135 karma · joined June 23, 2009
http://alvinlai.com
It'll be great if the textarea for commenting grew in height as you typed more.
Recap saves a snapshot of the page and hosts it, to make sure that your saved selection will be available even after the webpage has changed.
It lets you capture step-by-step screenshots, formats them nicely with HTML in a public Dropbox folder, where you can share a link in 1 step.
"Winamp… It really whips the llama's ass!"
Otherwise, how is the service going to survive? They have to monetize somehow down the road to pay the bills.
See if you agree with what the creator of Pinboard says: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
I personally run a site called Handpick that helps people curate links and inform in a considerate manner:
I have paying subscribers who help me keep the lights on and do not have pressure to monetize my users' data in any way.
The question is: do you care enough how your data is handled to pay for the service?
I made Handpick (http://handpick.me) as a side project and have not taken any outside investment. Hence I have no investor pressure to obtain a critical mass of users in an insane period of time.
See my other comment about charging users money too.
http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
While conducting the beta test for my selective link sharing-via-email digests tool, Handpick:
I asked my users whether they'd pay to support the app to run for the long haul. They love my app enough to say yes and were delighted that they could actually actively fund the operations and development.
Go on, try asking your users if they'd pay for your product. It's the best validation you can get!
Bundling all the links into a daily or weekly email digest would be less disruptive than sharing via facebook, imo.
Salespeople need marketers to sell products, marketers rely on Facebook and Google to buy targeted advertising slots, who in turn optimize their social networking tools to encourage everyone to share even more, all the time.
Frictionless sharing, as Zuck puts it, because the more you share, the more keywords they can accumulate and sell as ad slots to marketers and sales people.
For the rest of us, we have our work to do and there's only a small window of our day when we're most productive.
Understand that the social web, as we know it, isn't designed in a way optimized for our productivity and happiness. It serves the tripartite of salespeople, marketers and social networking companies.
Sure it's free to use, but if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
I've since weaned myself from Facebook for more than a year with a little tool I made that helps me, my wife, family, friends and colleagues be more selective about what they share in a attention-respectful and considerate pace.
It's called Handpick, which helps you collect links for different groups of people and send a single email digest daily or weekly, totally cutting out pesky notifications in our lives.
Let me know what you think.
How did you get people to engage with the site?
Tried looking for inspiration at your Fandalism blog (http://blog.fandalism.com/) but it seems to be password protected now.
Looking forward to learning more from you, pud!
http://hemiolesque.blogspot.com/2006/10/fandalism-youtube-fo...
Now it's an "invite-only directory of good musicians".
Would love to hear your story how you took your time to launch Fandalism :)
https://github.com/defunkt/repl
I use this on a daily basis to avoid having to type "git" repetitively.
Was it PG's rice and bean Ramen Profitable recipe? I don't remember slow cookers used in that recipe.
Lol, I got it for my wife, she loved it too!
Whilst it's exciting to come up with novel ideas, nothing's more spurring than fixing and making your own life better.
To illustrate, here are some projects that I've embarked on, which scratched a personal pain point and went on to be incidentally well liked by others enough to even pay for:
I had to submit bug reports with attached screenshots in Basecamp (later Pivotal Tracker and Fogbugz), which involves many steps, so I made this.
Customers were frequently asking how to do something and nothing beats sharing a webpage with step-by-step screenshots. Later I found Dropbox to be a great medium so I integrated with that.
I felt that Facebook was a little too noisy and public to share personal links with my family and friends, so I made this.
Whilst reading long articles, I'd want to select some text, mark it out and jump back between them easily.
Whilst these are not runway successes with millions of dollars of profit, it certainly helps you build up the stamina to successfully ship and launch projects.
- Alvin
How have you been getting content from your friends? I'd love to hear about that from you.
On a related note, I thought I'd just share that I built this app called Handpick, which helps you be selective about what you share with whom you share:
Let me know if you might find this useful, I can send out invites.
- Alvin
http://letsrecap.com/users/sign_up?invite_code=hnrox
Let me know what you think =)
You might like to take a look at Handpick:
You'll be able to create different groups of people to collect links for via a bookmarklet throughout the day and send them via a single email at the end of the day.
Nicely put, just like how we behave differently in front of our parents as compared to our peers.
Lol, I really like your comment! It sounds like it could be a great tagline for my web app, http://handpick.me
Just curious, how are you and your friends updating each other on what's big in the world today?