Ask HN: Our prototype: People real-time news. Would you use it?

3 points

16 years ago

Our application would allow you to follow someone, say Barack Obama, and get all that is being said about him on the net, in real-time (mixing twitter & traditional news outlets). We have NLP algorithms that figure out the 2-3 most important people/organizations in any given article (we track both individuals and organizations such as sports teams and companies). A popular entity -- say Lindsay Lohan or Justin Bieber -- will get dozens of articles matched every day. We are currently tracking around 15,000 people and in addition to articles we also attach useful meta-data using freebase (picture, twitter & facebook account).

Our current vision is a place where you can follow both what people say and what others say about them. There would also be an automatically generated "profile" page for each individual and we are thinking of adding social features such as badges (yeah, I know everybody is doing it :), but for instance you could get badges as you read more news about someone, slowly becoming his or hers uber fan). Such badges could be displayed on the profile badge, rewarding people for being awesome fans. It could also be a place where you interact with the person, post messages, send tweets, rate up or down, etc.

Here's the link to our internal alpha prototype: journal.factyle.com. It's not ready for public consumption! Just to give you an idea!

We also released a few iphone apps to experiment with mobile -- check out our sports app for example: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sports-stalker/id382283655?mt=8.

Do you think it can work as a consumer product? Would you use it? Is it doomed?

Thank you so much!

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