While I agree with the premise that being a mindless consumer is probably not a good thing, I strongly believe that consuming is just as important as producing. Exposing one's self to as many different ideas as possible is incredibly important to being able to produce high quality work. If we go with the definition that a person is the aggregate of their experiences, then most of these experiences are things we consume from the external world and other people. Why not try and maximize these experiences?
I personally try and give myself at least an hour a day for just consuming whatever content I'm in the mood for. More times than not, I find use for this information sometime in my life. I think the hardest part is curating this content so it will be the most useful, which I think this post is getting at. Maybe the author doesn't find a benefit to reading their Twitter/Facebook stream which is fine, but this is not a producer vs. consumer problem, it's a signal to noise problem.
Hi all, I am the Co-founder of Portrit. We released our iPhone app a few weeks back and now we are now ready to promote/show the world.
Portrit is a photo sharing service (Web app and iPhone app) with social filtering, think Digg/Reddit meets photo sharing. Portrit let’s you take a photo and nominate it for one of 10 trophies. These trophies mirror common themes such as Fail, LOL, Artsy, Party Animal, etc. Once a photo has been nominated, any Portrit user can vote on it. At the end of the day (12AM every night), the photo with the most votes in each category wins and is transferred to the owner’s trophy room.
We are very aware of how crowded the market is of photo sharing apps, but we think we're fixing a different problem than our competitors. We are fixing photo discovery and photo overload.
Please take a look at our Web app or iPhone app and let us know what you think.
FYI: If you are thinking about trading up from the iPad 1, gazelle.com is offering $320 for the 16GB WiFi version. This price won't stay for long since the iPad 1 16GB WiFi is going for $399 on apple.com. Also you can use the code "TWiT" for 10% more.
Portrit started as a Facebook photo viewer. As my co-founder and I worked, we realized that people have way too many photos and most are not that interesting to look at. We wanted a way to find our friend’s best photos quickly, so we created what we are showing today.
Portrit is all about filtering you and your friend’s photos. This happens through a method of nomination. You look through your friend’s photos and nominate one that you think is above the rest. We have 10 categories that we call “trophies”, including Hot, WTF, LOL, and Fail. Once nominated, the photo goes into the active stream where you can see all you and your friend’s nominations. At this point it’s up to your social graph to determine what photo is the Hottest, funniest, etc. This is done through a simple voting system similar to HN, Digg, or Reddit. At the end of a 24 hour period (11PM PST), whoever has the highest votes in that category wins the trophy and the losers are cleared out for the next day. The trophy is added to the user’s profile so their friends can easily find the best photos.
Quick technical info for those that are inclined:
* Standard backend: Django/Apache/Nginx/Memcached
* frontend is a single page with dynamic views.
* Around 90% of the code base is on the frontend. We love JavaScript!
* Using Node.js for notifications/real-time content updates.
The photo sharing and now video sharing market is still very young. I would not assume that any one of these companies has won. There is still plenty of room for innovation.
I filled out the short application just a few minutes after they had the announcement and received one two days later. I received no conformation but I did receive three phone calls by a member of the Google ChromeOS team. I missed UPS trying to deliver it to me so Google tried to get ahold of me to make sure I get it.
They are definitely trying to get these out and make sure you get it. I have no connections with Google and I am not a member of the press so to receive this level of service was amazing.
I checked and this is the dev version of chrome right? The dev version has JavaScript errors in the Jquery library. I am looking into why this is. Thanks.
The login is it limit the amount of users. This is what the key is for. When we officially launch this will be removed.
I agree that the like icon could use some work. The idea behind showing profile pictures of likes instead of names is one of the main ideas of Portrit. We are trying to limit the amount of text and promote discovery that may not have happened if the name was shown. We will look into making this action more intuitive.
Thanks for the feedback. At the moment there are not many differentiating features compared to Facebook, but I have a bunch planned. There are a lot cool things you can do when you are a intermediary between the user and all their Facebook data.
My guess is the target demographic is younger women or just women in general. Not to sound sexist but in my experience women browse Facebook photos in a much higher degree than males.
This was definitely a conflict I had. I wanted to focus completely on photos but most test users wanted to be able to see their stream and comment/like. This is the most volatile feature in Portrit and will most likely change in the future.
I am using Google analytics to measure trafic as well as events. On the backend I store the email address the user used to create their account, their Facebook ID, favorite friend ID's, and hidden friend ID's. I wanted to be as private with data as possible. 95% of the code runs client side and never talks to the server.
I plan on updating both the privacy policy and the terms of service. I modeled them off of Digg's but I am no lawyer, I am a hacker :).
There is actually optimized versions for iPad and mobile (iPhone and Android).
The photos in the feed do not open larger at this point. Still trying to work the black magic that is the Facebook API. The cursor pointer is some dev code that made it through to production be accident, whoops!
It's been four months of hacking and now I am ready to show the world Portrit. Portrit brings you your Facebook friends in visual experience. Portrit is all about your friends photos and making the Facebook experience cleaner, quicker, and more fun.
Create a account at http://portrit.com/create_account/ Use the key HN. Limited supply!
I started working on Portrit because Facebook's photo service is junk and I wanted something better. Originally this was a personal side project but it has grown into my first startup! This is just a limited preview launch with official public beta coming soon.
If you don't have a Facebook account or just don't trust me with you data :), check out this blog post showing all the functionality of Portrit. http://blog.portrit.com/what-is-portrit
*edit - I just upgrade everyone who made an account to Social. This key was supposed to give everyone this upgrade when you made an account...My Bad. The Social account lets you comment and like post as well as select favorite friends or hide friends.
Use this "rejection" to empower you to build something amazing. I know if I was rejected I would use it as motivation to be great. No one can tell you what you are made of besides yourself.
I got in and I am not not even a active contributer to HN (read everyday, just don't comment or post). Pretty excited to hear PG, Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman, and Mark Zuckerberg. Should be a good time.
First off good job (love that people are using HTML5/CSS3). I checked out an album on my iPad since drag and drop is not supported :(. The transitions were very jerky. If you want to speed this up, switch from regular css3 transforms to transform3d. This is a less know fact that regular transforms are not hardware accelerated (iOS, as well as safari 5, tries to render a box that is hardware accelerated that the transform runs in which creates the jerk/flashing content), whereas translate3d is hardware accelerated for the full page. Mileage may very though since translate3d is very memory heavy.
Sadly this is true. Canvas is still very much in its infancy. I see two main issues with Canvas for games right now.
First, canvas really needs to be hardware accelerated (someone already does this, Microsoft?). Having a few objects move around should barely take any CPU but with Canvas today it can be anywhere from 10%-20%.
Second, their needs to be game engines/abstractions on top of Canvas. Most developers don't want to have to write there own render/clear loop with all the utility functions to do movement, render shapes, texture elements, and keep object state. I know their are a few out there now but they are no where near the quality needed. This second step will not happen until my first point (HW acceleration) is in place.
It's good to see a classic paginator implementation though. I will take a look at the source later. Thanks for sharing.