When Rinnku.com launched our intention was to bridge the gap between community news and social bookmarking (Digg + Delicious if you will).
In the six weeks since launch we’ve had some success. In particular over 18,000 links have been imported from Delicious.com by users who needed a more modern bookmarking experience.
However feedback from our users has shown we missed the mark. They don’t want or need another community news site.
So after crying in a corner for a while we went back to our users and asked - well what do you want? They told us they wanted a bookmarking service that’s effortless to use - "something that just works".
And that’s what we’re building. We’ve simplified the UI to make finding your links easier and quicker, enabled 1 click saving of links, added more help for new users and committed ourselves to creating the best bookmarking service in the universe.
It looks like a nicely designed homepage that gets your point across well.
I clicked on the "Switch from Delicious?" button expecting to be able to authenticate with delicious and get going straight away. Instead I got a not terribly well presented list of reasons why I might choose to switch. At the very least there should be a clear call to action at the bottom of that list.
For sign-up is the CAPTCHA really necessary? If I understand your service correctly there is relatively little advantage to be gained by signing up multiple spam accounts and the presence of the CAPTCHA will reduce legitimate sign-ups.
It's likely premature optimisation. You may have a problem with bots signing up but I suspect at this stage it is not as large a problem as recruiting users.
You might also want to think about relying a little less on javascript. Try turning it off in your browser and see what you get. For me it was completely unusable and rather ugly.
To start with I emailed TechCrunch. I was 99% sure they'd ignore me (bookmarking isnt sexy I guess) but I had to try right?
After 3 days with no reply I posted "review my site" posts HackerNews/Reddit and asked people at KillerStartUps, Lifehacker, feedmyapp, thenextweb, mashable as well as others to review my site.
I got most hits from thestartupfoundry.com (people linking to my site from my responses to other peoples posts), Reddit (launch post) and feedmyapp.com (site review)
As someone living in a foreign country I have ocassionally dealt with racist behaviour so I'm aware of the pain it can cause.
I have to say that the thought of the name being racist never entered my head - I was just looking for a cool name and though rinnku looked good and would be easy to remember.
I apologize from the bottom of my heart for any pain I have caused.
In the six weeks since launch we’ve had some success. In particular over 18,000 links have been imported from Delicious.com by users who needed a more modern bookmarking experience.
However feedback from our users has shown we missed the mark. They don’t want or need another community news site.
So after crying in a corner for a while we went back to our users and asked - well what do you want? They told us they wanted a bookmarking service that’s effortless to use - "something that just works".
And that’s what we’re building. We’ve simplified the UI to make finding your links easier and quicker, enabled 1 click saving of links, added more help for new users and committed ourselves to creating the best bookmarking service in the universe.
I'd love to hear your comments.