Show HN: Timeline.com

Wow. Excellent execution of an awesome idea. Seriously, I&#x27;ve always lamented the fact that news is never presented with enough background, and the fact that these articles allow the user to either get an overview or an in-depth history is really exciting. I currently use Yahoo News Digest for quick updates about the day&#x27;s events, but this complements that form of news consumption very nicely and I could see myself using it often.<p>Minor point, the UI is a bit glitchy and sometimes the header bar shakes back and forth. Also, navigation from within stories is unclear - I couldn&#x27;t figure out how to get back to the front page section. I&#x27;m not sure if the functionality isn&#x27;t there or just wasn&#x27;t working, but a swipe left to go back would be much more user friendly.<p>Well done, and congrats on launching!

Wow. Thank you so much for the positive outpour of support, we are near the point of tears of joy with today&#x27;s launch!<p>I&#x27;d like to take a minute and get back to all your questions and comments:<p>* Bugs and glitches: please keep the feedback coming! This is a version 1.0 product, so we&#x27;re standing ready to fix issues ASAP as they come up.<p>* Technology choice: the iOS app is entirely native, written in Swift. The API is written in GO, and the web app is Angular.JS. Very shiny new tech all-around!<p>* Native vs. Web: We have a native iOS app on the AppStore right now, all other platforms can access full functionality via our web app <a href="http://m.timeline.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.timeline.com</a><p>* Maps and geographical exploration: Can&#x27;t say much except &quot;coming soon&quot;. If you have an interest, experience, or actual technology in this area we&#x27;d love to work with you.<p>* Contributing: We&#x27;d love to hear from you, and we&#x27;d love your help. Shoot us an email: beta@timeline.com

I think this is great execution but I&#x27;m not sure I would use it over Wikipedia. If I want to know the timeline of Boko Haram, I think I would get more objective and comprehensive timeline information, with sources, from Wikipedia&#x27;s page on Boko Haram* than the Timeline.com page<i></i>.<p>1 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boko_Haram#2009" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Boko_Haram#2009</a><p>2 <a href="https://m.timeline.com/#!/stories/boko-haram-nigeria-history" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.timeline.com&#x2F;#!&#x2F;stories&#x2F;boko-haram-nigeria-history</a>

That would not have been a cheap domain name to acquire, especially after Facebook rebranding &#x27;the wall&#x27; as &#x27;the timeline&#x27;.

Very, very cool. I&#x27;m skeptical about your chances of success (I feel like news startups are just behind music startups in terms of mortality rate), but I&#x27;ve been wanting something that looks like this for a good long while. I think the lack of this sort of resource has done a grave disservice to our understanding of world events. So, thanks a lot for agreeing with me, and acting on it :)<p>(n.b. I&#x27;m a mobile engineer at NBC News, and arguably in direct competition with these folks.)

I like the thought that has gone into expressing the app&#x27;s motivations. As a curated app, I was interested in learning about the people behind it. Your About, FAQ&#x2F;Editorial and Licenses section under timeline.com&#x2F;about was fun to read. Too bad it was hidden away on the homepage. But, maybe you did this intentionally.<p>I&#x27;m in the process of working on a timeline-like design, non news related, so this piqued my interest.

I like the idea of presenting news with related articles for historical context. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d download an app. But if it were a website, I&#x27;d go there to learn more about a current news topic.

I planned a tool to combine both timeline and map to be a tool for history exploration. With geography layer and time together, history can be shown in a clearer and impressive way. If one set of those by one user can be called a set. When grouping multiple related sets from different users, it must be amazing. It could be a game changer tool for history research and education. Moving those &quot;meta&quot; data to layers we can easily understand is a dream. Hopefully, I&#x27;m able to see it happens soon:)

This is great. Will definitely be my go-to app to kill some time and catch up on things.<p>I noticed an odd sentence structure in an article though. Not sure whether this text was generated, wasn&#x27;t copy-edited or I&#x27;m just not reading it correctly:<p>&gt; Gadhafi&#x27;s compound in Tripoli was connected to a web of secret tunnels. But they did not save him: the tunnels where Gadhafi was captured in a tunnel while trying to escape Sirte, his hometown, in a golf cart.

This is beautiful. It really shows that a lot of thought has been put into it. Have you guys thought about using CartoDB&#x27;s Oddysey.js[0] to integrate maps in your timelines? It seems both projects are very related to each other.<p>(Full disclosure, I&#x27;m a CartoDB employee, although not involved in Oddysey&#x27;s development)<p>[0] <a href="http://cartodb.github.io/odyssey.js/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cartodb.github.io&#x2F;odyssey.js&#x2F;</a>

Why can&#x27;t that be a website ?<p>Why do you have to make console-exclusives ?

I&#x27;ve been dreaming about a site like this for years. Casual newsreaders need context given to them in a friendly way so they can properly engage with the content. Vox.com explainers are one thing but this is even better. Kudos on launching!!

I LOVE anything that will add the needed context to news stories.<p>The article on Boko Haram is good. I like video and income map. The actual timeline functionality on the web view still needs some work. With a good timeline you can &quot;feel&quot; the differences in timespan.<p>Overall, I like the idea and the content. More please!

I think the servers must be getting killed because the mobile web version loads incredibly slowly or not at all.<p>Also @rohamg I think there are some compatibility issues. In Firefox for Android I see only the site logo on a gray background. Chrome for Android loads ... eventually.

Oh, Oh! ... dammit. I&#x27;ve been think about something like this for a while now. Nicely done.

_Absolutely_ love the insight of news being &quot;the short tail of a very long string of events&quot;. Along with the promising execution this could well be one of those tremendously successful ideas that look trivially logical in hindsight.

No IOS device here. Trying to use the &quot;mobile-web&quot; app but all I get is an empty page with your logo then eventually Chrome asks me if I want to kill the page(on my PC) or nothing happening at all on my Moto G.

I don&#x27;t have a mobile device, so I can&#x27;t really tell what&#x27;s going on. Can someone give a brief overview of what this is about? It&#x27;s supposed to be a new way of browsing news, right?

Can I ask, was this at all inspired by reading my blog post that I posted here last year?<p>Looks awesome!<p><a href="http://jamie.st/blog/news-timeline-v2/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamie.st&#x2F;blog&#x2F;news-timeline-v2&#x2F;</a>

Looks like this has been developed using the famo.us framework? I only say this because the parallax effect in the video is very reminiscent of a famo.us demo that was there yesterday but gone today.

With your servers seemingly being hit kind of hard, I&#x27;d recommend a refactor pass to using ng-bind over {{ }} syntax. Seeing unparsed expressions all over the place on your web app.

Very small thing, but there is a space missing after the period in the tagline:<p>&quot;..string of events.Timeline weaves those..&quot;<p>Otherwise looks awesome!

I love the tagline. It&#x27;s short, sweet, and immediately gets the point across. Great job!

The only way to understand what does it do is by watching a video?

Pretty awesome idea. I&#x27;m willing to contribute.

Thats one premium domain...

pretty good domain name

Great idea! Congrats

good idea, congratulations!