grag

I'm not sure if I'd have time to develop this myself, but I thought I'd throw this idea out there to see what others think about it.

The idea would be to have a firefox extension that allowed users to quickly select a portion of their browser screen to save it as an image to their profile on the bookmarking service. This could be a great way to keep track of all the little aspects of websites you find interesting/inspiring (menu systems, color choice, features, etc). You could then go to your profile and browse all your images, or browse by website (so you could check out a collection of images you saved of a particular website).

Others could come to the website to browse all the UI images and even subscribe to users to keep up to date on what their bookmarking.

I find 37signals "screens around town" blog posts, where they share images and their thoughts on particular design decisions, to be really interesting. My idea would be to form a service / community around this UI sharing concept.

I've developed a website / Firefox toolbar that allows people to surf the web by topic or within specific domains. I think it has huge potential and that I'm on to something big here, but its usefulness relies on having a powerful recommendation engine behind it, something I cannot build myself. It's similar in many ways to stumbleupon (at least in regards to how the rec engine needs to operate. new content is introduced by users who fave websites from their toolbar and should be introduced to more and more users as it gains popularity within a period of time).

I've talked to a few recommendation engine providers (loomia, strands, etc). Strands is the only company that may be able to provide a back-end recommendation service that could work for my service (great API, content agnostic, ability to filter by item tags).

But still, I'm not sure a 3rd party service like this could ever provide the flexibility that I would eventually want (For instance, how could I control the rate at which new content is spread and eventually stops being recommended? how would I address potential issues of gaming?).

I'm not that knowledgeable about how rec engines operate. If anyone here understands the technical details regarding rec engines (or has experience building them) I would love to hear what you think. A third party system could potentially allow me to launch this thing very soon and would alleviate many scaling issues. But maybe it would be smarter to try to get a team together and build it from scratch so that I have complete flexibility.

I'm in the process of building a social media website that basically recommends new websites to users based on a number of categories they have selected (similar to stumbleupon). I want it to be useful to users even if they are not logged in. I've devised a method, using cookies, to keep track of content that a user has already been recommended, which is important. I realize I may be going about this all wrong, so any feedback or suggestions would be appreciated!

- I have DB that includes a table for each category (images, videos, funny, politics, etc) and each row in these category tables contains information about a particular website.

- When a user goes to my site they select the categories they want to explore (which is saved to a cookie) and then they can add a bookmarklet to their browser which when clicked will take them to a recommended site from one of those categories.

-When the bookmarklet is first pressed, a database call is made that grabs the 100 most recent link_ids from each of the users selected categories which are then loaded into a new browser cookie. (so if they have three categories selected it will create three new cookies which each contain a comma delimited list of 100 link_ids for that category).

- If the bookmarklet is pressed again it will detect that the user already has category cookies, it will pick a random category, grab the link_id list, pick a random link_id from that list (probably have to turn it into an array first), and then overwrite the cookie with a link_id list that is identical to the previous list except that it doesn't have the chosen link_id in it. This way, the next time a link is loaded from that category cookie it won't load the same link. It seems like this would prevent a user from seeing the same content over again (as long as they don't delete their cookies), which is basically what I'm trying to solve. Even if a user does delete their cookie, chances are that a decent period of time has elapsed since they last visited the website, and thus the 100 most recent links grabbed from each category will probably be new to them anyway so their won't be much reoccurring content.

I know it's kind of strange, but does anyone see any problems with this method or a better way. Just wanted to get some feedback before I proceed because it's going to take some time to implement.

Thanks!

I'm working on a community generated media (images) website for a particular niche, that's almost ready for release (or beta testing). I've never launched a website which relies so much on the creation of a very active community.

My current thought is that it would make sense to have a closed beta to begin with and actively recruit people who may be interested in participating, and then allow each beta tester to invite a specified number of other people to the website.

There of course will be very little content and community interaction to begin with, and by making it a closed beta I'm thinking that early users won't be put off by that fact, as they understand it hasn't been released to the public and that they can have a role in shaping the community and the website. If I just release the thing now with little content and no community then it could just look like a failed website to anyone visiting.

Also, it seems that users would be more likely to invite others if it's a closed beta because it's a bit more exclusive.

Does this sound logical, or would it make more sense to release the website to the public right away?