List Gorilla: Our project over the last few months

http://www.listgorilla.com/

by Cheeese • 16 years ago

14 14 16 years ago

Cheeese5• 16 years ago

www.listgorilla.com

What is it? List Gorilla is a place to find and create lists of all the things you care about. The items in each list are sorted and curated by you and the community. Whether you are into food, science, cinema or something more obscure, make a list about whatever interests you and watch how it evolves.

Feedback Any feedback on the idea, execution and performance is much appreciated. We have some ideas about where we would like to take this idea but I'm also very curious to hear yours. You can also email me directly at oneintenthousand@gmail.com

Thanks, Jason

scrrr• 16 years ago

Great design, and although the idea seems trivial I clicked around quite a bit. I could imagine to visit the page with my phone occasionally if the mobile client is well-made. Can't test right now.

Cheeese5• 16 years ago

Glad you liked it.

Mobile is an interesting space for this content type. I can imagine a user getting relevant lists depending on their location. Actually location and localised content is going to be a big challenge for us - we can see patterns developing where users are creating lots of location specific content that may not be relevant to you.

Russelldb2• 16 years ago

First Hacker News project listed here that I have clicked around and enjoyed for ages. Really nicely executed. With a lot of play it may well become very useful for making snap decisions.

Would like to sign up without linking an existing account, don't want to sully my social network if you do something untoward. Trust is earned.

Cheeese5• 16 years ago

Fair enough. That is one of the things we plan on doing soon enough, we have a list of features to get through but it will get ticked off at some point.

Thanks for the feedback.

Russelldb2• 16 years ago

Saying that, I signed up anyway (to add to the feature list :D)

I really like it. It needs traction to make it useful but it is fun and could be sociable. The idea is trivial, but that is nice: everyone loves top 10s.

Cheeese5• 16 years ago

And strangely enough if you have a feature request you can add it to the list here:

http://www.listgorilla.com/list/List-Gorilla-Feature-Request

ThomPete• 16 years ago

Nice execution.

If you get enough traction you could make a book once a year.

wyck• 16 years ago

How are you going to prevent this from being gamed?

marknutter2• 16 years ago

I had wanted to create something similar at one point but thought there was too much activity in this space. I now see that there was definitely room for improvement. I like what you've done so far. The hardest part will, of course, prevent gaming of the system once it gets popular. But assuming you have a good strategy for that it looks like you have a winner on your hands.

Cheeese5• 16 years ago

Getting great content that is a true refection of sentiment is going to be a challenge. We do have a few ideas on how to make it tough to game, but I'm quite happy to have that problem.

Thanks for the feedback.

marknutter2• 16 years ago

Some feedback:

- when I tried to contribute, it asked me to login, but provided no links to login. Throw the twitter and google oauth links in that modal so I don't have to go hunting for it.

- provide a field for a url to the actual item in addition to the title, description, and image. I was trying to find some of the iPad apps that were recommended in a list, but had to hunt them down manually using google.

- on the list builder, I'd like to see some automatic link crawling so I don't have to hunt down the image and description. So if I paste in a link to an iphone app, it will crawl that site for an image, and use the meta description and page title (editable by me after the fact, of course).

- tried to create a test list, but it threw back validation errors. problem is, it didn't say what was wrong with the form.

- the tag field is not intuitive. I understand what you're trying to do, but I think saying "enter tags separated by spaces" would be more straightforward.

- A list building bookmarklet or chrome plugin would be awesome too.

svmegatron• 16 years ago

This is really nice. A great idea, and looks to be done really well. Good luck with it!

ollerac• 16 years ago

I remember Amazon tried doing this a few years ago with Listmania. I really liked that site because I could just search for 'hosting' or 'sci-fi' and I'd get an idea of what the community thought were the best options. Then I could research the top ten results myself. It was a really nice site for basic research and I kept coming back to it about once a week -- the had lists on everything

1. I think your design is better than Listmania's design. Allowing embedded images is a huge plus.

2. Watch out for tons of spam when you get popular.

3. Change your name? Listering.com and listles.com are both available.

4. Make sure your results don't get stagnant. For popular terms like "Hosting" or "Best Movies" etc try to make older lists lose their ranking really quickly. It'll keep the discussion alive, let new people have a voice, and keep your site up to date -- all super important things with a content site.

List Gorilla: Our project over the last few months

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