Thread

First of all, no this is not spam 😛 Second, I need your opinion and ideas.

I’m currently working on a project, called Flork. The idea was to make a web application that will let you share several types of information, such as simple hyperlinks or entire blog posts. In short it combines many existing services into one big, but easy to use application. Detailed specifications can be found here : http://www.flork.nl/

Right now Flork can share links, documents and “stories” (blog items), images, code snippets and movies (youtube). Obviously there are many other things you can share, and I’d like to know what you would love to see in the final product.

p.s. For those who wonder, the name Flork comes from the word fork. You use a fork to “pick” up food and consume it, you’ll do the same using Flork. The only difference is that it isn’t food you are consuming, but information. 😉

20 views and no replies, sure there’s somebody with an idea ? :|

Hey,
You said you wanted an idea. Don’t know if mine is the best to give but i will give some feedback on what i think. First of all, allowing customizing always seems like a bad idea, unless its something like virb. Also seems a bit pointless, and unneeded feature. Surely the site is about information and conveying that information, who do you think can style that best, you or 90% of the people using your site. I think the answer is you, If your going to work hard on a design then why let people butcher it, facebook has done pretty well as it is consistent. I don’t know of many people going on facebook and thinking oh if only i could change my background image, mainly its about the content.

Another thing, if your trying to cater for everyone and every bit of information. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? If you have 100 people submitting data, who’s do you show? How do you stop 99% of the data just falling off the page.

Why do you think that having all the information in one place will be a good thing, yes it saves signing up. But surely it will turn into jack of all trades, master of none. I’m not questioning your programming skills but a single site trying to target all kinds of information will generally never be able to put the same time into each type of information as a site designed specifically for it.

Personally if i wanted to share information with “everyone”, post it on a forum, share on a personal blog or a type specific blog. If i wanted to privately share i email it to the person. I can’t personally see where it would fit into my routine. But that’s just my opinion, one person isn’t exactly market research.

The idea of having “friends” confuses me, i thought the idea of the site was to eliminate signing up again for lots of things to have to repeat the same information in multiple places. You will have taken away the need for multiple systems only to provide yet another system for chatting to the people you probably already talk to on something else. Unless it can aggregate your friends somehow, or emails. Having the ability to upload a thing once, set it as private and then batch email a private link to the user to access the file wouldn’t be bad, although it would have to be made easier then attaching the file and sending it in an email with all your contacts already in your computer addressbook and being autofilled. That would take some pretty hard work to beat in simplicity.

Now onto the good news. Please note i’m just giving my opinion so take it how you like. I like the name, seems like a good domain name for this type of site, dunno just had a bit of a social site ring to it. Might be cos its similar to flock, (Reminds me of). The site could work, personally i wouldn’t have the need to use it unless it was really well executed. As in - i’m in awe trying to drag myself away from the screen but im sure lots of other people this would appeal to. Maybe im not getting the big picture of where you are trying to go with the site, which hopefully you can explain more fully. I’m not trying to just be negative and put you down, i try to be realistic in my eyes. If i cant see logic in it i will tend to give my opinion and be brutally honest. Now i have given you so much feedback, i expect a lengthy reply 😛.

You said you wanted an idea. Don’t know if mine is the best to give but i will give some feedback on what i think. First of all, allowing customizing always seems like a bad idea, unless its something like virb. Also seems a bit pointless, and unneeded feature. Surely the site is about information and conveying that information, who do you think can style that best, you or 90% of the people using your site. I think the answer is you, If your going to work hard on a design then why let people butcher it, facebook has done pretty well as it is consistent. I don’t know of many people going on facebook and thinking oh if only i could change my background image, mainly its about the content.

I haven’t read your entire message (scanned id) but let me clarify. I wanted to enable users to customize their page in a limited way, such as the background and perhaps a few colours, that’s it.

The idea of having “friends” confuses me, i thought the idea of the site was to eliminate signing up again for lots of things to have to repeat the same information in multiple places.

The friends system let’s you “follow” other users, you can send them a simple message and receive their updates, that’s it. It’s essentially the same way as Github’s / Twitter’s friend system works.

Thanks for the info, I’ll read through the rest of the message tomorrow 😊