Thank you for hunting us, @jason! The props mean a lot coming from somebody who’s reported and curated (and made!) as much news as you have.
Being (tech) news junkies ourselves (we’re an app studio, http://rocketshipapps.com/, by day), we’ve been mulling how to keep tabs on important stories and projects while burning fewer cycles doing so and I think we managed to tune this extension’s algorithm for triggering notifications pretty well in our testing. More importantly, though, what do you all think?!
Edit: You don’t have to wait the two hours and change between notifications after you’ve installed Top to start sampling the notifications. We’ve also been piping Top’s notifications into Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/topnoti..., and Twitter, https://twitter.com/topnotifier, where you can sample a couple week’s worth of historical notifications in one fell swoop.
@rememberlenny Before you edited your comment, you’d written “RocketShip” instead of “Rocketship”. My reply was a joke about capitalization (a rich source of material for many comedians).
@jason : how do you think that this compares to your Launch Ticker ( https://www.launchticker.com/ ) project?
from what I can see, people like me, who don't like constant interruptions (e.g. I turn off email notifications on my phone) would be better suited with using Launch Ticker, which sends you twice daily summaries of similar content to what is proposed here. Whilst people who want realtime updates of breaking news would be better suited using this. - Is that a fair analysis?
@_jacksmith Bingo, I don't need a stream of "alerts" unless its a real alert. Launch Ticker is good for me on the updates (plus the notes from @jason always liven it up). When I need news, I go looking for it,
@oldestlivingboy - what was the inspiration here?
There are many similar products out there at the moment like Panda iOS Lite and FastVoted even LAUNCH Ticker is in this space, as @_jacksmith said.
How do you aim to compete here?
Why did you choose PH, HN and GitHub as the three sources to start off with? Will there be additional sources soon and will users be able to filter which sources they see. E.G. I follow Hacker News on Twitter and see stuff posted from there (and rarely click them), so I wouldn't want HN in my feed but perhaps I'd want Designer News or even TechCrunch etc.
Thanks for the questions, @bentossell. I answered a bit of the first in reply to @jason. Our aim is to be able to, personally, consume (most or) all the major tech news that comes out each day with a minimal investment of our time. I think Top has turned out to be high signal, low noise so far compared with other such products, but please judge for yourself!
We began by giving the news sources we check most often as options (but you can prevent any of the default selections, Hacker News included, from triggering notifications by clicking the toolbar button then unselecting the option you want to mute). We definitely have a mind to add more sources based on the feedback we get!
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