Really cool idea (and nice design). I know it was a weekend project so I bet most of my feedback are things you've already considered, but here it is:
1) It's a little hard to tell the source of the quote from just the thumbnail, unless you recognize the cover. I think there should be a title above the quote that includes Book and Author (in addition to the thumbnail of the cover)
2) It's such a cool concept, but I'd like to be able to browse by books (business books, psychology books, fiction, literature, best sellers, etc).
3) Make the page more dynamic, so you don't need to refresh the page every time you call for a new quote. This will make it much nicer/enticiing to quickly scroll through quotes. The refresh creates a bit of friction
4) Make it easier to tweet/share it out. You have a tweet/pin button in the corner, but I would integrate it into the quote box. If it's a good quote, I want to post it to other places
Thanks for the great feedback! A couple of the things you suggested were in the works, however, I set a time limit for how long I would allow myself to work on this and I simply ran out of time. Next iteration though!
One other feature I'd like to see is an "Add to Wishlist" button. Writing the book title in a new tab is quite annoying and this would definitely help me save time.
Nice app and concept...the most-highlighted passages feature of Amazon is definitely something worth mining.
My first reaction: Is it really necessary to load a 2.33MB background for this? Even on a fast connection, the background-image-load stuck out like a sore thumb, clashing with the otherwise smooth operation of the site.
This is great. I hope you get some sort of referral payment for linking back to books for purchase on Amazon. A site like this could inspire a lot of people to buy a lot of new books.
I recommend allowing users to pick from a set of categories to filter quotes from genres they want to highlight/ignore. For instance, I would be interested in seeing highlighted passages from fiction novels without running into a bunch of self-help or religious passages.
As a further step, this would be a perfect implementation of social media advertisements. The most popular passages serve as a good advertisement for books. If you have a little widget that shows a random book and favourited passage, with the ability to cycle through to others, any website could host this interactive advertisement and see a portion of revenues from the amazon kindle purchases.
> I hope you get some sort of referral payment for linking back to books for purchase on Amazon. A site like this could inspire a lot of people to buy a lot of new books.
That's a nice app you have come up with. I like it. Here are some suggestions to create a better experience:
1. Use of arrow keys to navigate between the quotes will deliver a much better experience to the users.
2. Providing the users with a filter to browse books by different categories, authors etc. will prove to be a better discovery platform.
3. Use AJAX to load the quotes instead of reloading the page every-time.
I really like this site, I could see it becoming a homepage for people. I would suggest adding button to automatically set it as a homepage for people. Also, I would like to see the social features become all white for a cleaner look. I'm not sure if non-tech users will still be able to identify them though so it would require some A/B testing.
:) as you can see, I didn't have time to go through all the quotes I scraped. We ended up with over 300,000 quotes and chose to use the top 1000 to start. What I find even funnier is that this was highlighted on the kindle by 980 people!
The app is really cool, there's lots of room for design flair with this.
I was a little disheartened to see so many religious quotes, the same book (persuit of god) came up three times, and there were others too, I'd say half of them were religious.
I think the idea is great, but the content would be better if the quotes were from fiction rather than self-help and faith based books.
looks really nice! I just felt that some minor animation would have given it a better feeling, for example when I changed quote a fade would have been nice. I also feel like that a slightly moving background would give an amazing feeling, the image looks great and I really gives me a sense of moving. I'm not sure why but this is what I feel.
I feel the same way as you! We were in the midst of doing all these things but decided to hold off to see what others thought of it first. Thanks for the feedback!
I really like the design and the interface, nice work. One thing I found a little confusing is that if you go "back" and then "forward", the "forward" action seems to load a random quote instead of returning to the one you were on.
It is confusing. I wasn't sure how to keep the interface as simple as possible and also include the forward functionality. I'll be putting more thought into this for the next iteration.
That's our source! This is what I mainly used to find new books. The idea was to make this beautiful and more fun. We're going to add discovery via genres soon too, hopefully making it even more useful.
I've toyed with the idea of a social quote site or some basic paid software to create pretty quotes, and I love that you've included a Pinterest button. I think it would work better, if you were able to generate an image that could be pinned on Pinterest instead, though.
The image doesn't have to be shown; the bookmarklet/share button could probably detect a `display: hidden` image instead. Although that would add to the bandwidth footprint.
Why not also add a plugin that can collect quotes from web-pages with a right-click? I think that's what quote.fm and quotevault.org sort of already do. But you could make a kind of flickr for quotes: quotedesk and have it feed pc desktops or a toolbar display.
I think the idea is that people look at quotes and then click the associate links to Amazon.
I don't know how the associate program works, but I clicked through to a number of books. It won't make him rich, but it might make him a few dollars a month.
No end in mind! Aside from my company, I hadn't launched anything in a while and had the itch. I'm not looking to make a fortune (I'd be fine making $0 to be honest). I wanted a site like this, so I decided to build it when I realized it didn't exist.
[+] [-] patrickambron|13 years ago|reply
1) It's a little hard to tell the source of the quote from just the thumbnail, unless you recognize the cover. I think there should be a title above the quote that includes Book and Author (in addition to the thumbnail of the cover)
2) It's such a cool concept, but I'd like to be able to browse by books (business books, psychology books, fiction, literature, best sellers, etc).
3) Make the page more dynamic, so you don't need to refresh the page every time you call for a new quote. This will make it much nicer/enticiing to quickly scroll through quotes. The refresh creates a bit of friction
4) Make it easier to tweet/share it out. You have a tweet/pin button in the corner, but I would integrate it into the quote box. If it's a good quote, I want to post it to other places
[+] [-] jordanmessina|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexsb92|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austenallred|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|13 years ago|reply
My first reaction: Is it really necessary to load a 2.33MB background for this? Even on a fast connection, the background-image-load stuck out like a sore thumb, clashing with the otherwise smooth operation of the site.
[+] [-] mnicole|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanmessina|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pirer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alainbryden|13 years ago|reply
I recommend allowing users to pick from a set of categories to filter quotes from genres they want to highlight/ignore. For instance, I would be interested in seeing highlighted passages from fiction novels without running into a bunch of self-help or religious passages.
As a further step, this would be a perfect implementation of social media advertisements. The most popular passages serve as a good advertisement for books. If you have a little widget that shows a random book and favourited passage, with the ability to cycle through to others, any website could host this interactive advertisement and see a portion of revenues from the amazon kindle purchases.
Keep it up, you're on to something here.
[+] [-] StavrosK|13 years ago|reply
It already has one, it seems.
[+] [-] user24|13 years ago|reply
^ excellent tag line. Explains exactly what I'm looking at. Good job. Nice idea.
[+] [-] vrishabh|13 years ago|reply
1. Use of arrow keys to navigate between the quotes will deliver a much better experience to the users. 2. Providing the users with a filter to browse books by different categories, authors etc. will prove to be a better discovery platform. 3. Use AJAX to load the quotes instead of reloading the page every-time.
[+] [-] cnanders|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonybaroneee|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MikeKusold|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wheaties|13 years ago|reply
http://quotab.ly/792/solitaire-for-kindle-vol-1
[+] [-] jordanmessina|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnriot|13 years ago|reply
I was a little disheartened to see so many religious quotes, the same book (persuit of god) came up three times, and there were others too, I'd say half of them were religious.
I think the idea is great, but the content would be better if the quotes were from fiction rather than self-help and faith based books.
[+] [-] curiousdannii|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiglionabbit|13 years ago|reply
There's religious fiction too. Though perhaps a tagging system would help you filter out what you don't want to see.
[+] [-] dinduks|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duiker101|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanmessina|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickambron|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wldlyinaccurate|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanmessina|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unclegene|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanmessina|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmfrk|13 years ago|reply
The image doesn't have to be shown; the bookmarklet/share button could probably detect a `display: hidden` image instead. Although that would add to the bandwidth footprint.
[+] [-] rshlo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanmessina|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ftwinnovations|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vandershraaf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kafkaesque|13 years ago|reply
To my eye (and my personal taste), the book image should be valign=top. With the longer quotes, the book image at the middle looks strange.
Also, again with the longer quotes, the blue links are difficult to read on that dark/grassy field background. The grey "from" is basically illegible.
I'm using Chrome 22.0.1229.94 m.
Great work, though!
[+] [-] adrianwaj|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanmessina|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unreal37|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbesto|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanmessina|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praveenhm|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanmessina|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charleshaanel|13 years ago|reply
Having said that, did you begin your project with the end in mind. Who is your paying customer(target market) and what is your revenue model?
[+] [-] jlarocco|13 years ago|reply
I don't know how the associate program works, but I clicked through to a number of books. It won't make him rich, but it might make him a few dollars a month.
[+] [-] jordanmessina|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toxik|13 years ago|reply