

Review my startup - Quote Feed (step 2) - DanielBMarkham
http://quote-feed.com/

======
pclark
Find a designer co-founder, right now :)

I'm interested in what problem this solves compared to say, Tumblr +
WikiQuote? It isn't clear what the specific value proposition to a user is.

When I think of Friend Feed I think of importing all my "stuff" into one
place, is Quote Feed supposed to import quotes from all over the place into
one place?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
My original idea was to have a place like HN where, instead of reading titles,
I could read the quick excerpts from the latest articles and news events all
over the web. I also didn't want a simple voting system (insert long
discussion about mob voting here) and instead went with a tagged learning
system.

Later on it occurred to me that social hooks and app-store integration might
really help with growth.

~~~
dimarco
Here's an idea: If people could wrap quotes in some tag like [qfeed]a good
quote[/qfeed] in media outlets all over the internet, like Disqus comments for
a particular blog or in reply to the quoted post on HN.

And then a spider came along and pulled the [qfeed] bit and submitted it to
quote-feed.

It wouldn't work well for comment-less sites like wikipedia, but it would for
"quick excerpts from the latest articles"

------
cheald
The design turns me off pretty quickly, to be honest. The color scheme does
make it difficult to visually parse and obscures design elements like the
upvote arrows - a lighter background and some padding on your quote containers
would help a lot.

My initial impression of the concept is that it suffers from lack of context -
quotes are interesting, but usually only in the context of an existing
discussion or topic. For example, in Newsweek or whatnot, their "quotes of the
week" page has the quote, and then explains the context it was in. For
example:

> "Pie is bad, and we are dedicated to providing a safe and pie-free
> environment for our children as we move towards the future." -- President
> Obama speaking to the National Cake Frosters Association

If you could make the design point to sources more easily, so the users feels
like it's a lead-in to a piece of content, that may alleviate that issue.

It seems like the niche you could capture would be sort of an expansion what
the Twitter trending topics is already - a high-level view of the things being
said by interesting people, and what people think of them. I think your
concept implements that, but it doesn't really present it to the user. My
first impression was "well, it's Reddit, except I have to read more to find
something interesting". If you can find a way to present it in such a way that
the user is presented with easily-consumable, interesting, relevant
information with easy access to context and reactions, it could have some
interesting potential.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Lightened the background and increased the padding on the quotes per your
request.

Awesome feedback. Thanks.

So here's the million-dollar question: What is the context that the user is
browsing? The people who say things? The web site that sourced the quote? The
people who posted things? The topic that the quote falls under (you can see
the topic -- it's the tooltip that pops up when you hover over the quote)

I'm getting a lot of "get a designer" advice, and I'll cop to being a poor
designer any day of the week -- I suck. But even with a designer, you don't
want the thing to look like a 747 cockpit. Simply because you _can_ search by
something doesn't mean the UI should allow it. With a desire to keep the UI as
brutally simple as possible, what do you think is the context people would
like to see as a higher-up heading?

~~~
cheald
By "context" I meant "What context was this quote said in?" (I amended my
original comment with an example of what I meant). The context is going to be
where the quote was said, who it was said to, what it was said about, etc.

I'm browsing Reddit right now, and see the following "quote" headlines:

* Tamil pulp: "each chapter usually has at least one murder or explosion or someone getting eaten by a cheetah or attacked with black magic." [Context is a review of pulp fiction of some sort - not sure what "Tamil" is but I'd guess it's a culture or subgenre]

* "The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. ... I hate it." - Tim Bray (self.linux) [The context is the iPhone's restricted platform in contrast to Linux's open platform]

* "But Piglet wasn't listening, he was so agog at the thought of seeing Chritopher Robin's blue braces again. He had only seen them once before, when he was much younger, and, being a little over-excited by them, had had to go to bed half an hour earlier than usual..." [Excerpt from a book. Intent seems to be to convey unintended innuendo. Doesn't do anything to make me want to read further.]

* "He also held the fire hose between his legs like it was a penis and pretended to pee on the flames. Right in front of my wife and daughter!" (i.imgur.com) [The subreddit and domain tell me this is going to be an amusing picture, and makes me want to click through]

In 3 of those 4 cases, the quote isn't the content itself, but a pointer to
some larger piece of content. The Tim Bray quote is the whole of the content,
but is presented in a context (Linux and open software advocacy) that makes
sense. In all of those cases, I don't just consume the quote and say "oh,
that's inspiring" and move on with my day - they spur me to learn more and who
is saying it, what they're saying it about, and why they're saying it. Reddit
is very much a different approach to content, so I don't expect a 1:1 mapping,
but the Tim Bray quote is a pretty good example. There's a quote by an
industry leader regarding a topic that I'm interested in (software freedom,
platform flexibility, etc) because I've elected to follow the Linux subreddit.
I'm presented with enough information to be told what the context is (Software
freedom philosophy), who said it (Tim Bray), and why the quote is being
presented (it is of interest to the Linux community).

You're absolutely right that information overload is terrible for design -
that's very key to success. However, part of design is knowing what to
emphasize and what to minimize, so you guide the user's attention through your
content. Insofar as what you're presenting, I'd offer the following
observations:

* Using tooltips/hovers to present critical information is really bad. It doesn't work at all on mobile platforms, and the only existing UI paradigms that use that technique are icons and XKCD's inside jokes. It is a fairly non-obvious way of conveying information.

* The quote attribution and context are grey and "faded out" - you place more visual importance on who posted the quote than who said it. This seems backwards to me.

* The "Posted X time ago" bar is the most visually striking piece of the page. You don't want people looking at that first - you want them looking at the quote.

* The quote, souce, and user are all clickable, but there are no visual cues that they are, even on rollover.

(At this point I've lost my train of thought, and will have to return to it
later)

Do forgive me if I'm being over-critical. I'm trying to be an objective user,
and give you an honest read of the things that go through my head as I use it.

Edit: The padding helps. Now I'd desaturate the background a bit. _grin_

------
crux
I suspect you might have a credibility problem as long as one of your quotes
is attributed to 'Benjamin Franklin, President of the United States'.

------
davi
Nice to see your project!

Agree w/ pclark about need for a designer.

I even have a quote in mind ("the biggest danger of people doing bad things to
you is that it will make you paranoid",
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192160> \-- I thought that was pretty
good) but really feel no 'win' from signing up and making an account just to
give myself the ability to enter this quote. Give me a reason to summon the
activation energy, or get rid of the need for it (a la Posterous). Slashdot
allows anonymous cowards, maybe you should too?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Great comment.

I think there are probably 3 levels of users: 1) People like yourself. For
those guys probably just a button and a place to put a link for the source
should be enough, 2) People who want to vote. For those guys some kind of
sign-up is required, and 3) People who want to post their own stuff.

You are right on with the anonymous coward thing. Right now you either get
nothing or have to sign-up and then you can do everything. That's too big of a
hurdle for casual users like yourself (and easily fixed). I'm also finding out
that simply because you vote and comment doesn't mean you have the energy to
tag and source new material. So there's probably a gradual engagement model
that needs to be created.

------
tptacek
You would get a lot of value out of BlueprintCSS, right away.

Your colors do nothing to improve the site. Ditch them. Use black, white,
grey, and a single accent color of your choice for text only.

What's the deal with the DOCTYPE?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Will change the colors. Also thinking of hiring a designer to take a look at
layout.

DOCTYPE is hosed. Looks like a bug in the JS.

~~~
tptacek
You're trying too hard. Stop. Go for competant and boring.

Switch to Blueprint. Get everything layed out on a grid. Things should line up
with each other. This takes programming, not design talent.

Use Blueprint typography. You have no discretion in font sizes anymore. Just
let it do its thing.

Stop setting background colors. On anything. They aren't your friend. If they
were an ice cream flavor, they'd be pralines and dick. If you lay your site
out on a grid, you won't need the background colors to distinguish elements.

Work with three colors: black, grey, and an accent color:

* Most things will be black

* Things that aren't important --- like all your timestamps --- are in grey. Look at the header on this comment. Metadata fades into the background.

* For very important things, use an accent color _sparingly_. Maybe it's the most important comment on the page.

* Count the number of ways in which any two pieces of text differ. Bold vs. not bold: 1 point. Grey vs. black: 1 point. Big vs. little: 1 point. Things should differ by the minimal effective number of points. That means don't set <h2> text in accent red.

Just do those things and, instead of springing for a designer, you can go to
99designs and ask for a $250 logo. That'll be money better spent.

~~~
eagleal
tptacek is right! You don't need (at this stage) to spend money on design or
anything alike. If you're stack just ask for help.

------
newobj
Immediate gut reaction: I don't get it... and it's ugly.

I wouldn't work on the design if I were you. Honest opinion, it'd be a bit
like lipstick on a pig at the moment. I think the fundamental premise is
flawed - I cannot imagine in any stretch of my imagination why I or any normal
person would visit this page, much less withstand the friction of the service
in order to interact with it.

My elevator pitch re-imagining of what you're doing: "Quotes can serve as
great summaries, excerpts, or lead-ins of a larger story. They also humanize
stories or events by putting a face or voice on them. Quotestory.com brings
you each day's biggest news and events one quote at a time, presented in a
beautiful and simple interface that lets users get a quick read on what's
happening in the world."

Essentially, the site would scrape the news to pull out candidate quotes, as
well as allowing user submissions. Weighting system incorporates crowed voting
as well as "page rank" of scraped quotes. The quotes are pegged to a specific
point in time, and the front page displays a sort a chronological arrangement
of quotes, chunked into days (maybe something hierarchical to summarize entire
weeks/months in the past). You get a unique view of each's days events via
direct quotes rather than editorialized headline. Quotes click through to an
article. If you can extract a attribution, perhaps a small image of the
quotee. If you get smart enough, perhaps you can have some sort of point-
counterpoint dueling quotes to show both sides of an issue.

I'm not saying this is insanely compelling either, but I can at least see a
small value add in that some people may prefer to graze on news this way.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
So I'm going to add you in the "unsure" category. (grin)

Thanks for the feedback. You made my day! I love negative feedback. So much of
running a startup is getting any attention at all. If they hate you, at least
they're listening.

Appreciate your time, and I'll work as hard as I can on the value proposition.

~~~
newobj
Hey, I don't hate. Just trying to help! :) I deeply admire anyone trying to do
their own thing.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
And I appreciate it. I should have said "if you confuse them and they call
your app ugly"

I'm learning today that there's too much of a cognitive load in coming to the
app fresh and seeing so much text from everywhere with so little context.
There's too much inertia in the average reader to spend any time at all
signing up. The site is ugly. People confuse the featureset with tumblr.

This is all tremendously good stuff, and you can believe me that I am taking
notes. You've been a great help.

------
greyman
As I understand it, your idea is that the user will discover some new
interesting quotes and then the community can vote them up.

I like the idea, but in a general sense, quote is something shorter (usually
just one sentence), and aiming at some basic "truths", like there are quotes
about love, relationships, inspiration, etc. But if you mix that with quotes
that require some specific knowledge, I am not sure if that will work.

For example, I tried to read some quote form your side, only discovering that
it is related to U.S. politics. But I don't watch this topic closely, so after
reading the paragraph, I just didn't understand what is it about. So the
quotes which requires some specific knowledge (like politics of certain
country, etc.), will need to have their own subdomain...if you mix it into one
place, you will just get a snippets of text understood by only certain people.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
This is great feedback, but I'm not sure how to handle.

The idea, for registered users, is that you downvote the first U.S. Politics
quote you see. Then the system starts sorting those lower. Over time, if you
keep training the system, you'll never see a U.S. politics quote.

But for new users, how to handle? Right now for anonymous users I have a basic
HN sorting algorithm.What you are saying is that this might not be enough.
Should I leave it as is? Should I add some kind of heading or sorting on the
page so that people can easily see the topics (topics appear as you mouse over
the quote). Not sure.

~~~
alilja
So what you're REALLY providing isn't a quote-aggregation service, but rather
an intelligent method of showing people content from around the internet based
on how much they like a topic.

It's like Pandora but for news.

EDIT: community-powered Pandora but for news?

~~~
pclark
community-powered Pandora but for news = reddit...?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Reddit -> little boxes with items in them. Choose your box

QF -> one big box. Each item is highly-tagged. System chooses combination of
tags based on your previous behavior

\--Also--

Reddit -> Consume based on community score and titles (which can both be
wildly gamed)

QF -> Consume based on previewing a piece of the material

------
DanielBMarkham
It's a limited beta right now and it's only a web service.

Here's the master plan for future development. _As usual, no plan survives
contact with the enemy_. This is just the vision and we're actively looking
for a pivot point as we continue to work customer development.

\----

You're in a conference. The keynote speaker says something cool. You go to
tweet it to your friends -- but it's longer than 140 characters. So you key it
into your iPad on my app and choose to share it with your FaceBook and MySpace
Friends. Over on FB and MySpace, the longer quote appears and has a link back
to my web app where the quote is stored.

You're reading a political or science article. About half-way down, the author
makes a really cool point -- all the ideas seem to be coming together and this
text just jumps off the page. You highlight the paragraph and enter it into my
app, choosing also to share it on Twitter and FB.

You're looking for something pithy to tweet or put on your FB status. You
visit my app and read the latest quotes from sources all over the world,
sorted and ranked especially according to your tastes. Choosing the one you
like the most, you upvote it, make a comment, and choose to automatically
email it and post to your status updates.

You're looking for the best of the web today. Visiting my app, quotes from
much longer articles and speeches are listed, customized to your tastes.
Finding one that looks especially interesting, you click the link and go to
the longer article, spending 10 or 20 minutes reading the full text.

Your friend hears something incredible at a news event. He quotes the speaker,
links to the video, and notifies you by using my app. You visit his quote on
my app, make some comments, and vote it up. Soon you and your friend have made
several comments -- other people have also joined in. Your conversation about
this quote is saved for you to return to when you like.

Finally, you're reading a book on your Kindle or other device. You find a
particularly interesting passage. Quickly you copy it out, tag and save it,
perhaps also choosing to share it on your status update. Later on, when you
are not at your e-book reader, you can visit the web site and view your quotes
-- along with the comments from your social network and other folks who share
your same interest.

\--

Why is it different from tumblr or other micro-blogging services?

1) Message length

2) Superior content preference learning system

3) Niche product

~~~
eagleal
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your strength (as of now) is the _app_ (for iPad,
Kindle, iPhone, etc), and the best quotes of the day (trough the learning
system). Is this right? (I think I see a piece of your vision, am I the only
one who sees this as a solution to one of the YC RFS?)

Also if you need a designer, I have plenty of experience in UI/UX. Funny
thing, I was going to contact you to join me in one of my projects.

~~~
eagleal
I maybe need to clarify it: I'm not talking about the iPad apps request (this
one also apply), but another (really) bigger one.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Yes. You are on-track.

Sorry for the delay. I'm still stunned from this other conversation I was
having with alilja. They really described my app better than I could myself.

But yes, the idea is Community-Driven Pandora for news running on an iPad (or
similar device)

------
chanux
You should visit <http://colorlovers.com> :)

------
bmelton
"Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" -- using IE7 on Windows XP.

