This is my 4-year, off-and-on passion project. All suggestions and feedback are appreciated. I'd especially welcome product/feature-based ideas about how to overcome the enormous cold-start hurdle.
Note: Re-posted with permission from Dan. Last week's post got dinged by a semi-false-positive algorithmic penalty after only a few minutes.
Ok, so if I understand this correctly, in order to be certain I'm not tracked, I need to host my own back-end server? And the server stores the comments? And if I'm hosting my own server, I'm likely to end up talking mostly with those that sign up with "my" version of this? And if I want it to work in eg: Firefox I'd have to port it? Finally, wrt. tracking -- if the comments are stored on the server (and that's a REST service or something like it) -- wouldn't it be trivial to log activity at the routing level (eg: ha-proxy/nginx/other front-facing web server)?
This isn't meant as negative criticism, just trying to figure out if I've understood how it works correctly? (Note, I appreciate that the source is available, but obviously I can't know that the source you share is the source you run on your back-end. So we're back to trust, which is fine in my book).
[edit: re other clients -- the most straightforward thing to do would be to make an iframe(or js)-based proxy service (a la stumble upon) in order to enable any browser, I suppose?
I've thought about something similar, and I wonder if an XMPP back-end with one "room" pr url and the server-side log-extension might work? That should then make it trivial (unnecessary!) to enable better clients than web-only -- ie use a command line xmpp client to participate in the discussion, rather than forcing the use of the web browser. I realise many people think using the web browser is an advantage -- I generally find GUIs built on top of browsers to be slow and not very efficient. Extensions less so -- but the problem is of course that you'd have to port to Firefox, Opera, Webkit and IE (along with mobile variants) -- to achieve parity with systems like disqus etc]
The problem with XMPP rooms is that if you can connect to them with a chat client, people start using them like a chat client. Which is not necessarily what you want.
You're exactly right. The backend source code is here: https://github.com/fivedogit/words-backend but there's no way to know for sure that it's the same code running on the backend other than my word.
Seems like this might be a good business for someone to start, matching a github repository to a running server; third party verification that said code is actually what's running on a server.
First I've heard of OpenAnnotation. I'll look into it. Thanks.
As far as overcoming the cold start, I'm looking not so much for marketing ideas, but for product or feature enhancements that would be valuable to users immediately, without a huge number of other users.
Google search - useful for 1 user
Facebook - theoretically useful for a handful of friends
Twitter - useful for a slightly larger network
Words doesn't have friend/follower mechanisms -- it's just not the nature of the product. The intention is for users to interact with each other as they happen upon the same content. It's a dynamically-changing social graph. Unfortunately, this means the critical mass of users is definitely north of 100k, probably higher.
It wasn't a marketing suggestion. If an existing community (even a small one with hundreds of users) promotes the plugin, you will get feedback about requirements and feature enhancements. This is a necessary precursor to finding 100K users. Even Facebook started in a limited school environment.
These "second screen" or "third voice" apps require people to be (a) trained on the tool, (b) have a common set of target objects that they want to talk about. You could start off simple by looking for a small community of people who:
(a) use chrome
(b) regularly visit multiple (5-10) sites related to their primary site
(c) currently talk about the secondary sites using their primary site
(d) see value in having their existing conversations appear in-context on the secondary sites
The plugin may have business applications for proof-reading.
Note: Re-posted with permission from Dan. Last week's post got dinged by a semi-false-positive algorithmic penalty after only a few minutes.