

Ask HN: What do you think of prepopulation to seed a service? - glen

This idea of pre-populating a web service with information from people and companies seems to be growing. One company that has done a nice job of this is teachstreet.com. They allow people to recommend teachers. That recommendation then results in a stub of a page for that educator with their name and the review the recommending person submitted for the teacher's class. The teacher gets an email indicating that they've been recommended. They then visit this site and can claim the page or delete it if they do not want it posted. Once they claim it they then have a number of nice tools to use to help them gain more students etc. Zillow.com also does a nice job of this. They gather all the publicly available information for your house, tie it to bing's bird's eye view, and even include an estimate on what your house is worth. Like with teachstreet, you can then "claim" your house and modify the listing if you are trying to sell your home. One more example: Seth Godin recently prepopulated/gathered information from the Web on a number of brands. Many felt that he went too far and accused him of brandjacking (http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=139261).<p>One clear value in pre-population is that you can provide users/institutions with free tools that they don't currently have. They might feel awkward about going to a site that has their information posted (w/out their acknowledgement), but then feel pleased to discover the tools you are offering. On the other hand, they might feel wronged and just want to delete the account.<p>The question is: Do we do more harm than good with prepopulating user and institution information?<p>To put this in a bit more context, we are considering prepopulating school information at www.nixty.com. Basically, we'd provide a nice home page, file-sharing area, announcement area etc. In addition, we'd give people the option of launching a LMS (think Blackboard). The LMS would be free to start, but cost more as the institution added more users.
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bhousel
You should absolutely prepopulate your site with data, IF:

1\. The seed data is already public anyway.. e.g. It is public information who
teaches at which schools.

2\. The seed data adds value to your users.. e.g. Seeding with school and
teacher data is useful, but adding school district demographics (even though
publicly available) might be a waste of your time.

3\. The seed information isn't _too_ personal. By that I mean, can the
information be used to harass the user. e.g. In your case, an teacher's work
address is probably ok, emails and phone numbers are probably not. It's a
judgment call - and the situation is obviously different for a site that lets
people share information with teachers than for a site that lets people rate
restaurants.

4\. The seed data isn't _too_ transient. In your case, probably not an issue,
since school information doesn't change often.

So, my recommendation is to definitely seed. Don't expect new users to your
site to be entering in all of this for you. And you can't launch a site with
nothing to look at -- people won't return for a second look.

~~~
glen
Thanks for those guidelines. This makes perfect sense. Do you have any data as
to how seeding/prepopulating results in uptake? I've looked at compete.com and
compared sites similar to teachstreet, but there really isn't a way to control
for the other variables.

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Travis
You also need to evaluate how good your data is. Do you have confidence that
people "recommending" teachers will input their names correctly, and not put
in "John McPeebrain Doe".

If you scrape data, be careful of that as well. You can easily turn vistors
off if your data isn't accurate (and you're only going to get one shot at
convincing your user that your data is good).

~~~
glen
Travis. Really good point on the recommendation side. It probably makes sense
to hold off on publishing the information until the educator affirms that it
is accurate.

We will likely use MTurk to enter additional educator and school information.
I haven't yet used the new service, crowdflower.com, yet, but this might be a
good opportunity to try it out.

