UI Design for Social News Sites

LOOK UP! (need I say more??)

I'm a huge fan of HackerNews, I can't thank the community enough, I am slightly wiser for using the site, and have been introduced to an infinite number of subjects I need to learn more about. 

Like most, I don't upvote as many entries as I should, and I don't read enough of the comments, or get involved in the conversation enough. 

Why is that? Simple. 

When I click on an entry (I almost always open them in a new tab), I have to make an effort to go back to the entry and read the comments or upvote.

If you followed this link from HackerNews, look up, and you'll see (hopefully) that the HN entry is above. Click here if you didn't come from HN.

You can up vote, read the comments in context, etc. and because the HN header is so small already, it fits the page nicely and isn't too intrusive, unless you want to read the comments. 

Click the 'comments' link and the comments will show. 

Of course, with control of the HN domain, there could be a nice little ajax link to extend the view to show the comments, and therefore get rid of the scrolling in the upper frame. 

If you like this idea and think it would benefit the community, up vote it (hey, you might as well, the arrow is right above you), and maybe PG will implement it. 

If you don't like it, let me know why? I'm kinda curious. Clearly I think it's a pretty simple idea. 

Thanks, 
Pete

A shake-up for the US Auto Industry

Elon Musk of Tesla Motors was right that Silicon Valley can shake up the car industry, but maybe his view didn’t go far enough.

Tesla planned to take on the big 3 and recreate the US auto industry only went as far as designing an innovative product and creating demand for that product, things the big 3 have been somewhat unable to follow-through on recently.
However, where Musk didn’t go far enough was in his non-innnovative plan of creating his own manufacturing capacity.

Though lots of blame can be placed on US Automakers management teams for the current state of the US auto industry and requests for a bail-out, the biggest issue is simply that the Big 3 have been unable to build cars that people want to buy.

With the exception of the SUV market, US auto manufacturers have struggled to capture the audience and following which European or Asian manufacturers have garnerd, and even in the SUV market, competitors were able to take significant market share once they tooled-up to the growing demand for these types of vehicles.

There has been talk of breaking-up GM into it’s distinct brands. This would allow smaller companies to fail without having disastarous effects on the economy.

However, simply breaking up the brands doesn’t go far enough. Going a step further puts the US Auto industry into an opportunity position, rather than just struggling to survive.

The opportunity is to not only split the Big 3 into their component brands, but to split the manufacturing and logistics into a completely seperate company.

This creates an architecture in the auto industry of brands becoming design, engineering and marketing firms while the manufacturing sector focuses on solely manufacturing and the logistics involved in that.

Tesla and Fisker, just two new US based brands looking to take on the big 3, make the case for outsourcing manufacturing.

Tesla suspected to be in financial difficulty itself, has spent an enourmous amount of time and money tooling up for manufacturing, and is in preperations to build a new manufacturing facility in California.

Fisker signed a deal with Valmet Autotive of Finland to build the the Fisker Karma sedan. Valmet currently builds the Boxster and Cayman for Porsche.

 A redesign of the architecture of the auto industry, and seperating design/engineering from manufacturing could breath new life into the US auto industry and improve the abilities of market forces to drive the auto industry.

Strenghts

1) moderate disruption to manufacturing sector - retool for more flexible production if necessary

2) minimal disruption to external contractors

3) reliance on manufacturing and logistics expertise to direct future manufacturing capabilities

4) improved manufacturing quality as manufacturers will compete for contracts rather than just be handed the design

 

Weakness

1) lack of current agility in manufacturing capabilities

 

Opportunities

1) Lower impact of brand failure

2) manufacturing becomes a competitive market in it’s own right

3) lower barrier to entry for car companies - start-ups can purchase manufacturing capacity

4) agile manufacturing creates a more competitive and adept marketplace

5) market opportunities for growth in alternative fuel/energy sources

 

Threats

1)poor manufacturing quality reputation for North American auto makers. 

 

Is Facebook planning a Digg style feature?

After essentially killing off the HearWhere Facebook app this morning, and replacing it with a simple ability to post links to HearWhere shows on Facebook, I got to wondering if Facebook, and this applies to MySpace almost equally, will add a digg type feature to the site.

Obviously the social network is already in place, and link pages are a somewhat regular occurance.
so how big a step would this be to implement this in profiles.

The same applies for MySpace, though I don't know that linking pages is as ingrained.

FriendFeed is too Easy, and maybe Facebook should follow suit

Though I haven't been a HUGE follower of twitter, or friendfeed, in the past week I've started to slowly come around to what FriendFeed is offering.

So, I decided to give the FriendFeed api a try, and see what it was like.

WOW! that is just FAR too easy. The api set-up is simple, beyond words. I had the api sending data from HearWhere to FriendFeed within maybe 20 minutes of downloading the api pack.

Whether or not people actually share HearWhere shows using FriendFeed is an entirely different matter, but you can try it out on the HearWhere site.

The simplicity of the FriendFeed api, combined with the lack of interest in the HearWhere facebook app, and the upcoming changes to Facebook have also lead to changes sharing HearWhere shows on Facebook.

Now, rather than adding the application, HearWhere will just post a link to Facebook, and that link will be shared with your friends.
Unfortunately, that means that for the time being the capability of seeing what shows your friends are going to with a list of friends going to that show is no longer available.
Though with the low volume of users who signed-up for the Facebook app, it appears that functionality was limited anyway - can't see who's going if nobody has installed the app.

The FriendFeed team deserve a huge congratulations for making their api so simple.

HearWhere.com releases iPhone version of site

The HearWhere tagline of 'find live music anywhere' has taken on new meaning with the launch of the iPhone version of the site 'http://iPhone.HearWhere.com'.

Now live music can be discovered anywhere around the world, from anywhere in the world, no longer tethered to a desktop.

The idea for the mobile version (not supporting flash lite just yet), is that now while out to dinner with friends, you can take out your iPhone, lookup who's playing near by, have a listen to a few bands, and decide what to go see.

Now get out and support the live music scene!

PR with the lemmings, or go against the grain

With the US long weekend over, I am working on getting some PR to further the growth of HearWhere.

Lots of blogs advise to submitting Press Releases on Tuesdays through Thursdays.
The theory being that if you release on Friday, it sits around over the weekend and doesn't get enough attention when nobody is looking, and Monday people are catching up on the press releases that you shouldn't have sent in on Friday(?).

However, does this also mean that most Press Releases get submitted mid-week and therefore there is more competition on those days? Since everybody is taking the advice of the PR blogs, should I zig while everybody else zags? or follow the advice of the experts?

iPhone without Flash???

Thankfully nobody is reading this blog, but even if you are, and you've seen HearWhere, I assume it isn't a stretch to say 'hey, this would be cool on the iPhone'.
But there is a hitch, Apple has decided not to allow Flash to be installed on the iPhone.

I found this strange as so many great media sites use flash, but Quicktime supports flash files, so it might not be as detrimental as first impressions would make you think.

However, the question still has to be asked, why would Apple block flash? What is there strategy with using quicktime as a flash player? if that is there strategy at all.... puzzling...

more competitors every day

Back in November I launched ZiFiMusic.com, a music discovery service ala pandora, last.fm, etc.
It seems that within a week of launching everybody and there dog set-up competing services. Even Gerd Leonard (who blogged about HearWhere yesterday) got into the game with Sonific, which he later closed just before I shut down ZiFi.

I didn't think I had jumped into HearWhere without doing any research on the market, but at the time it didn't seem that much was out there, and certainly nothing that had the depth of HearWhere, or the ability to play music from the artists which were being presented.

Now it seems everyday I can find another concert listings site. Though I feel fortunate that HearWhere has more listings, is the only site I've found which can sample the artists music in the same UI, and is simpler to understand than most, I also find it disconcerting to discover that these other sites are not only getting funded, but getting press often because they are funded.

I'm hoping to break out of this cycle shortly, and maybe if I get a spot on a major blog, I'll get enough traffic to make HearWhere a viable business.
Time will tell, though it appears my faux pas from a few days ago has hurt more than I had anticipated.

Rookie mistakes and 420

Yesterday I noticed a significant bump in traffic coming from StumbleUpon. I thought myself very fortunate at the time, and decided to put a 'Digg This' button on the HearWhere index page to see if I could get the site on to Digg.

I loaded the new site into production, and continued to watch the visits increase. Happy with my moderate progress, I went for a ride.

I noticed that the bounce rate was high, and that for the increase in traffic, I was actually seeing a decline in ad clicks. Thinking this was some sort of StumbleUpon anomoly (stumblers blocking ads, etc.), I continued to be high on the fact that I was getting visits which I suspect were a result of the new design.

Well, at 12:18am, Gerd Leonard (music futurist) dropped me an e-mail to let me know that the links on the links on HearWhere were not working.

DOH! A two second fix and everything is back in order. My pride hurt, feeling like an idiot that i got a good amount of visitors to the site while it was in non-working order.

So I looked through my logs to see how many visits were affected. Exactly 420.
Maybe it's a music industry thing, maybe it's because I live in Whistler. Hopefully it's a good omen.

NOTE: i don't use drugs, and don't condone there use, but 420 is a bit of an icon around here.

new site design

After not much time at all comes a new site design.
This one is far from final, but getting closer, and better all the time.

I am hoping this design will last more than a few weeks ;) I think it holds promise.
The facebook app, and widget have also been redone to match the website.
The blog will be next.
Let me know what you think.

The Widget is dead, long live the widget

Just one day after Fred Wilson somewhat ominously announces the end of widgets as we know them, and mashable promotes iWidgets as the next best thing in making your website go viral, I have decided to build a quick and dirty widget for hearwhere and see what happens.

I side with Fred on the idea that for most visitors, widgets don't do much. However, of course, I like to consider the hearWhere widget a bit different. Rather than just being a showcase of what the blog writer thinks is important, the hearWhere widget uses the viewers location as the jumping off point.

Knowing that Fred is in NYC, showing me a list of upcoming shows happening in NYC doesn't help me, as I live on the other side of the continent. So, the hearWhere widget shows a small list of shows playing locally.

In no way is the widget the ultimate use of hearWhere, it pales in comparison to the abilities of the main website and the facebook app. the facebook app can show you what shows your friends are going to, and a list of shows you have decided to save.

The widget thing for me right now is a bit of a wait and see. Will anybody use it? Does anybody care?

Let me know what you think, and if you think it's a good idea, i'll dedicate more time to making the widget a better product.
For now, I'll be getting to work on another redesign of the site, and trying to get more uses, so spread the word, and go!

Welcome to the HearWhere Blog

Thanks for stopping by.

On May 22nd 2008, I launched hearWhere.com. A simple website for finding live music anywhere in the world.

Hopefully I'll be able to keep this blog up to date with updates regarding hearWhere, and I'll likely comment on other web apps, technology developments and random thoughts.