Also: This facebook group doesn't mean that YCN is missing some feature that fbook groups has. Being a member of a group in facebook is mainly about identity creation and signaling. It's so that anyone viewing my profile know that I'm into this 'YC news' thing.
Edit: Looks like theres a new post on the facebook blog about how groups are used: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2249512130. "On the other hand, groups can be great just to declare an affiliation, such as my obsession with Thin Mints."
I'm sure pg has thought of this already, but it seems like there is a demand for more community features surrounding YC news. Unlike everyone else creating social networks for the sake of creating a social network, it looks as though you might be able to grow one organically here.
That is what I'm thinking about right now. We said explicitly when we started news.yc that one goal was to get to know founders before they applied to us. I think I'll add messaging next. If anyone has suggestions about how it should work, or other community features we should add, just let us know in this thread.
Now that I think of it, this is a place where we're much more likely to have involved discussions rather than quick "where you been" type comments. That implies to me that you'd kind of want the same threading / nesting as the general boards. What if a user simply has their own personal submission spot- they can post things that are meaningful to them- latest blog entry, a discussion that they want to keep off the front page for now, etc. Others could post articles, comments, and linkless topics just like in the general board- the difference being the user can outright delete the posts.
You gain the ability for a user to post more specialized information or stuff they themselves generated without spamming, you get an easy mechanism for another user to post a quick message or even start a discussion with that user, you get the ability for multiple people to join in and make intelligent comments and still have the place readable and organized, and I assume you'd be able to reuse a bunch of code.
Differences from the general board- I'm thinking maybe topics shouldn't get pushed off the bottom? Hopefully that's not a storage issue. Karma could stay the same as normal or you could make it work the same within the topics but not reflect on the users' real score, or you could let just the user who owns that board to give out karma, get rid of it altogether for the user board, or whatever.
[upd. Oh, and also, if things get interesting or there gets to be some important content you could submit a link to that discussion in the general board]
More important than being able to talk to each other is being able to see who's talking to one, I think.
a) Notification when someone replies directly to one's comment.
b) Some way to easily find new comments on a thread. Instead of marking comments read, let me click a page-level button to "reset new marks". Couple that with sorting the front-page by 'number of recent comments'. Especially in periods when the front-page changes infrequently it'll allow users to follow discussions after they've read the submission.
Let me find interesting users and filter them for potential co-founders.
c) Show me users whose submissions and comments I upmod most and who I talk to the most.
d) Provide tags for me to add on my profile: location, horizon to startup, areas of interest, etc. Allow others to set constraints and highlight for them users who match those constraints/tags.
What about providing a way for YC news to identify other users who potentially share the same interests as me? Basically, the set of links which I have upmodded provides YC news with a set of potential topics that I am interested in. Naively comparing this group of links that I have upmodded with that of another user may potentially provide a non-null intersection and show possible common interests; thus, that other user may be someone I am interested in collaborating with.
Now that I think about it, another benefit of this is that more relevant news may be surfaced to me - if person X and person Y have a largely overlapping set of upmodded links, then perhaps the set (X-Y) may also be interesting to person Y, and vice versa. Perhaps this could be a way to deal with the perceived quality of news degrading as a site gets more popular as well, as it would allow the system to break off into smaller clusters of news items/people, where each item may be highly relevant to those who belong to the cluster.
Sorry to ramble on like that - I don't expect (or necessarily want) such a complicated feature to be a part of the obviously minimal YC news site...just thought I'd bring it up for discussion.
Edit: Used in combination with jwrecker's idea of having a more personal space, this could be a great startup idea - instead of YC News determining your set of links, it could simply be the set of links you post to your personal space :D
What sets this site apart for pg is that he can use it to guage peoples comments for when they apply for something. One thing that sets this site apart for me, though, is that I think most people here intend to meet one another in person at some point, sooner or later. That makes a big difference in the feel of the place. Using first names in posts, not acting like children in our debates, a real desire (from the first day in the feature request discussion) to see what other people look like and know what they're really up to, etc.
It might not be a good idea to place too many requests on pg's schedule. What Paul can do, instead, is integrate "MyBlogLog" widget into news.yc. That alone will solve the problems regarding messaging and avatars.
Probably, but why bother. I think most of the target demographic here is already happy with Facebook, so it would be easier just to add a permanent link to the Facebook group in the footer. Reimplimenting Facebook just leaves users with (n + 1) profiles to keep up-to-date. I suppose you could use the Facebook API to grab people's profile pictures and interests and contact info and stick them in each user's news.YC profile, but I think more than that is unnecessary.
I'm not sure if the facebook group is even going to be usefull apart from making it easier to find/contact other users. Now that we have an about field on profiles it will be easier to contact people. Anyone who wants to be contacted can stick a url/email in the field.
Perhaps the ability to send messages to users? Or to add people as 'friends'? There are some people who consistently add article that I like and it would be great if I could add them as a 'friend' and then look at a 'your friends submitted articles' page that would aggregate all the stories and perhaps comments submitted by the people on my friends list. It would let people look at new articles being submitted without being deluged like in the current 'new' page.
Anyone else think this feature would be good and actually used by us?
Actually, yes. Paul Graham, sir, why dont you take a look at Yahoo Answers? It is hugely popular and in a very short time. If you think of a Yahoo Question as corresponding to a YC Article, and our YC comments equivalent to the Yahoo answers, then it's not too hard to see how you could improve.
Interesting thought now - what prevents you from copying every feature on Yahoo Answers?
