

Ask HN: Our prototype: People real-time news. Would you use it? - mprovo1

Our application would allow you to follow someone, say Barack Obama, and get all that is being said about him on the net, in real-time (mixing twitter &#38; traditional news outlets). We have NLP algorithms that figure out the 2-3 most important people/organizations in any given article (we track both individuals and organizations such as sports teams and companies). A popular entity -- say Lindsay Lohan or Justin Bieber -- will get dozens of articles matched every day. We are currently tracking around 15,000 people and in addition to articles we also attach useful meta-data using freebase (picture, twitter &#38; facebook account).<p>Our current vision is a place where you can follow both what people say and what others say about them. There would also be an automatically generated "profile" page for each individual and we are thinking of adding social features such as badges (yeah, I know everybody is doing it :), but for instance you could get badges as you read more news about someone, slowly becoming his or hers <i>uber</i> fan). Such badges could be displayed on the profile badge, rewarding people for being awesome fans. It could also be a place where you interact with the person, post messages, send tweets, rate up or down, etc.<p>Here's the link to our internal alpha prototype: journal.factyle.com. It's not ready for public consumption! Just to give you an idea!<p>We also released a few iphone apps to experiment with mobile -- check out our sports app for example: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sports-stalker/id382283655?mt=8.<p>Do you think it can work as a consumer product? Would you use it? Is it doomed?<p>Thank you so much!
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scrrr
I think this could be very useful. If not for the general public (except
perhaps fans of celebrities) then at least for people that professionally need
to keep track of them. Reporters, showbiz-professionals etc.

Also: I don't care (at all) about the badges but would be interested in it as
a research tool. Furthermore I'd like to have a software like this that is not
limited to people but also to concepts, ideas and topics in general.

For example I'd like to be kept up to date on subjects like "Life on Mars" or
"A.I.". Better than Google alerts and websites like HN already help me be it.

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mprovo1
Thanks, I really like your idea of a product for professionals. It would
definitely be useful for them. And tracking subjects is something we _really_
want to do! Our first product was a "speedreader" bookmarklet that extracted
the most important concepts of a webpage and generated a navigation tool that
allowed you to scroll to them. Unfortunately, identifying important concepts
in a document is a much harder problem than named-entities/organizations (but
doable I think).

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riffer
You need a differentiator. You've done a lot of work to get to this point, but
why would somebody use this when they are used to going to Google News or TMZ
or whatever? You have to create something that is extremely compelling in some
dimension or another, otherwise it will be tough to rise above the noise. Best
of luck.

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mprovo1
Thanks, you're right that is the biggest problem we are currently facing. We
seem to have good "retention" rate with our iphone apps (people who come back
often to use the app), but our downloads are low. I must admit I'm not sure
what we propose is compelling enough for people to change their news reading
habits. Will people really come to us to consume news or will they simply
google the people instead -- that we do not know yet.

I currently use the app to track my favorite hockey team and it works pretty
well. I get all the signings / analysis / articles in almost real-time. I
think it's definitely useful for sports -- but then again I could probably get
such news through team-specific rss feeds.

