

Ask HackerNews: New website launched QCrunch.com. Feedback? - breck
http://www.qcrunch.com

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rms
I think it's fine for _your_ homepage but I don't see this becoming very
popular.

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breck
thanks. you're right, it's great for my homepage. the idea is to make it the
best page for 1-20% of the web 2.0 community. i made one for my college as
well, and it was mainly just for my homepage, but there are a lot of people
that don't like to make their own homepages or customize thinks like igoogle,
so we're trying to provide this segment with a great product.

~~~
paulgb
Fair enough, but I doubt there is much of an overlap between the "web
2.0"/hacker community and the kind of people who don't like to customize their
homepage.

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breck
lol. good point. i guess we should target it toward the lazy web 2.0 crowd.

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bmaier
why not grab the feed from each of those links and create a collabpsable div
that opens with the recent headlines and links from each site. that would go a
long way towards making your site useful, sort of like a hacker's version of
popurls.com

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breck
thats a very good suggestion. we discussed that, but the idea is to make the
best start page. we think the most important things are: 1\. fast 2\. clean
3\. google search bar 4\. links

and adding that feature would detract from 1 and 2. our goal is to make the
best start page for as many people in the web 2.0 crowd as possible. hopefully
we can please a lot of people(1-20%), although we know we can't please
everyone.

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dyu
Maybe it's just me (and this is more of a general comment to start pages), I
don't see the need for a search bar in start pages, I can easily (cmd/ctrl+k)
go to the search bar in the browser and it's not that much harder.

As for your site, bmaier's suggestion is good, but if you are concerned about
speed maybe you can do some ajax request on some local cached copy of the
latest headlines?

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breck
I'm with you: I do the same thing(ctrl+k) and rarely if ever use the search
bar. But a surprising number of people still do.

The AJAX suggestion is good. One of our requirements though is minimal effort
on our part(we've got a real startup as our primary job).

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brianr
A plain google search isn't very useful, but what MIGHT be useful is a google
custom search that has all the sites you listed pre-included. (See
<http://www.google.com/coop/cse/> ).

If you had that and included the most recent headlines from the sites you
listed, it might be useful enough to get me to try it.

~~~
breck
Google Custom Search might add value. Anyone know if there are any successful
custom search engines?

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ed
Guys, no offense, but you're a few years late to the static homepage party.

Here's a random idea: how about a service which turns any webpage into an rss
feed? It'd basically provide a compiled feed of text delta's, which can be
added to an existing feed reader. It'd be helpful for people who want to keep
up to date with "feedless" sites.

~~~
breck
Oh like 12 years late. I remember making my own start page in 1995. But I
think this one's a pretty good start page. I think it's better than google.com
for most people who are in the web 2.0 community but don't want to update
their own start page.

~~~
ed
Please note I'm not saying you guys are unable build a great site; however I
am saying this isn't it. Keep chipping away at the idea and I wish you guys
the best of luck!

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joeguilmette
i dont see this competing very strongly with

1) my bookmarks 2) google homepage

~~~
breck
Thanks for the feedback! We started with the Google homepage, and just tried
to add a few links to make it better. That being said, it only adds a little
bit to the google homepage. But it does make that Home button a lot more
useful. And we will post statistics on what pages people visit the most.

~~~
joeguilmette
oh no i meant igoogle. this is basically just your bookmarks with a google
search bar, right?

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breck
plus the statistics, which are used to auto update the site monthly to ensure
the best links are placed up top.

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alaskamiller
why do i care what the most popular links to blogs are? if i like techcrunch i
go to techcrunch, i could care less if 10 more people clicked it the day
before. this doesn't do any value adds.

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nameless
A page of links can't be launched. It can be UPLOADED, but not launched.

~~~
breck
There's some statistics behind it too(both backend and javascript--the latter
only coming with a certain probability) to update it based on what's popular.

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ajkates
You absolutely NEED the RSS feeds for each of these sites, otherwise it's just
a bunch of uncustomizable links; totally worthless.

I'll stick with my iGoogle at the moment.

~~~
breck
Thanks for the feedback aj. I don't think it's totally worthless. Thousands of
people use our similar sites daily for different niches. I don't know if this
niche will work, but there are at least a portion of this area who like
something like this.

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nickb
What current problem are you solving exactly?

~~~
breck
A very small one: getting you to the pages you use the most faster. We're
aiming to help a small proportion (1-20%) of people in this niche who don't
want to do any customization.

Once you build up a decent amount of traffic, you can add a few things that
can only work if you have a steady flow of people using the same start page.
We hope to replicate the success of some other niches in this market.

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rokhayakebe
Your concept is good but I think you are simply going after the wrong niche.
Web2.0 guys have bookmarks/tabs and once they fire FF they probably have all
tabs open and they can use the google search box on the toolbar. You should
apply the same concept to sports for example and create startup page with the
hottest sport website and links ...Then go after teenagers and launch the
Gossip or Hollywood startup page...Before you know it you will have all these
niche communities. That's just my 2 cents.

~~~
breck
Yes very true. This niche probably isn't the best for this type of product.
Our goal is to create something for us to use and share it with the community.
I would encourage anyone interested to talk to me about how you could go about
building a startup around creating these types of start pages. We've created a
handful of pretty successful ones with 100k+ unique monthlys so there probably
is a small startup opportunity here.

