So they took this down, do you know if there is a replacement?

Ideas come to me late at night usually when I am falling asleep or if I have awoken from sleep. This is actually extremely annoying.

I am finding it a bit difficult to properly understand what this app does.

So it uncovers lost connections between the user and other people, where do the stories come into this?

Looks good, have you heard of twitter boostrap? Its a easy to use library to spice up the UI of web apps.

Awesome idea, but the background image (the cityscape) takes about 7 seconds to load for me. Try optimising it down to a smaller filesize?

It is hard for me to read the grey text on the white background, maybe darken it up a little?

I'm redoing the site and this won't be grey anymore.

I don't understand your point here, if bootstrap creates a good design which does the job well why would they be in need of a 'real' design.

Design is an essential element of functionality. I had to click on one small link at the top of the navigation bar to get to the most important information: Users.

Then I had to scroll through a list of people, pulling out various tags and keywords that might have been interesting to me.

I gave up finding what I was looking for, but not before clicking on 'Search' at the top. The search wasn't an autocomplete field, so I typed in something, hoping for the best. 0 results.

A good design, IMO, makes the most important function the most obvious feature. It makes the most complex task the most simple to complete.

For this site, I could have used a sortable and searchable data table that let me both browse, search, and communicate on one page.

Thanks for your feedback! We'll definitely make some changes soon.

>For this site, I could have used a sortable and searchable data table that let me both browse, search, and communicate on one page.

Can you please elaborate on this? Do you mean sort of personalized dashboard?

> I gave up finding what I was looking for

Our plan is that: you say us what are you looking for and we take care of everything else. After we filled in the tags in profile, you can click on "My Recommendations" and we also send you email messages when find something intresting for you.

Sure thing! I like the overall concept a lot.

> Can you please elaborate on this? Do you mean sort of personalized dashboard?

No... I just want a way to filter people quickly by 'wants to learn' and 'wants to teach'. At first, I don't really care about the details of the person except for that info. So a table that can be filtered with some javascript would be great. Especially if you used something like chosen: http://harvesthq.github.io/chosen. That way, I can both see all the options as well as get autocomplete.

The idea is just that I want to know right away whether or not there is someone who I can help, and someone who can help me. Otherwise, it's a waste of time for me to register. It's like a dating site... I'm not going to register if there's no one available, in the hopes that the site will become popular later.

(I am the other creator of this website)

> The idea is just that I want to know right away whether or not there is someone who I can help, and someone who can help me. Ok, this makes it much more clear! We'll definitely improve search experience for unregistered users. Thanks for the link, btw, the lib looks very useful.

> Otherwise, it's a waste of time for me to register. It's like a dating site... Yeah, I do agree that the site would be attractive with more users. However, you can register, type in some tags and receive occasional notifications when someone with the same tags signs up.

I'm very interested to know how the voting ring detector works. I assume you use semi-supervised learning algorithms?

My guess is that it detects natural access to the post by browsing new/top etc. versus direct link access followed by a vote and disconnect plus perhaps some vote distribution detection (i.e. a cluster of direct access votes indicates a ring)

I imagine full disclosure would simply encourage more sophisticated voting rings :P

Maybe you should allow the user to test the product without having to go through the account creation process? You have no idea how tedious it is for me to see yet another account create form.

I disagree. Account creation is very important to building a client book of business. There should be two options: 1) Sign up with Facebook/Google+ or 2) Enter only first name and email address. Other information can be gathered at a later date.

Working on a change now.

Maybe you could display the data as it is loading? So instead of making the user wait to see all the results you could show the user as the server drip feeds the results to the browser. Just a suggestion.

You produce a lot of data but it is hard to make sense of it all, maybe some kind of comparison tool would be useful?

Also I am very curious how you managed to do the whole nearby celebrity address thing?

This actually has a lot of potential, but I am not sure if you could profit by selling this to real estate agents as something like this kind of makes their job obsolete.

Maybe you could target the renters demographic, people who rent generally switch locations more often (therefore more recurrent to your service) and are not as accommodated by real estate agents and other third parties (probably because they are not spending as much so no fat commissions).

I don't know your business model very well but another idea is maybe leaving the service free and placing advertisements. Your user demographic is looking to buy or rent a property - very valuable to advertisers. So maybe you should cache the pages you generate and add them to an automatically generated sitemap allowing google to index those and hopefully you will start appearing on search results for people looking to buy a property. If you want to be really aggressive you could scrape property listings off real estate websites and pre-generate those to be indexed by google with the intention of appearing on search results.

Sorry, I'm rambling here ;)