Show HN: weekend project, Readstream

You might want to have a demo that doesn't require signing into Twitter. I didn't go any further.

&#62; Watch out, you're about to be addicted.<p>This headline almost made me close the website. Who needs more addiction to time-wasting than we already have?

No matter how nice the landing page, there is probably a sizable number of people who will just close it without either 1) an interactive demo page showing an example user's tweets, or 2) a video demo. Video demos are pretty easy to make with tools like screenr.<p>Without some idea of exactly how it's used and how it will benefit me, I'm at least a little hesitant to sign into it using my Twitter account.

Can I ask you you need permission to update my twitter stream?<p>That put me off trying it.

So, content creators convert their RSS feeds to Twitter feeds and Readstream then converts them back again? Seems pointless. Why not just use the full feed in the first place (if that's what you want, instead of the &#60;140 chars synopsis)?<p>I don't mean to sound cynical, but surely, I must have missed something.

Pro tip: You can navigate through the articles using the arrow keys on your keyboard. Do you guys have any suggestions as to how to make this more clear? (We already say to do so on the loading screen but feel not many people pick up on it)

One comment on UX: After clicking "get started" I'm presented with a way to enter my email and password. It may save people a moment's confusion if you say something like<p>"sign in to twitter: twitter username or email<p>twitter password"<p>Although it's clear what you are doing once you see the URL and if you read carefully- but in that first millisecond I'm thinking you want me to sign into an account for <i>your</i> service (which I don't have).<p>Of course, you could always have the user create an account with you and have the wiring to their twitter account on the backend, but that would require more trust on the user's part.

Although I can't see it as a total replacement for my twitter stream, it definitely is a neat app and I will be using it. However, it would be really cool if you also could parse the links in the articles. For instance, this News Desk piece from the New Yorker (<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/04/to-do-list-winners-and-warnings.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/04/to-do...</a>) has a lot of links and references, but they do not appear in the read stream.

This sounds awesome, but it would be good if I could try it without giving your app unlimited access to my twitter account forever. (much as @ra has pointed out.) Is there scope/resource for a demo version without the API features (i.e. just grabbing my timeline and showing me the links inside your UI, with retweet buttons greyed out)?<p>I appreciate that is a fairly convoluted feature to add in 3 days though - sounds like you guys did a good job anyway! :)

Its nice to see that other teams are currently working to solve the noise vs signal problem by using people to curate content in a more <i>networked</i> way.<p>Also, pardon my curiosity, but is that the idea with which you applied to YC or did you come up with it for the interview ?<p>In any cases, good luck w/ your interview ; there is sure a lot of future in that type of apps!

Interesting project. I agree with the others who say you definitely need some sort of demo to convince users to sign up.<p>Question though: how did you guys get around the copyright issues? It sounds like you're grabbing the content from these links and displaying them in their entirety on your page. Won't the content providers complain about this?

Can you guys consider adding a bug tracker or any place where you can accept feedback (uservoice?).<p>Just wanted to give you folks a heads up about escape characters coming near quotes. <a href="http://i.imgur.com/pKWEK.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/pKWEK.png</a><p>Congrats on the project, love it.

This is great. I had a feeling what it would do from the description and the name and it lived out to that promise. I think its a great start for a "weekend" project and would love to see where it goes and give some product feedback if you are up for it. Will try to contact you directly.

As a techie, I'd be more convinced if I read a few words on how you determine relevancy. You don't need to reveal your secret sauce, but you need to convince me it's good enough so that I don't need to look at Twitter anymore.

Seen this post late, currently receiving a "Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'EpiOAuthException'" with a PHP stack trace, really should hide errors like this from being displayed on the webpage.

Nice work guys.. Consider showing the headlines in reverse order, with the newest ones being at the top and older ones at the bottom so i don't have to scroll to get the latest headlines.

This is really nicely done. Can you tell us how you built it?

Doesn't work for me. Site keeps getting connection resets.

How do you guys sort articles? By date? Popularity?

Good tool to use. I like it