Ryan Hoover

Belong.io - Twitter-powered link aggregator, favors projects > articles

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Ryan Hoover
This is a new project by @waxpancake that automatically surfaces projects/products shared on Twitter. It might be another good source for Product Hunt-worthy additions. :) How are you distinguishing projects vs. articles, Andy?
Jorik
@rrhoover Nice! A similar site I have bookmarked for a while: http://latest.is/ (also just found Belong.io there ;))
Jorik
@rrhoover HA! Probably the way I found out about that ;)
Andy Baio
@rrhoover Ha, very funny for me to see this here. I made Belong for myself and have used it privately for the last six months or so, and decided to open it up for my friends, which is why it doesn't have any sort of About page (or even a credit). It works by listening to around 1,000 Twitter accounts from interesting people, unshortening and normalizing every link they post, and ordering them based on a combination of popularity, freshness, and URL structure. To answer your question, I can't *really* tell the difference between a project or website launch or a blog post or article, but I use the URL structure as a signal. The fewer parts of the URL path, the higher it ranks. So, for example, producthunt.com would rank higher than, say, http://blog.producthunt.com/post... This doesn't always work, of course... Some blogs/news sites have very short URLs, so I'd have to factor that in at some point. But it's a surprisingly decent signal.
Per Stenius
@rrhoover Yes! It's very very similar to The Latest. We also grab, organize and rank links posted by 1000 "interesting" people. And favor projects before articles. But competition is always good. Game on!
Krish Dholakiya
I think it's pretty cool, although I do think it should have some sort of /about page or at least a brief explanation as to what it's listing.
Andy Baio
@krrishd Duly noted! I really just built it for myself, and released it on a whim. I'll add some info at some point.
Kartik Parija
Very nicely done! @waxpancake