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leanreviews.com

21 points by udayj 13 years ago · 23 comments

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udayjOP 13 years ago

Hi HN, I am developing LeanReviews with a goal to make it easier to share opinions about anything people care about. People often have lots of opinions about lots of things but dont usually write elaborate reviews. LeanReviews makes sharing quick reviews almost trivial. I had submitted this to HN about a week ago but could not get any response. So I revamped some things and am resubmitting. I hope I get some feedback - any feedback is good feedback. Thanks.

  • sycren 13 years ago

    Hey little bug which confused me a bit.

    The placeholder text for 'your review' contains "Search for review eg. Tom Cruise" which is the same as the actual search field.

    Perhaps you should change the text to 'lively, beautiful etc'

    Theres a D3 word cloud example here - http://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud

    Perhaps you could also change the layout style for the words to make it look more interesting ;)

    Otherwise looking good :D

    • udayjOP 13 years ago

      Hey thanks for the feedback. You are right need to look at the UI. Also, thanks for pointing out the bug. Main issue presently is that I am not getting much feedback. Is this form of review/opinion visualisation something that people want? There is a network effects problem.

      • sycren 13 years ago

        I think that even if it is only something that interests 25% of people, the data is worth a lot more than the service and perhaps you need to find a way of using it.

        Is that something that you're interested in?

        • udayjOP 13 years ago

          I think the user submitted reviews/opinions would be very useful. Since review submission is easy, probably a lot of people might choose to submit their opinions. This would mean that we can asymptotically approach the true crowd opinion about something. This is definitely a hypothesis but the content in such a case would be very useful. Lead generation, brand awareness measurement, quick buy/dont buy decision helper, random content exploration, etc. are some possible uses.

  • mxack 13 years ago

    you can also try separating negative and positive words in the word-cloud. Looks good!

    • udayjOP 13 years ago

      Hey thanks for the suggestion. I was also thinking of doing something along those lines. However, dont have enough content presently. Some kind of sentiment analysis would be useful.

      • ollysb 13 years ago

        Could you use twitter to grab some reviews? You wouldn't need to do it ongoing but it might be a good way to get to a critical mass of reviews.

        • udayjOP 13 years ago

          Thats a great idea. Twitter can be a good source of seed content. Thanks for suggesting.

      • sycren 13 years ago

        What kind of analysis are you doing so far with it?

        • udayjOP 13 years ago

          Not much presently. Its just restricted to the bar chart. Infact that is mostly another form of visualisation of the content. There isnt much content presently for doing sentiment analysis where you could show a goodness meter for something based on the words being submitted as reviews. I am not finding much time to work on new features between collecting seed content, finding users, getting feedback, etc. Of course, that cannot be an excuse for not getting the features done. Infact there are lots of other items in the pipeline that need to be done - eg. spell check, more general search - presently its mostly exact match with some help from autocomplete, social integration, chat, etc.

          • sycren 13 years ago

            I don't really know where you want to go with this project whether its a company or just an interesting side project but I work as a Data Analyst.

            Would you like some help analysing the data further? I think it's an interesting project with potential.

            • udayjOP 13 years ago

              Its mostly a side project as of now, although I do want to turn it into a venture if possible. I couldnt find your email in your profile. Send me an email and lets discuss what we can do. My email is in my profile. I would be glad to collaborate.

  • maniacwhat 13 years ago

    great job, but a favicon would be nice :)

aaronz8 13 years ago

Hey, great idea! I found a couple bugs:

1. There is not much user input validation, if any. For example, I submitted <h1>Broken</h1> to the San Francisco page, and it broke the "Explore Review Frequencies" section.

2. There is no checking for repeating submissions. Using a while loop on "send_review('stuff')" repeated my submission until I refreshed the page. A way to fix this would be to save an array of user ids per topic, but unfortunately that would require user login. Or, you could save an array of ip addresses, though obviously there are easy ways to get around that.

  • aaronz8 13 years ago

    By the way... feel free to delete all the "broken" tags in the San Francisco page...

    • udayjOP 13 years ago

      Hey thanks for letting me know of the bugs. Presently I am not disallowing repeated submissions. Earlier submitting a review required you to be logged in. However, I thought that might put off users who didnt want to go to the hassle of signing up with an account. But yes that is something I need to solve. Also, you are correct - there is not much user input validation. So lots of work that needs to be done.

lf6648 13 years ago

Awesome idea, with a very nice and pure design! Am I the only one experiencing an error 500 while trying to activate my newly-created account?

  • udayjOP 13 years ago

    Thanks for the compliments. There could be a bug. Thanks for letting me know.

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