It is a little discouraging to have your work dismissed in a couple sentences though. I put an awful lot of time into it.
Positive and negative comments come with the territory once you launch/announce your site to the public.
Anyway, it looks like you've got the skills to make something nice. Maybe you could try to push the space into some fresh direction that no one has done before, instead of doing an incremental improvement.
What is wrong with other sites? What does your site do better? I put about as much care into my comment as you put into selling your website.
FWIW, I also viewed it, thought 'what sets this apart from all the other alternatives?' and then left. I think your design is really loose. Other than that, I use a snippets function in my text editor and the things that doesn't cover aren't enough to warrant using a site like yours. There might be some advantage I'm missing though?
(foo.com/c# is parsed as an anchor)
It made me log in and try it out straight away.
I've been wrestling with this question for several weeks. It seems easier if you already have a google account. Otherwise, you will force them to get one and make the login process a bit more complicated.
What about Disqus? Anyone else using this?
- Use fixed width layout
- align the sign in link the the right margin
- let people see submit links even if they aren't signed in. If they click on it, then sign them in.
- stock it with a lot more bits. Right now there are just 3!
- have more than one user. Get your friends in on the beta first.
- make it seem alive and constantly changing, so people come back.
- make the bits shareable on twitter / facebook, etc
- the iconography is sort of weird, I saw a pancake, an asparagus (?), and the logo looks like a green folded piece of paper with eyes and a bite out of it. If you don't know how to design (which is totally OK), then go for minimalism.
As far as the design goes: I'm not much of a designer, so I used vegetables. It seemed like a good idea at the time, anyway.
Right now it's basically a standalone GIST app with out any of the social networking bits.
If I were to rate the idea as-is I'd probably give it a 5/10 it seems like core functional works but there needs to be more...
How do you intend to monetize the site? (premium services, ads, acquisition?)
Somethings I'd look into.
1. Add Group Feature (Private Group Bit Repository) 2. Maybe some kind of game mechanic to drive initial traffic and increase the sites stickiness. (pts for posting, badges, etc) 3. Plugins for Wordpress, BBS, Facebook, etc. 4. Try narrowing your niche "Business, Open Source" you can always expand it later.
Just some thoughts...
Good Luck
-N
