Ok HN, 5 weeks in, here's where our startup is at...

[coryl]

A couple weeks ago I started an ASK HN post to review our startup. We got lots of interesting advice, and we'd love more (original post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353337).

So here's an update with our startup, http://www.howl.com. We need your thoughts and suggestions and criticisms. Our initial post was less clear as to what we did. It should be clearer now, so here's what we've got.

Howl.com is a link blogging platform, a place to share and discover links. To post a link, you simply paste the URL. We'll grab the titles, description, thumbnails, and embed images or videos.

In the past couple weeks, we've added some features we think can give a bit more value to our users. They include:

- Ability to automatically post to Facebook and Twitter accounts whenever you post on Howl. - Reblogging: 1 click to repost content directly to your link blog

- Thumbnail selector on the edit page, which scans the URL for images and lets you choose one as your post thumbnail. (we may include this directly in the posting process)

- Users subscriptions which will show posts in a a basic feed, and an explore page so people can see whats being posted and what the site is about

- A few little things like avatars, location/about fields, and giving your blog a custom title

Some things we haven't added yet that we want to do:

- Globalized comment pages, so that anyone who shares the same links can get to a centralized discussion page, where they can also see other people who posted the same link and other networking data.

- Add a "Preview" button that lets people see and edit their post before they publish it.

- Faster spider and posting process.

Please give it a try, you can use our demo account (demo // asdfasdf) or register your own. We'd love your feedback and can handle the tough stuff. Thank you very much!

[JoshCole]

I almost didn't post this, because I had assumed when I saw your explore page that you had already taken it into account , but here it goes..

It seems to me that howling something is a type of up-vote (reddit, hn, digg) or bookmark (delicious, xmarks). This means you have an idea of what people have found interesting. So why don't you tell what people what others find interesting in addition to or instead of saying what has been posted recently? One reason I can see for using most recent as your exploration metric is that it would really correspond to popularity, the most popular link would be most recent most frequently (depending on implementation). I don't think this is a good enough reason though, one person has the ability to use bursts of spam to remove things they don't want to be seen on the explore page (its harder to stay popular if nobody can see you so this means spamming is an effective way to give a down-vote).

[andyhin]

Hi JoshCole, thanks your feedback. You are thinking along the exact same lines as us. Your suggestion is on our todo list, and the latest post/users are just a filler as we have not gotten around to implement a recommendation system yet.

But we plan to utilize a users posts, the people who they are subscribed to, and the posts of the people they are subscribed to in order to serve more relevant content.

Again, thanks for the feedback, it really helps.

[coryl]

Clickable: http://www.howl.com

[shuleatt]

It would be cool if you integrated with Open Graph to allow links posted to Facebook to be cross-posted to howl. Feel free to ping for clarification

[jamesshamenski]

really good name! solid execution on the idea

[TheSOB88]

Maybe I'm not your market, but this really has no appeal to me. Were you expecting to have high interest among us at HN?

Still, site looks good for 5 weeks.

[coryl]

Thats alright, theres still a lot of good thoughts and opinions that people here propose that could really apply to any startup. We appreciate those too.