Ask HN: Does anyone want this? Central Badge/Achievement service for the Web

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120630

by generalk • 16 years ago

8 12 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm working on a badge/achievement provider for social sites. I'm close to having something ready for beta, but the slew of Customer Development posts recently got me wondering: does anyone actually want the thing I'm building?

My thought is that as more social sites start providing badges or achievements, it will be useful for users to be able to track all of their badges at a central location, and it will be useful for providers to have an API available to create and assign badges, and generate leaderboards, statistics, and webpages.

Does anyone have a site that would benefit from that? Is there something I've missed that would make the service more useful, given my brief description above? Questions, advice, criticism all welcome.

EDIT: To clarify, our customers are the social sites that would like to provide badges/achievements to their users but don't want to manage that themselves.

FreeRadical3• 16 years ago

I'm not sure where the customer pain is? Are there really users out there frustrated because they can't see all their badges in one place?

If you're approaching the problem from the other POV, as in social sites don't want to manage their own badge process, and hence you're offering a 'white label' badge service, then there is potential.

generalk4• 16 years ago

My summary may not have indicated that, but that's correct, the idea would be that we're providing the service (and charging) achievement/badge providers. Their users will get benefits, but we wouldn't market this to end users, or charge them for it.

Hope that helps clarify some.

FreeRadical3• 16 years ago

I think it's a good idea but all the social sites that matter surely have, or will create their own (for example foursquare).

limist• 16 years ago

Am curious what the main websites/services are that issue user badges on some semblance of meritocracy?

StackOverflow.com is one obvious one where the awards have some weight (at least with some developers), but where else?

FreeRadical3• 16 years ago

Foursquare

generalk4• 16 years ago

That's an interesting question, but I'm not necessarily concerned with that.

For instance, a foursquare-like service would offer badges based not on merit but on how many times you've visited a certain location or how many checkins you perform in a night. That service could use our badges API to award these badges, and not have to write/maintain that portion themselves.

Saavedro• 16 years ago

Even those have some merit weight. Many visits to a certain location will imply that said person is a "regular" there, for example.

vyrotek• 16 years ago

Its great to see someone else is thinking about this. We actually started building a Badge repository service last year. - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795952 (KaBadge.com)

We have since also built a rule engine to allow sites to create badges and award them based on specific combinations of events. (You won't find it on KaBadge, we have been playing a new domain, expect a post Monday asking for a review!)

The biggest reason we created the rule engine was because people felt that the best area to create value. People commented about why would a site want to share their badges when they did all the hard to work figure out how to award them.

I'm excited to see others noticing the growing trend and benefit of achievement engines. There are problems to solve, but the trick is finding the ones that will make money :)

generalk4• 16 years ago

Excellent. I'll have to look into what you're doing and see if there's anything I can bring to the table, but either way, it is indeed awesome to see that my idea isn't completely without merit!

ryanelkins2• 16 years ago

The utility to having a central location for badges will be if you can find a way to establish virality. That would lead to new people wanting to earn these badges, which leads to directing traffic towards the company's site/application. A user being able to see all their badges in one place doesn't really provide much benefit for the company. If however, you can find a way to promote those companies through those badges (posting "User X just earned Badge Y on Site Z!" on Facebook, for example, then you might have something that someone would be willing to pay for.

It sounds like you don't plan on providing a service to actually determine when to award badges and are instead leaving that up to the companies themselves, so the above would be the only advantage to using the service that I can see. You have to think of "how does this benefit my customer ?"(in this case a site).

Ask HN: Does anyone want this? Central Badge/Achievement service for the Web

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