Well, the snowman is pretty awesome... There are other features, such as the ability to share bookmarks on your personal site (http://stavros.historio.us/) for an example, automatically add things to "read later", one-click bookmarking, automatic sharing...
A few features that are coming are the ability to import RSS feeds from other places, as well as more social elements (and, of course, support).
For you, though, David, I'll throw in a free subscription!
Actually... I've just tried your site end-to-end and you do have a killer feature and it's not the thing you are making most prominent.
The killer feature is the cache.
To know that what I bookmark will have a snapshot at that moment in time, citable and impervious to changes that happen to the source.
That is a fantastic feature.
My advice to you would be to highlight that. Bookmarks against things that can and will change, disappear or move are moving targets... what you're offering here is a permanent bookmark as it stood at that moment in time.
That's a big deal, definitely enough to make me consider trying it out. But you need to communicate that this is possible... it would really help researchers and those who use bookmarks as a searchable source over a long period of time (which is when the effects of things changing becomes most obvious).
I think you should possibly look at features like verifying a source (it looks like you cache from the browser, which the user could've modified) and allowing tags to be shared with other users or publicly. Basically... allow academics to use this and to include web citations in their papers and such with histori.us providing the verified cache.
Perhaps even extend the bookmarking functionality to include the ability to highlight and add notes to part of the bookmarked page.
Ah, thanks for that, you're right in that we don't publicise it almost at all (and we should). As for the sharing, you have your personal historious at:
You can publish sites there (including tags) and refer people to it by giving them a link of the form http://buro9.historio.us/?q=some+query. Personally, I think that's pretty handy for answering the question "do you have any sites about X?"
No items are made public by default, but do note that, when you do make an item public, you are also sharing the cached version.
Thanks again for the feedback, and I'm good for that free subscription if you need it!
Beware and embrace the slashdotting (insert digg, reddit, HN here).
The cache is both your killer feature and your risk. I hope it's statically stored or can be put in memory quickly... are you using Varnish?
Encourage it's use... if people are bookmarking using histori.us and a site goes down, you've just gained a very large audience to your service. But only if your site survives the onslaught itself.
We are using Varnish, but we're storing the sources in the DB (to take advantage of automatic compression and all-around ease). It's trivial to get Varnish to cache the entire source and invalidate the cache when the document changes (the public/private setting, basically, so it doesn't accidentally share a page that's been changed to private), so that's all good.
The biggest problem (by far) is disk usage. The rest of the service is very easily sharded, really, as every user is isolated. Solr is also fantastic (much better than Sphinx, in hindsight we should have gone with that for TP), so that can also scale very well (there's even an implementation of it on hadoop).
We'll add the caching feature to the front page as soon as we finish the current round of A/B testing, thanks again (that feature was basically an afterthought, so it was great that you noted its importance)!
He's right. You (historious) could market that to the academic and legal world, where citation is a big deal but URLs can be ephemeral; the other day I was reading a brief less than a week old, filed in a current (and very prominent) case, and two of the hyperlinks in it 404'ed. If historio.us can get a reputation for having 'certified copies' then everyone will stampede towards the service.
For bonus points, a button to search for the current version of the same page, which may be at a different address from the original one.
We definitely should emphasise that. Also, the way the service works now, each user's cached page might be different (e.g. if you historified it a month ago and I yesterday, the caches will be different if the page changed). Example:
Unfortunately, we just lost a day of A/B testing due to an erroneous setting, but we'll start testing this addition to the homepage first thing tomorrow. Thanks again!
Following on again... allowing a legal firm to have a company account whereby the company paid for the storage of their employees would be a good thing.
This is a just collection of users, perhaps identified strongly by their company email address... and as each user works on a different case they should see their own thing or things of shared tags (multiple people working on the same account).
The company shouldn't lose access to a cached URL just because an employee leaves and decides not to renew their sub with you. Hence the need for a company account.
The company should also be able to control what is made public and to review all public items. This takes care of ensuring that research into defence isn't leaked... perhaps a simple approval process on what is made public (whereby a named person for a tag approves items within that tag being made public).
Then make it so that you bill the legal firm on a monthly basis and show the proportion of storage per tag (they will re-bill their client accounts) and you have a winner.
After that the only thing you have to do is sell it to a few firms.
Mrs Browl works for a discovery firm; she sugggests that the rolling billing might not work, but getting the foot in the door might allow sales of a long-term cache at a premium price instead eg $10 keeps a page up for 10 years.
Tricky pitch for a new company, of course - you haven't been around so long. Any sort of partnership with an existing one would help. Be aware that law firms in general are conservative about technology so it might take a year or two for the idea to catch on. A way around this might be to target law students first. Contact the editors at prominent 10-20 prominent law journals and give them free accounts for the journal and/or themselves as individuals; let them recommend your freemium service to their fellow students. Law librarians are another likely target, they spend quite a bit of time helping people with research tasks.
I think it would help if these 'permacache links' had some distinctive appearance that was easy to type from a printed page, eg 'http://historio.us/citations/username/98734545.htm <- numeric is easier than mixed alphanumeric if you have to copy it by hand.
In fact you could do 10 digits easily using a telephone format, and then ditch the user id string. 'historio.us/citations/####' is easy enough to become a standard link for public citation, and 111-222-3333 gives you room for 10 billion citations before you need to change the naming schema.
Thank you for your points, they are very good. I agree that the lawyer market is hard to penetrate, and that students would be a much better target, so this is what we'll try to do.
As for your second point, due to a security vulnerability with having cached pages on the main domain, we moved them all to another one:
I think that is much more readable, and the number doesn't really have to have a fixed number of digits; it can increment infinitely. If we ever need shorter URLs we can base36-encode it and reduce the number of digits right away.
That's a fantastic idea and something we've been looking for for a while. We couldn't find a feature a company would pay for, but the caching is it. Thank you again for pointing it out, we can approach many lawyers/journalists/universities this way.
This is absolutely an accurate comment. The fact that content is cached actually makes me see value in this to the point that I might pay for it. I haven't looked at your pricing, but I'd probably pay $10-20 a year. Or pehaps I'd just roll my own.
A few features that are coming are the ability to import RSS feeds from other places, as well as more social elements (and, of course, support).
For you, though, David, I'll throw in a free subscription!