Game Plan for the Slides Sites last update: 06/25/2006 09:40 AM

to do list - our top tasks in order of importance

1. Take out the suggested tags section of the tag search box and add a dropdown method of searching along with a typical google type search capability. So three ways to search: by tag by search box and by dropdown.
2. search box - utilizing searching through all fields of all database records for sites that match
3. add new menu structure for some sites - based on the vertical sample on this page http://deluxe-menu.com/floatable-menu-sample.html
4. fix the problem of the sites that are slide show stoppers see http://sportsked.com/stoppers for examples of these web sites that stop the slide show.
5. preload slides so there is no white blank space between slides and perhaps use dissolve fade in and fade out effect . . . right now Blogslides is showing a blank frame for about as long as it's showing the actual blog. I bet somebody who knew more about such things than I do could figure out an ajax-y way to prefetch the blog content -- get one blog ready while the previous one was displaying.
6. There needs to be a mechanism for users to add websites of their own choosing and tag them much like a user would add an entry to http://technorati.com or http://stumbleupon.com ... we would need to suggest tags during this process status: complete except for tagging
7. start slide show running automatically if a user does not click play within 30 seconds after reaching main page
8. adjust the 15 second period that websites are shown faster or slower by means of a slider bar
9. integrate affiliates in to slide shows so they are interspersed in a more random and less apparent manner
10. provide for a floating highlight of the active site in the left menu bar the actively selected site always stays in the middle of the visible url list
11. build fast or slide slider bar to vary the speed of the slides from 5 seconds up to 1 minute
12. provide for export / import of users browser bookmarks and browser history - both IE and Firefox see proof of concept at http://ekstreme.com/dev/yummy/
13. fix banners for all the slides sites - use TagSlides as the default banner
14. build import export bridges to technorati stumbleupon del.icio.us pluck myspace etc. where these users can sign up on our site and run their bookmarks as slide shows ... a great example of a social bookmarking community integration is http://ekstreme.com/socializer/ from which the graphic to the right was drawn.
15. import http://smarking.com/?mode=rss&users=springnet and other bookmark sets using an rss parser
16. use iframes as a cleaner frames interface. This may be our frames alternative.
17. optimize slideshows for Internet Explorer
18. a click on the website itself (to the right) pauses the slideshow and allows shopping.
19. add user preferences page friends page bookmarks page
20. build translator that will load google searches or searches from other search engines amazon searches ebay searches del.icio.us bookmark searches etc. etc. This is a pretty major feature.
21. combine two scrollbars in left sidebar in to one scrollbar
22. Add javascript code to check for 404/bad domains/broken links etc
23. institute backup procedure to cc and datapipe servers - backup mysql database primarily
24. blogslides should display the most recently modified blogs first by reading the date of the most recent blog entry. In a new version of this use rss feeds to just show the most recent blog post. See http://austinbloggers.org for an example of how they display rss content in a list format. see http://www.bloglines.com/newblogs (bloglines newest feeds) Daypop searches the web for the most recent news items (but they're down for the next month).
    linkwatcher - Linkwatcher is a system designed to publicize and monitor weblogs. It visits all the blogs it knows about once every hour updates the search engine and determines whether each blog has changed
    Technorati - new keyword search feature provides you with the most up-to-date search of all of the weblogs that Technorati tracks - over 1616471 at last count
    Trusted Blog Search Tool - a search box that lets readers search the web your site or blogs you read
    Waypath - Contextual navigation of 9874535 posts from 942083 weblogs (as of November 1 2003)
    http://feedster.com searches for blogs by date order
25. provide sort mechanism for slides sort by popularity or alphabetically
26. build admin interface for adding sites deleting sites and editing sites singly or in batches - partially complete need tags
27. front end - investigate best language to drive the slideshow - Flash Java and Javascript. All of these have spyware prevention. AJAX also prevents cross domain communication which the site is aiming to provide
28. make our code proprietary and make our site difficult for others to copy (but easy for us to copy and redeploy on new domains)
29. include a buy button when the slide show displays an affiliate site in the top menu bar next to thumbs up thumbs down
30. We need for TagSlides to be constant in the box above the list of the sites regardless of what site they are on. If they are on Sportslides the big name on the right can be SportSlides but the little name over the search box needs to always be TagSlides.
31. admin interface won't allow addition of tags interface needs to be part of top bar and not a separate screen so admin can modify sites on the fly
32. users can only have one slide show from their thumbs up choices they should have the option of saving multiple slide shows with different names and be able to share these with their friends network
33. friends network similar to that on http://stumbleupon.com
34. build friends page with ability to invite others to join from users current address books in Outlook etc.
35. import web2.0slides.com sites in to main database but keep the original site
36. offer this as a downloadable app with our branding ??? or a hosted solution
37. eliminate the problem of duplicate titles showing several of the same websites in a row. These titles should be interspersed throughout the list of slides not shown all in a row.
38. data scrape all major affiliate aggregators for interstitial urls we can include in our slide shows (capture tags descriptions and urls) this is a 3 stage process
    1. sign up for affiliate programs using our company info and the email we designate ... sign up for the best ones first - cj.com has 62000 affiliate links .. we have 32000 complete
    2.sign up for all programs on all affiliate sites
    3. collect the destination urls (interstitial urls) and save these in our database (4 field) format: url title description tags
39. security - with all it's ramifications - weed out sites with malicious popups
40. determine feasibility and importance of running our own OpenID Server
41. Firefox plugin and IE plug in - later phase see http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Building_an_Extension
42. build a virtual team of programmers designers database engineers system administrators marketing and sales people

................. completed items ...........................

1. organize this list of items in to a more coherent form as a project definition
2. finish top bar with improved thumbs up and thumbs down. status: complete
3. add user registrations - signup and login with retrieve lost password. Use OpenID Server openidtag.com. status: completed
4. www.tagslides.com and www.sportslides.com come up with a branding error and won't run. status: fixed
5. simple command line script to batch disable show stopper slides similar to the import.php script that adds to the database. status: possibly complete

This is the story of an exciting new web venture one that has huge upside potential and promise.  Read on.

Introduction - The slides sites are a family of websites that all grew from http://web2.0slides.com and continues with http://tagslides.com and http://sportslides.com we are expanding on this concept to launch websites in every major subject area that contain all possible tags that describe internet websites.  We are a display engine that shows our own database of 1.5 million plus websites (complete with tags and descriptions) and enables users to display websites they select and run their own slide shows.  It is also intended as a display technology for users of all the major social networking sites including but not limited to delicious stumbleupon technorati pluck myspace google news.google yahoo ebay amazon and others.  We hope to draw vast numbers of users from these social bookmarking and social networking communities as well as the ecommerce and search sites.

We're like the mp3 player that folks can play their bookmarks on that they've slaved away at on sites like del.icio.us and stumbleupon.

The success of web2.0slides has spurred us on because of the rapid rise in traffic unique visitors due solely to blogger attention inclusion on lists like http://listible.com technorati stumbleupon etc.  Within a few days of our stealth launch (no annoucements or promo was done) we were getting over a thousand unique visitors a day and this hasn't slacked off after 3 weeks.

The user experience - When a user arrives at one of our slide sites they see a familiar intuitive easy to understand interface.  They can quickly do a search for a subject or tag (or collection of tags) and play a slideshow which displays the sites that match their tag search.  They can pause the slide show and interact on the active website they can go forward or backward they will be able control the speed of the slide show they will be able to mark sites while the slide show runs with a thumbs up or a thumbs down.  Thumbs up sites get stored in their own bookmark area similar to the bookmark areas delicious.com and stumbleupon.com (we will combine the best elements of both of these sites).  Thumbs down take the sites out of the users personal slide show. Users can import and export to and from all the above mentioned social bookmarking sites and run slides shows based on those sites. 

The most vexing problem is how to select tags.  Should we have a shrink and expand cloud tag?  Should we have an expanding menu list?  This is one of our number one issues.  The process of selecting tags needs to be fast intuitive and comprehensive.  We're working hard on this issue and it's the subject of much debate and concern.  It's our second most important issue only eclipsed by the problem that some sites stop our slide show cold.

There is the main page which displays slides and there is the user page where users choose preferences and where they import and export content to and from their slides site.  There are also help menus and help balloons that help users understand how to use the site.  There should also be a type of "friends list" like StumbleUpon which consists of other users with slide shows so users can share their slideshows with others.  People should be able to find similar slide shows easily and share their slides with others.

The site will feature our own OpenID Server running on our server that stores user ids and passwords and interfaces with the user database.  It allows a common log with our entire family of sites and other sites using this standard.

The Admin Interface allows us to edit the slides quickly and easily.  We can add sites and tags quickly edit existing sites and their tags and export user slides lists in to the main database.

We don't want to get reviews like these!

At first glance it’s hard to tell what’s going on at del.icio.us. The main area “Just posted” lists bookmarks added by other users. Save for indulging a bit of voyeurism there’s little of value here; the list comes across as jumbled and meaningless. Same goes for “most active” a long scattershot list of tags. Surprisingly there’s no way to search bookmarks until after you’ve registered and even then you can search other users’ bookmarks only after you’ve searched your own.

For such a confusing place del.icio.us offers precious little help. Although a few features are explained on the About page even tech-savvy users may have difficulty figuring out various functions. Much as we like the idea of accessing our bookmarks from anywhere we don’t find del.icio.us particularly palatable.

We do want reviews like these!  StumbleUpon may be the closest site to what we're doing and we have a lot to learn from them.  This review from mashable.com

StumbleUpon has 875000 Users!
from the highly recommened micropersuasion blog of Steve Rubel

StumbleUpon which I first mentioned in January has officially launched. The company has relocated from Canada to San Francisco and raised over $1 million in an angel round at the start of the year. They’ve also revealed some impressive stats - the service has 875000 registered users and a third have been active this week. They’re currently profitable through advertising since some of the Stumbled pages are actually interstitial ads. From the site:

StumbleUpon is an intelligent browsing tool for sharing and discovering great websites. As you click Stumble! you’ll get high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended (rated I like it) by friends and other SU members with similar interests. Rating these sites shares them with your friends and peers – you will automatically ’stumble upon’ each others favorites sites.

So the question becomes: how the heck did StumbleUpon gain traction? The only answer I can muster is that it’s just so darned addictive - once you Stumble you just can’t stop. [same with tagslides] What’s more it’s incredibly accessible to the mainstream demographic - while mining the social bookmarking sites for gems takes a lot of work Stumbling takes no effort whatsoever. Just like skimming through YouTube videos is an oddly addictive distraction StumbleUpon does a great job of bypassing conscious thought - it’s the browsing equivalent of channel-hopping.

Blogs We can use rss feeds to present a slide show of world's most recently updated blogs by mashing up data from technorati feedster etc and using their tags and date stampss

Affiliate system - Mixed in with the slides are affiliate target slides these slides provide revenue for the site by passing our affiliate codes to affiliate sites where users make purchases.  We need to incentivize users to click on these sites.  Our main affiliate site is Commission Junction cj.com 

The slides sites serve as an awesome display engine for viewing large numbers of sites without clicking. 

We're building a team - We are looking to build a team to work on the slides sites.  We are looking for developers designers system admins and skilled imaginative people to join our virtual team.  We work together using http://gotomeeting.com the telephone instant messenger and video conferencing.  We are looking for persons who want to make a difference in building a web service with major potential impact on the web community.  We are looking for developers and designers who "get it"; who understand our goals and project of becoming the ultimate website dynamic content display site.  We're the "sizzle" and a huge value add for users of all the major search engines and social networking/bookmarking sites.  Come join us! We even have an "in residence" program for designers and developers in the Austin area and we'll be providing luxury housing for up to 4 designers developers and system admins starting this summer.  We had a group lined up for this program but they backed out so now we're looking for in residence replacements.

5/20/2006 8:36 pm

What are the pluses and minuses of creating the c++ version? How easy/hard will it be to update add features and replicate to other sites? Will I have the ability to easily change variables add/modify text etc. We need something that is editable and easy to change.  If we do go to c++ we need to still keep our current code. It should take about 2 minutes to be able to roll out a new niche site like shoeslides.com for example which is possible with the current code.

What information will you ask for from the user when they sign up and how will this be stored? I assume we'll ask for and store the username email address (and either can be used to login) website (optional) phone (optional) delicious yahoo etc. usernames (optional) city (opt) state (opt) and age (opt). We may want to also offer them the option to submit some tags that describe their interests.

Will users be able to run slide shows of their own from the sites they tag (which is one of the main reasons for the thumbs up tagging)

Is there going to be a separate affiliate database? How will we deal with affiliate banners? Can we have some kind of default background with information on web2.0slides to fill out the page where we display affiliate banners?