Note: I had to put the description here because it didn't show below the title.<p>So, this is my second attempt at building something people want. How am I doing? ZoooV is a social news site for niche subjects. Here is why I built it:<p>With the big social news sites: Digg, reddit, and recently after the name change, news.yc, the discussions tend to become more general as the communities grow because we, the readers, have different interests. And because of that, only what's common to everyone goes to the top. Smaller communities have more focus, but it's hard for them to survive because there is less to read, and therefore, we tend to visit them less often and eventually forget about them.<p>I'm trying to solve this by keeping the communities smaller and focused, but allow the individual reader to choose the communities they like and I create a custom page for them where they only see what they're interested in. This way, even though the individual communities might have low volume of stories, the reader will always find something interesting to read in one of his communities or the other. It's like how an RSS reader allows us to keep track of low volume blogs because we don't have to remember to visit each one of them.
Lol. When I landed on the home page, my first thought was "Why did this guy post a link to a site that hasn't launched yet?"<p>I thought it was one of those parking pages chock full of ads. You really might want to change the design a bit...
I like the idea, but don't really like the look. Kind of messy.<p>And the "niches" that I'm seeing are: "Beautiful mind", "Post launch", "Break time", etc. Those aren't niches but uber-vague references to niches.
Congrats!<p>The front page seems a little noisy.. Perhaps the box on the right that explains what the site is about could be colored to draw attention to it?
I'd like to see a service like this designed for easy exploitation of 3rd parties like myself who want to create a social news community for their own organization/website, but don't want to have to run it off their own server (I don't want to have to install and manage one of the digg/reddit clones myself). It could remain 100% public and controlled by ZoooV, and I simply add a snippet of code to make it available on my site with all interactivity enabled (No, I don't want to just include an RSS feed, I want it to feel like my own site's community area).<p>I don't see why the functionality of reddit/digg couldn't be applied to small/medium-sized groups with great success. I don't see anything about this style of interaction that makes it exclusively valuable for catch-all site like reddit.com or digg.com. I think it could/should become a standard feature for all kinds of intranets / blogging platforms / website providers.<p>For example, I might start a community called 'Product Development in China' and integrate it into my website, or my Ning social network, or my FaceBook Group... then if some of my friends (or strangers) like it, they can add it to their websites/blogs as well.. soon enough the ZoooV community is getting a lot of users as a result of exposure on these 3rd party websites...<p>Maybe the feature set I'm looking for is available elsewhere (is it?).
I think it's got potential, but you should work on your design and copy. It wasn't obvious to me at all why I should use it over instead of one of the many popular "social news" sites. For inspiration, take a look at what 37signals does with their products. <p>When you've got a startup that essentially revolves around one improvement on what vast numbers of competitors are already doing, you've got to make it blindingly obvious what I'm gaining by using your app.
I understand that its niche subjects <i>but</i> I wouldn't describe it that way in your tagline. Its doesn't sound very interesting. I also wouldn't say "social news". keep it simple. Say: news about "all" subjects (instead of niche) or "new/fresh links about the topics <i>you</i> want to read about" or something along those lines.
I like your execution: the site just screams quality, and I would surely read it if there was content. But I am not convinced this is <i>different enough</i> from reddit with more categories, or "communities" how they call them. And they (reddit) <i>are</i> adding more.
I like the concept. <p>However the question is, why would people go to this site as a destination instead of a niche site itself. Example: If I wanted to learn about internet marketing news - which isn't covered by digg, reddit etc, i'd go to plugim.com which is focused on that. Why would I go to zooov as a destination site? and then would you be able to build an audience enough for each and every niche. That's the problem with building a site that's wide enough ... <p>good concept though - good luck.
The page looks good, I like the layout, the only thing I would change is the header.<p>About cool the startups sidebar, that would make a great community!<p>What do you think about that?
Not sure it matters <i>too</i> much for sites that have login page that aren't https, but better not to email people their passwords (clear text). It also indicates you're probably storing passwords in the clear, see <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000953.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000953.html</a>
This is pretty cool! Your idea is good, but the implementation needs improvement. Please keep working... if done well I'm pretty sure I would use this!