HN: Review my little Twitter app

http://glunote.com

by petesalty • 17 years ago

27 20 17 years ago

glunote.com

kirpekar• 17 years ago

Wow, I liked it. Very cool.

petesalty10• 17 years ago

Thanks, that's always nice to hear :)

petesalty10• 17 years ago

My desk is covered with little sticky notes, with just about everything written on them - things I'm interested in(books, websites, music, etc.), restaurants, lyrics to songs, people phone numbers/email addresses, etc. Anyway, this just isn't a good system, since I never seem to have these notes when I actually need them (i.e. when I'm not at my desk). Even if I don't tweet a lot I have Twitter open all the time since I like to keep up to date with what some people are doing/talking about. I also have Twitter on my phone, so a few months a go I thought it's be a good idea to create a system where I could create notes, just little ones, and access them from anywhere. Hence glunote.

The premise is pretty simple, just follow a user "glu" on Twitter then to take notes send a direct message to glu. The system then stores the note permanently, i.e, "d glu dicount socks 1-800-555-SOCK". You can then search notes by sending a direct message to glu with a ? as the first character. For example "d glu ? discount socks" would return all your notes that matched "discount socks" as direct messages (actually at the moment it returns the best match and a link to all other matches).

It was originally just for me but I've opened it up to anyone. I'd love to get some feedback on what people think, where there might be improvements, what's missing, that kind of thing. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

bbq2• 17 years ago

I've been toying with an idea like this (quickly and easily take notes from anywhere) and using twitter didn't even come to mind. I like your implementation and I see myself using it.

One feature I would love is a reminder system of some sort. I'm an extremely forgetful person and I could tweet notes all day long but would never remember to check time-sensitive ones. Could you add some functionality to retweet me reminders for time-sensitive notes? e.g. I could tweet "d glu meeting @6:30pm", "d glu do so and so @tomorrow @12:00pm" or something similar that could be parsed easily and wouldn't misfire.

petesalty10• 17 years ago

Actually I've been thinking about something like this but didn't want to implement it if no one wanted it - now that I know someone would think it's useful I'll do it. One question though - how would you prefer to get notified? Would retweeting work (might be sensitive info), direct messaging, or maybe email (although you'd have to provide an email address).

stevejohnson• 17 years ago

I like the app's simplistic nature, but I think your explicit use case is not really correct. I can't see myself using this to take class notes at all. The sticky note format just does not work for that. However, it seems like it would work great for leaving yourself reminders. More of a "note to self" than capturing in-depth information.

The visual style is good conceptually, but needs polish. You need more than yellow rectangles for each note, the cork board background needs some kind of border, and your X buttons need to be more stylish.

Edit: I see that you really did intend it for the use I just described, but the language on the site makes it sound like it's for taking notes in class, meetings, etc. I think that a more descriptive phrase is "write notes" rather than "take notes."

petesalty10• 17 years ago

Thanks Steve, great feedback. Wish my design skills were a little better :)

hellotoby• 17 years ago

I'm a designer/front-end developer and have some free time at the moment. Get in touch if you'd like some help with the visuals. My details are in my profile.

unohoo• 17 years ago

Wasnt this posted a while back ?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848889

petesalty10• 17 years ago

Yes, but I felt I did a really poor job of describing what I wanted to achieve so I thought I'd give it another go.

jmorin007• 17 years ago

While I like the app and what you're trying to do, just a heads up that you're going to come across as super shady by automatically following the @glu Twitter account when you have users login with their Twitter credentials. The problem is that you're not making it clear up front that by logging in, you're going to be adding a follower to their Twitter account, which will be interpreted as a violation of their privacy, and will almost certainly cause a backlash at some point.

I understand that in order for your app to work, the user has to be following the @glu account, but automatically opt-ing someone in is not the right way to do it. You need to update the content and design to make it painfully clear to anyone logging into your site that they are also consenting to following the @glu account.

petesalty10• 17 years ago

You're right, I'll change the language to reflect this. Thanks for the feedback.

HN: Review my little Twitter app

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