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Ask HN: Please Review My Webapp

celebsutra.com

I'm not sure if this is a bug but the tabs (All, Movie/TV etc.) are all empty for me.

The design looks appealing at a glance (nice colors) but I have absolutely no idea what the service does and why I should register.

From the blurb on the right I can guess that you're somehow tracking celebrities. But I still don't know what advantage that gives me over just following them myself?

Oh, just noticed, when I select a country on the right then tweets start showing up. Well, again, I like the design, but wonder why I should sign up instead of just following those celebs myself? And what would signing up give me over what I already see right now?

The service tracks celebrity tweets.

Signing up allows you to pick the celebrities instead of seeing everyone.

I have outlined the target audience here he target audience is broad.Someone interested in tweets by celebs but does not want to either

* create a twitter account and add celebs one by one

* or feel like reading the celeb tweets only sometimes and does not want to pollute the twitter stream with non-stop celeb tweets.

You should have United States celebrities auto-selected.

Or at least someone. Because showing up to blank screens with a non-intuitive way of turning it on is just no good.

It is a bug. Will fix it.

The ability to pick your celebrities once you register was not obvious and something that I thought the site needed. I'd make sure this was front and center as an incentive to register.

Having said that, why make people register to select their celebrities? If there's not a good reason then drop an id as a cookie and track their choices that way. I was not going to register, but had I been able to select the celebs right from the get go I probably would have done that then returned.

I had thought about that but since the target audience is non-tech people, they might get very pissed/confused when their selections are no longer applicable when they return to the site because the cookie got deleted.

Actually I've done this with a number of sites before and that scenario rarely happens. Non technical people almost never delete their cookies (at least from what I've seen).

The way I've tackled it before is let them do X first (select their celebs lets say) without registering. Drop the cookie and create a user record linked to it. Then tell them that if they register they can access their list from any computer (work and home are big sellers). It's pretty effective for getting registrations and you shouldn't encounter as many problems as you think you will. If you're encountering a lot of trouble getting users to register, give it a try for a couple of weeks and see if you get more adoption.

Alternatively you could let them pick their celebs first, then make them register. It's kind of annoying for the user but let's them see what's available (and get a little invested) before registration.

Anyway, just my 2c.

After reading the discussion (all 14 comments that exist right now), it seems that people have given you plenty to think about.

It looks like you wanted to make a web app that was simple, interesting, and attainable. For that, I give you an A+. Using the Twitter API is good practice because its extremely popular.

That said - the added value of something like this is probably minuscule in comparison to the effort it took to make it - especially nice and polished like it is.

In any case, I bet you have a list of things you learned, plus a working demo on the web of your capabilities. Kudos!

This a side project I was working on for fun. If the site takes off I plan to aggregate the highest commented/liked tweets and celebrities. Beyond that I don't have any plans.

Design is by a friend of mine: http://sandosh.info/v2/pages/home/

Thanks in advance for spending your time on reviewing the site. :)

I am not sure who is your target market. It doesn't mentions anywhere what is the purpose of creating a login, either.

However, I have a suggestion which might make it appeal to a broader audience. When a user creates a login, you can provide a list of celebrities of each category. The user can pick the ones he/she wants to read the tweets from for each category. Maybe adding an option of receiving daily email/rss feed be useful. Also, being able to add all the checked celebrities into the twitter account be also useful.

The functionality you just outlined exists already. If you create an account, you can pick the celebrities.

The target audience is broad.Someone interested in tweets by celebs but does not want to either

* create a twitter account and add celebs one by one

* or feel like reading the celeb tweets only sometimes and does not want to pollute the twitter stream with non-stop celeb tweets.

Well it's not something I would use but it is a pretty cool idea.

I can see something like this really being popular, especially in LA and amongst the perezhilton.com crowd.. In fact you should try to get him to blog about your site. =)

Best of luck..

Thanks. That crowd is part of the target audience.

Simple concept. Good execution.

I would think about adding in a blurb at the top summing up what you do. Then follow that up with a sentence about why somebody should sign up - the benefits of being able to pick and choose celebs.

Thanks. It seems "Why register" is the common question. I was thinking of adding a blurb to point out the benefits.

You might want to look into this: I just "liked" the same entry 10 times.

Actually it is intentional :). There were two reasons

1. If someone was that interested in liking an entry, there is no harm done as of now, as there is no ranking as of yet.

2. Evil idea: If someone likes an entry multiple times, it gives an impression of more users :). Reddit apparently started out like this. The founders had multiple accounts and posted stories under various accounts to show activity.

Yeah. But my target audience also include people who don't want to sign up for twitter but may want to read celebrity tweets.

I'm still not sure if having a full fledged signup is good. But this is why I did it.

Why would people who don't want to register for Twitter register for your website?

(a genuine question you need to ask yourself)

Because in twitter, you have to find and follow the celebrities yourself.

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