Feedback on a new project - KickPost

If there's one thing it needs right now, it's a one sentence "What is KickPost?" blurb in the top-right somewhere. If I hadn't read the comments here I'd have assumed it was some sort of aggregator and moved on.

Hi<p>KickPost is new tech news aggregator that uses a predictive algorithm based on historically popular stories to predict which stories will be popular in realtime. We are about 20min faster at predicting hot stories than Techmeme.<p>What do you think?

This is way better than what I was working on[1]. Mine is still under development. I wanted to go after more of the top things being searched- i.e. Google Trends, Bing, Yahoo!, all that jazz- and somehow do something with that data. Along the lines I added Youtube popular list, Reddit, and other things.<p>I like it, wish you had an RSS feed. If you are going to want it to stick you are going to need a way for me to either a)share this content with my friends(twitter, facebook), b) let me comment on the stories you are giving me, c)let me bookmark these stories- there are tons of ways but right now I'm just reading. I'll keep checking back to see what you are doing. Great work!<p>[1]christopherwoodall.com/trendy

Please, please, please ditch the "disruptively scroll a huge chunk of page upon reaching the bottom" feature. Even if it does come bundled with the "show more content in a passive manner" feature, it's not worth it.<p>I'll gladly click to load more stories if it means I don't have to bear with the jarring effect of the page moving down a chunk while I scan stuff.<p>It works fine if you use a scrollwheel, but if you drag the scrollbar it is a horrible experience that I would not wish upon my greatest enemies.<p>Especially for content that is repetitive in design, I find dragging the scrollbar to be a more effective way to scan. I assume I'm not alone?

I propose a test. Set up a fake HN account, and use kickpost to submit stories. With a 20 minute head start, you should be the first poster on many stories. Later, you can reveal the account name for our amazement.

Great clean type! Love the non-fussy auto-loading at the bottom of the page too (is there some kind of fade-in happening there?).<p>I don't know if the italicized time of the post at the beginning of each blurb is useful, it feels like cruft when I am looking for information (I just skip over that piece). It also loses meaning lower down in the list (6:45PM 3 days ago? Do I care?)<p>Also: Have you played with de-emphasizing the time box on the left of each post somehow? Like, make it use muted colors unless :hovered?<p>I'd kill for an RSS reader that worked like this, though.

Looks great! I agree that there should be a blurb to the effect of "predicting hotness while it's still lukewarm," or something less lame but more informative. Do you use a form of Poisson regression, by any chance?

I'm interested to see it working during the weekday. This weekend is kind of dull for tech news. :-) Nice job though. I really like the simplicity.<p>I typically refresh the Techmeme page 10-20 times throughout the day. Does the KickPost page automatically pull down new posts, or do I have to refresh to get the latest news? Also, is there a list of blogs that you're pulling from? Thanks!

Great stuff.<p>I would make the headlines stronger than the rest.<p>Also I would play around with sizes. You might be able to squeeze it down a little and get more headlines at any given time.

New items appear in an annoyingly jerky fashion as I scroll down the page (Opera 10.6). Can you add a smooth animation for the same?

Care to share any technical details? Hosting, language, storage... Thks.

Have you considered applying the predictive model on HN submissions? It'll be interesting to compare your predictions against top voted news articles.

totally kicks ass.