

Ask HN: Advice on my side-project, helping you share links more efficiently. - StavrosK

Usually, when you find something on HN or somewhere else that you want to share with a few friends, you tweet about it or put it on Facebook. This is a scattergun approach and it's not very likely to get the thing noticed by the few friends you know might enjoy it.<p>To this end, I've built YourPane (www.yourpane.com). Basically, you install a bookmarklet, add a few friends' emails and it pops up an overlay with those friends whenever you click the bookmarket. This way, you can just send the current page to specific people with a few clicks.<p>If your friends have an account there, they can see the link you sent embedded in their account. If not, they get an email with the link inside.<p>It appears that most people who have used it have a bit of trouble installing it or getting it to work correctly (a few have asked me to add functionality that's already there, which tells me that I haven't made it easy for them to notice it).<p>I would appreciate it if you could look it over a bit and let me know if there are things I could improve. Also, if you're hesitant to enter your email address on sites this will not be very useful to you (as it works over email), but I promise you that any emails entered aren't ever leaving the app or misused.<p>Thanks for your feedback, HN!
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revorad
Stavros, this is beautiful. I think this might turn out to be one of those
things which is so simple, yet so effective that once I start using it I
wonder how I managed without it for so long.

Obvious feature request is to import my contacts list.

One little 'bug': I added my own email address through the 'Your contacts'
page with the nickname 'me'. Then to test the bookmarklet, I shared a link
with myself. The email I got said "Hello! me has sent you a link!". I guess
you want to replace 'me' with my email address or name?

The link you email is not the original link I shared but a link to a page on
your site, which then links to the original link. Please link straight to the
site if possible. Presumably you are not looking for pageviews with this
project ;-)

Good luck and keep us posted!

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StavrosK
Thank you for your feedback! To answer your observations:

About importing contacts, I think you don't need all your contacts on it, but
I guess you might only import a few, so I'll add it!

The site uses your nickname because that's what you ostensibly want to see
when you get a link, "Stavros has sent you a link!" rather than the email
address. You just stumbled on a weird corner case :) To clarify, the site uses
the nickname the recipient has set, so your friends will see "revorad has sent
you a link" (or whatever each person calls you) rather than "me".

The email you get has both a link to the site and the original link, a bit
further below.

I hope you find the tool useful, thanks again!

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revorad
Ah sorry I missed the original link in the email.

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kylebragger
This is a neat idea and something I had considered prototyping a while ago. If
it's helpful, my goal was to create a better way than email to share links
with a very small, consistent group of people. Good luck!

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StavrosK
Thank you, that's completely and exactly the idea here. I hope the
implementation has been good, but it has changed the way I share things with
my friends for the better (unless my friends think I spam them a lot more
now!). Thank you for the support!

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JoshKalkbrenner
Hey, Stavrosk! Just a shout-out. Nice concept:

<http://www.deadmansswitch.net/> \-- add an SSL cert

JB

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StavrosK
Clickable: <http://www.yourpane.com/>

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kposehn
I'm enjoying this tool, highly recommended.

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StavrosK
Thank you, I'm glad you like it (and will be adding groups soon (: )!

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shikhar
I think it's a good MVP, I signed up :)

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StavrosK
Thank you, I hope you find it useful!

