Review my startup: Social news reader Twingly.com open for business

http://blog.twingly.com/2010/07/01/you-are-now-able-to-create-channels-at-twingly-com/

14 7 16 years ago

blog.twingly.com

wanderboy• 16 years ago

My $0.02: I think the concept is interesting, but the domain name makes it hard for me to love the startup. The domain name obviously has nothing to do with your vertical, has no story behind it, and was seemingly chosen only because it's pronounceable.

Likewise, the accompanying logo doesn't provide any insight into what your service does. What does reflected text tell me about your service? What does that odd, semi-rectangular polygon tell me about your service?

I read your FAQ: I don't think you should market it as a search engine, but rather as a social RSS reader. More people will be familiar with using RSS readers to get news than using search engines to do so.

Like I said, I think you created an interesting product, but I wanted to give you some food for thought.

PS Isn't the social news reader market fairly saturated? What, besides billing yourself as "spam-free" (in the FAQ) can you do to differentiate yourself?

martinkallstrom2• 16 years ago

Hi thank you for the input! It is greatly apreciated and I think it is given that we should address your concerns in the FAQ. Twingly actually comes from being a search engine for blogs, now moving into the social news space. You can try the blog search engine here: http://www.twingly.com/search

hotmind• 16 years ago

I think your service is lacking "stickiness" Martin. If it's going to be a social news reader, there should be a "social" element to it. Add conversations to the mix, or maybe a retweet/reply feature. Or perhaps a bookmarking functionality. Something that will help me interact with the content and make me want to come back.

Also, I love the channel idea. Make finding, adding and creating channels the central focus of your service. Add more multimedia (video/audio clips etc) and exclusive member channels (subscriptions to these channels might be your business model). The static links look muy boring. Yuk.

If you call it a "channel", make it LOOK and sound like a channel!

TVitter.com: Joost, Twitter and Delicious in a blender. Yeah Baby!

adbge• 16 years ago

Reading your post, it stuck me that being able to follow someone else's RSS feed would actually be very useful. I imagine a scenario where someone provides a "linux-news" channel which is basically a meta-RSS feed filled with interesting Linux articles from around the web. There could even be a "hacker-news" channel where popular stories on HN are listed.

After digging around the site, there are a couple of things I noticed: no channel search (not really necessary yet) and the design of the "channels" themselves is not very appealing. I'm imagining a more Twitter-esque design with some kind of box around each entry in a channel with the metadata displayed (retweets and that kind of thing) in a minimal fashion near the border of each.

I'd focus on building, first and foremost, a beautiful RSS reader that emphasizes content and then afterwards add a minimal "social features" framework. Don't worry about features, just do a couple things and do them right.

ScottWhigham• 16 years ago

Checked out the "Tech" channel and it's definitely not something I would use. I'm on a 1680 rez monitor and I can see three headlines on the "Top Stories" page. I can't handle Digg b/c I can only see six, maybe seven headlines without scrolling. As a first time user, I immediately close the page thinking, "#$#% that - I'm not scrolling just to read the headlines." FWIW I like the more spartan "headline only, please" styles of HN or reddit so I realize you may not be trying to appeal to me.

From a content perspective, I have no idea - wasn't worth it for me to check it out since I wasn't interested in scrolling x times to see what you offered.

Maro• 16 years ago

Some criticism:

You should have a language tag for your channels or feeds and make sure you only put english ones on the front page. Right now 2 of them are non-english.

You should put up a demo video or slides or something. Your front page is not compelling enough right now for me to register.

The news items in your channels don't have preview pics. With the space-liberal layout of your site, this is very lacking, it was my first thought as I scrolled down. OR use compressed headlines, and use favicons. But put up some pics, it looks very boring this way with text only.

As one of the commenters here pointed out, the default channels are so general as to be useless. You'll need to think of some interesting subjects. Right now you probably should concentrate on early adopters like us, so create some interesting channels like Python or Django or whatever is hip these days.

I'd consider rethinking the layout (I'm looking at /tech right now). It looks like a generic blog, but it should look like a CHANNEL, so make it look like one! Get rid of the noise on the right side (Sources, Subscribers), use the space for a layout that's not boring and makes me want to use the site.

I should be able to create a channel without signing in. It could be the hook for later signup.

Best of luck!

martinkallstrom2• 16 years ago

Hi, thanks for the excellent feedback. Pics and vids are next up, via oEmbed. I agree there is much to be done about the layout. The noisy items in the right hand column are going at the bottom of the channel.

As for the selection of channels, we are seeing a lot of interesting channels set up by users, over 200 new channels only today!

Again, thanks! We'll try out different ways to increase sign up rate. A video or the possibility to create channels without signing up are great suggestions.

Review my startup: Social news reader Twingly.com open for business

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