Trunk.ly Keeps Track of the Links You Share Online

http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2011/01/18/18gigaom-trunkly-keeps-track-of-the-links-you-share-online-58012.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

by robryan • 16 years ago

36 25 16 years ago

nytimes.com

alexdong• 16 years ago

Thanks folks. Trunk.ly was launched 33 days ago right here on HN. Here is the original link when we announced that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567

There are still tons of works need to be done. Our viral co-efficient is too low, new user orientation process is horribly missing. But it's been a great ride so far.

we're currently seeking angel investment - if you like what we've achieved so far and are interested in finding out more, then contact us at tim@trunk.ly and we'd love to share our plans and goals and see if we can work together.

nc17• 16 years ago

One problem is that you log in and you have nothing to look at. You really want to have something for new users to get a great "out of the box" experience and they'll be more motivated to come back.

tbull0077• 16 years ago

Totally agree - we're rethinking that first experience at the moment so that you go through a more guided process. The intent is to send you to connect your social networks, then fill out your profile, then send you to the home screen. With a priority queue for new users, we should be able to get you to a home page that is full of your links by the time you first see it.

akkartik• 16 years ago

I love the data export/aggregation.

mattdeboard• 16 years ago

I am glad to see Trunk.ly get this kind of attention.

I contacted Alex and Tim last month to see if there was anything that I as a novice programmer could do to help them with their suddenly overwhelming workload. I was seeking just a little bit of work as a learning exercise, and these guys asked me to write an RSS connector for them. It was the most effective learning experience I've had, ever.

I am very happy for these guys. Two class acts who gave me the chance to actually get some code put into production. (AFAIK they're still using the RSS connector I wrote, with some adaptations and what have you I didn't know to include.) Kudos, guys.

tbull0077• 16 years ago

Hey Matt, thanks for the kind words. We really appreciated the work you did, and yes, that RSS connector is still there.

StavrosK3• 16 years ago

How do you get mentioned in the NYT, if I may ask?

bootload5• 16 years ago

"... How do you get mentioned in the NYT, if I may ask? ..."

Probably by making a product that people want and maybe a good bit of timing. If you read through the first post by Alex ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567 you'll see a mention of Yahoo refuting a claim they are closing delicious, but instead making it know the wish to sell.

When launching a new service with a big existing competitor, uncertainty can be used to boost user interest in alternatives.

StavrosK3• 16 years ago

historious has been running for more than six months now and it hasn't been mentioned in the NYT... Not only that, trunkly does basically exactly what historious does.

tbull0077• 16 years ago

The short answer, I submitted a press release to GigaOm, they wrote an article based on that and the NYT syndicate their content.

The long answer, I'm not a PR professional, but what's been working for us is to find some headline hook.

I'm not trying to write the article for the journalist but to pull out what's interesting. If it's an Australian blog, I'd make a big deal of the fact we are Melbourne based 'Aussie battler hits Top 20K sites globally in first month'. If it's someone like GigaOm, I'm trying to find some other 'cut through' that will grab the journalists attention.

I think in this case, the headline I went with was 'New startup Trunk.ly bookmarks 5 million links for users in its first month'.

The press release itself was basically the same regardless - a story about how we launched, what we do in the first paragraph, then facts figures and quotes. Overall I try to tell a story, but I make sure there is plenty of quotable things too.

In practice this seems to of been working OK - what's interesting is that the quotes facts and figures rarely, if ever, get used, but I think what's going on here is that we are capturing the blogger /journalists interest enough to want to research more and write about us.

I never tried to pitch the NYT, I think pitching a tech blog is a lot easier.

The question I'd love to know the answer to is do the NYT curate inbound syndication - did some sub-editor somewhere make a decision to run the article, or was it purely automatic?

StavrosK3• 16 years ago

I see, that's very informative, thank you.

bootload5• 16 years ago

"... The question I'd love to know the answer to is do the NYT curate inbound syndication - did some sub-editor somewhere make a decision to run the article, or was it purely automatic? ..."

Follow the flow of information. Who is the original author? Where was the piece originally published? Well the author is Simon Mackie from GigaOam. The piece was published in the "collaboration" section ~ http://gigaom.com/collaboration/ an area of reader interest that gigaom has a separate category for. If we look a bit closer at the author we and we check his bio, I noticed Simon did a stint at SitePoint ~ http://www.sitepoint.com/about/ Now I know that's a Melbourne company because I worked with Daks (Mark Harbottle) in a previous startup. I guess you should ask the author about the jump to the NYT ~ http://twitter.com/spiky_simon

The point is, the product is in a growth category and the author knows the startup scene in Melbourne. So is it a case of luck? or making your own luck? I think the later is the case.

paraschopra• 16 years ago

Thanks for this answer. A minor question: how long was your press release and did you attach it as a document in the email or just copy-pasted the content in email?

I'm asking because from what I read bloggers don't particularly like getting traditional press-releases.

tomsuchy• 16 years ago

Excellent app, imported my delicious bookmarks, set up twitter/fb feeds, works like a dream.

The only thing that would make the experience complete would be tag suggestions based on previously entered tags in the bookmarklet popup (you know, type a few letters, get a list of tags). Or maybe a list of all tags, I don't know, a simple alpha-sorted block of tags.

Even if you don't do any of those, I would still use it though :)

Great stuff! -Tom

tbull0077• 16 years ago

Thanks Tom, there's a lot of work still to go - we'll make sure these things are on the list.

cj• 16 years ago

If anyone is looking for a simpler bookmarking app, I made http://saaave.com/ last weekend.

Bookmarks are added with a one-click bookmarklet that saves your current URL. No tagging or further action necessary. The app indexes the content of your bookmarks for fulltext searching.

It's lacking a UI, but feel free to give it a try :)

pacifika• 16 years ago

Great. doesn't even need much UI. Not sure how you will scale indexing with more users - so if I could install it on my own server and and you add addons/plugins (get 1 free with every account) as extra payable features (imports etc) while keeping this bare bones install free then that would work for me.

didip• 16 years ago

I just registered, that's a clever way of collecting user links, through scraping status update.

It seems like the bookmarking scene is getting crowded again.

PS: I run a dead simple bookmarking app too - http://mybucket.co

gnubardt• 16 years ago

This is great! Is an HN importer coming :)

tbull0077• 16 years ago

We were actually going to launch with HN importer but didn't quite get there. If we find some time, it would be a bit of fun to implement.

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