User9812 | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: Can you build something better than Youtube?
User9812's comments
User9812 | 11 years ago | on: (Your opinion) Is private access more valued than public access?
That page doesn't load correctly on my desktop, so I can't see the example.
Your question though, you want to show the first few minutes of the video or something along those lines, then ask users to register?
That'll definitely increase registration. I don't agree with it though. You'll inflate your registration numbers, and at the same time, turn away users from enjoying your content. For example, Quora displays a portion of comments, then blurs the rest asking you to sign-up. I know you can get creative and modify the URL to get the full page, but I just no longer visit links to Quora based on principle. I don't like to jump through unnecessary hoops.
You want users to register, because they want to register. You can hold their video hostage after the preview, and they'll just create a throwaway account, or register, and never participate or return. Is that something you want to encourage for the ego boost of a higher user count?
Anyway, that's my take on the situation. I'm always for giving users the best experience possible, and I think interrupting their video doesn't achieve that goal.
User9812 | 11 years ago | on: Introducing Nvest
Agreed. I could register accounts for 1,000 five year old children and let them pick stocks, and one of them would have what appears to be great insight and recommendations. Does that mean we should follow the child's next move? I hope not.
User9812 | 11 years ago | on: The new VirginAmerica.com
Well, I give them respect for trying something new. It has some improvements, but the UX falls short in others.
1. Boarding pass is great.
2. Being able to scroll back up to make changes is wonderful. A lot of airline sites are slow, your session breaks when you use the back button, etc. It's nice being able to scroll up, change a date, scroll back down. Well done.
As for the downside, it uses way too much space. This might work on a tablet or touch screen, but it's awful for the desktop. For example, your typical airline uses something like this...
http://i.imgur.com/bEjWWm0.png
A couple of autocomplete boxes, and a calendar picker that pops up. Works fine, it's all visible in a little box, and easy to use. The virgin site stretches this across a handful of pages, or if you're picking further off dates, it might be 10+ pages. That's just bad design.
What they should do is keep a more traditional method of selecting all your airports and dates, then scroll down to the prices when you click continue. I think it would be the best of both worlds.
They also need a method of finding the best price over a given time period. Jetstar is one of my favorites when it comes to this...
http://booknow.jetstar.com/Search.aspx
Pick a flight, say Brisbane to Sydney for a few weeks in June. Click the box to say you want the lowest price. It gives you a nice little graph with all the cheapest flights highlighted, so you can easily choose your days. Actually, the whole Jetstar booking process is decent, and I used it often in Australia.
User9812 | 11 years ago | on: Osmo
http://i.imgur.com/0OXmc9h.png
The blue line is an iPad, the red region is the camera line of sight. On the left, you have no mirror, the camera is looking straight ahead at you. On the right, a mirror is attached, it redirects the camera view down to the playing surface.
User9812 | 11 years ago | on: Osmo
I thought that was self-explanatory. Your iPad camera faces forward, the mirror redirects it down to the playing surface. The AI tries to track the location of the letters and colored blocks in the mirrored image.
What does it do? The examples are pretty obvious, what more are you looking for?
Arrange tangible puzzle pieces into matching on‑screen shapes.
Be the first to guess and spell out the on‑screen hidden word by tossing down real‑life letters faster than your friends. A related picture gives the clue.
User9812 | 11 years ago | on: Osmo
It's one of those trick sites, where you never realize you can scroll down (thank you fullscreen image trend). Go back to the site, scroll. First thing you'll see...
Setup is a snap. Simply mount Osmo over your iPad's front‑facing camera. Reflective Artificial Intelligence and a built‑in mirror recognize and respond to your every real‑world move.
Then it goes on to describe the available games, and has other key information that's well summarized. I watched the video, and didn't realize you could scroll until I read your comment, and went back to the site a second time.
User9812 | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: I'm looking for new ways to serve museum visitors with content
More interactive content, and well designed infographics. I've been to a lot of museums around the world, and usually they have a sign next to each object of interest with a short essay. I went to another museum where they had headsets, and you could listen to the content. This never appealed to me. I don't have 8 hours to stand with a headset on, listening to each piece. I also don't have the time or interest to read something that looks like a copy/paste from wikipedia. If I wanted to do this, I'd just stay home and read online. If I want more information on a particular piece, once again, I can read at home on my own time.
Other people seem to feel the same way. The majority of the time I see people glance at a sign, read one or two lines, then keep walking.
Imagine people only have an hour to go through the museum. How can you organize and display the most interesting data for them? Pick out the best facts, and design some eye catching infographics that make them stop in their tracks.
And why not make things more interactive? I'll learn more that way. Quiz me, give me a few multiple choices on a touch screen, and let me guess what period this artifact is from, or how much this particular ship anchor weighs. What about the number of people on the Titanic, or how many were crew, how many were passengers? How many survived? Things like this make people stop. They're walking and they see a question with a few answers. It makes them think, talk about it with the people they're with. You could show the average votes for each answer based on past visitors, etc.
User9812 | 11 years ago | on: Compressor.io – Compress and optimize your images
Well, that's a bold claim, but let's see if Photoshop really is inefficient. I took the original iguana image from the Compressor site, and then used Photoshop save for web to bring it down to 250kb (same size as the after image from Compressor).
I picked a spot and zoomed in where it's easiest to see the artifacts.
http://i.imgur.com/Sf72oZq.png
If anything, I'd say the Photoshop one is better than Compressor.
User9812 | 11 years ago | on: The Indie Bubble Is Popping
Discoverability can't be solved to a certain extent. As a gamer, I have a limited amount of time to devote to reading about games, or discussing them with my friends. As the owner of a gaming website, I can only push so many games to my user base.
For example, let's say I own an indie gaming site, and my average user reads 2 reviews a week. 100 games are released each year. I can easily talk about them all on my site, and my users can consume that information and make informed choices. Now, if 1,000 games are released, we have a problem. My users only have time to read 100 reviews, and I can only display so many reviews on my homepage. Which ones do I choose? I pick the best 100 games to write about.
Everyone does this, Steam features games on their store, PCGamer has a limited amount of screen space above the fold, as does RockPaperShotgun. Only so many games hit the Reddit homepage, or get voted up on HN. Which games? The same 100 out of the 1,000 I mentioned earlier. 10% of the games, getting 100% of the media attention.
This isn't a problem you can solve. If I ask my friends what indie game I should buy this month, They'll recommend 2 or 3. It'll be the best ones. It doesn't matter if there are 10 games released, or 10,000 games released, I get 2 or 3 recommendations.
See the issue here? I have a limited amount of time, it doesn't scale up with the number of games released.
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There's a reason image hosting sites are everywhere, but no one is hosting video. It's just too expensive, and you can't make a return.
If we had some kind of peer-to-peer, decentralized video sharing platform, so we could share videos without region restrictions, and without worrying about paying for bandwidth or storage, we might be on to something. Something like torrents, but I'd need to be able to post a link here, and you could click it, and stream the video in your browser from other users.