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@allotrop
For all the movie fans out there
We have two new things for everyone who loves movies. You can now see all (English and Hindi only for now) movies playing in India as well as the movies coming to our theaters in the near future.
You can see trailers, cast and other important information in an easy to browse format.
Check our Movies in Theaters page or our Upcoming Movies Page for more.
Some major changes
Allotrop has now been up for more than 13 months and has failed to build traction of any sort in this time period. I did take some time off in the middle to do some consulting work, but for the amount of time and effort I have put it in this startup, the progress has been very disappointing.
The biggest hurdle has been in attracting a critical mass of contributors who could seed the site with enough data to make it appealing to a new visitor. There are some honest questions about why someone should use this product which I have not been able to answer well enough.
I spent too much time thinking about engineering issues and too little on design and reaching out to potential early adopters. Everyone interested in programming has some things that he wants to try. I wish I knew earlier that this was not the right place to go deep on those interests. I should have never forgotten that all the coding is only a means to an end of building a product which people love and turning it in to a successful business. I got too deeply involved with the route to take and lost track of my destination.
I still believe that the problem of finding a good recommendation for most things is as relevant today as it was an year back. The other day, I was looking for a dentist in Mumbai for my father. There are a lot of listings of dentists but none with reviews I could trust.
The larger goal of helping people find better things remains the same, but the methods to do so will be very different from what I have tried till now. I am utterly thankful to those who have tried Allotrop till now, and hope they will like what they see on it in the coming days and weeks.
If you have read till here, I would love to know who you are and what you think of this. Please leave a comment below or send me an email at [email protected]
Rolling out Collections
The directory vs search argument was long settled when Google triumphed over Yahoo 15 years back. Search is wonderful and is magical as a navigational tool.
But, search is not a lone warrior. It needs help in many places. A good example of this is on the desktop. Search on desktop has been bad (the default Windows and Ubuntu search, OS X seems much better). Google Desktop Search promised a lot, but died midway. So, we kept making folders even 15 years after search went mainstream. Folders give us more control, and familiarity with the interface. And, we love things which play well with our folders. Hi, Dropbox !
But, I must be insane to take cues from desktop since we are in the post-PC era. Searching for an app works pretty well on iOS/Android. Still, people keep making folders.
Photo by Nick Paden from http://branch.com/b/what-s-on-your-iphone-home-screen#AvdGFottp4g
Collections are making a comeback on the web too. From Google+ (which allows you to send your post to collections of people) to Pinterest to Amazon, they are everywhere. It is their ubiquitousness that pushed me from not adding them to Allotrop.
I believed that the semantic model of linking nodes together is better and more usable. But, in hindsight, it proved to be very difficult to make a good UX for linking nodes together without making it too much extra work for the user. I also realised that collections are the easiest way for users to provide additional context to their posts.
And so, collections are now a core part of Allotrop. Every user gets started with two default collections - Things I Use and Life is Random. The first is for all the things you use to get stuff done while the latter is for all the random things you find interesting.
This is an early release and a lot of additional features like following a collection, and moving a post from one collection to another will be available soon. You will be then able to move your existing posts from the Life is Random collection where they reside now.
The vision of helping people explore the most interesting and useful information using linked data is still at the core of Allotrop. Collections are another way of helping people achieve this.
Search
A large reason I started Allotrop is because I believe that existing networks are bottomless pits in terms of sucking information. Most of them expose only the recent most activity to their users. This is valuable and entertaining but a lot of great information in the data we put on these networks is then lost.
Today, I have taken the first step in allowing our users to get more value out of Allotrop by adding search.
This search bar will show you everything from nodes, categories, users and posts. Selecting any autocomplete entry will directly take you to its page.
You can press enter to see all results for your search query. You can also filter the results for any specific thing that you are looking for.
I am eager to know how you find it.
Say hello to categories
Nodes on Allotrop can now have multiple categories. These could be assigned when you add a new node to Allotrop. You can select a category from the existing categories or create a new category from the same field.
These categories will be visible at the bottom of your post.
If you want to add or remove a category from a node, just click the edit button in the node category section.
HTTPS Everywhere
Hey folks, just wanted to let you know that I have added HTTPS everywhere in the site. Now when you visit Allotrop, you will be automatically redirected to the https version.
A new way to use Allotrop - the Add to Allotrop Bookmarklet
Adding a link to Allotrop took a fair number of steps - you had to open the site, click on the Add button, copy the link and paste it on Allotrop before you could create a post. Now, all of these have been replaced by a simple click of a button. All you need to to is to grab the Allotrop Bookmarklet and place it in your bookmarks bar.
Now, click this button whenever you are on a page which you want to add to your Allotrop. A new popup window will open. Any selected text will be automatically added to the post content. Once you click the Add button, it will show you your post in all its glory.
I made a small video to walk you through installing and using the bookmarklet.
Happy Allotroping !
Better Notifications
tl;dr - Notifications have been completely changed on Allotrop. Rather than simple messages, you now get full fledged notifications on a separate page. This post talks about the technical changes under the hood.
Notifications was one of the earliest code that I wrote for Allotrop back in January this year and also one of the most ugly ones. Since then, Allotrop has gone through iterations and it was time to evolve the notifications code. Some of the assumptions that I remember I had back in January:
Notifications need to be stored only for a short time.
I need to have data formatted in such a manner that I do not need to do much processing while rendering. For example, if 4 users have reposted your post, I was storing the ids of user 1, user 2 ( the last 2 users to add your post) and the number 2 as count-suffix.
I also wanted to show the notifications as a popout on every page when the user clicks on the notification count. Notifications were rendered in a div hidden by default whose content was added to the popout's content on initialization.
Unseen notification were determined by the timestamp of the last seen notification.
I was using a Redis set for each user as the notification queue. Each member of this set pointed to a hash or a sorted set (in case of follow notifications). I was using Sidekiq background workers to update this hash/sorted set. This is directly from the source some time back.
Old Notification screenshot
I was doing so many things wrong. I was maintaining a count of reposts for every post in redis and using that count to generate the notifications. This was a relic of the old linear programming model. As I soon found out the background workers give no assurance that they will execute in the same order that they are called. Since Allotrop never reached significant volume, the effects were negligible. Otherwise, the notifications would have been hugely erratic. The way I was storing data also had to do a lot with how they were supposed to be rendered. Never a good idea.
But, with the relaunch of Allotrop, notifications had to be redone. I had the following objectives in mind this time:
Notifications were now supposed to be stored persistently.
New kind of notifications should not need huge work. I was never able to get comment for a post to go to people who have commented previously. This made sure comment threads never took off.
Notifications should be more full fledged. The user should see the complete post rather than just link to it.
Unseen notifications are now determined by the id of the last seen notification rather than the timestamp of the notification.
I now use a Notification model. This has belongs_to relationships with the user and post model. There is a category field which contains the type of notification and a hstore for everything else. The current notification model:
I would love to get any suggestions on how I can further improve this code. Enjoy your notifications.
Photo: Physical Notifications - Flickr/johanl
All of Allotrop & easy sharing to Twitter and Facebook
A couple of new things are available from today. An option to see all posts on Allotrop at http://www.allotrop.com/all This shows you all post on your Allotrop unlike your home feed which only shows posts from people you follow. You will find a link to this page in the dropdown you see on clicking your name.
Another addition was easy sharing options for Twitter and Facebook. Clicking on the share icon will bring out these two options. You do not need to login for these to work.
Hope you folks like this change.
Tweet away your Allotrop posts
No one likes doing the same thing twice. And you won't have to tweet the posts you add to your Allotrop separately. Just connect your Twitter account and you can share the posts you add on Twitter.
When you login, you will get a friendly reminder to connect your Twitter account or you can always do so in settings.
Also, I have added Twitter card support for most of the links on Allotrop. Some photos for how this works.
Click on the Sign in with Twitter button
Authenticate Allotrop on Twitter
Share on Twitter button while adding a post
The link will show up on Twitter with a card
Add posts on mobile
In this new version, I have taken care that the complete site is usable on mobile. Though there are still a few width issues, the flow to add a post is pretty simple. Few screenshots to walk you through.
The landing page
Tap the menu button to login. You will find yourself on your home feed.
The Feed
Tap the add button in the top menu and you will find yourself on the add page.
Add Page
I entered this great video about a small bike store in Bangalore. Tap the next button and enter an optional class and comment.
Create Post
Tap the Add button and you can see your latest post in all its glory. Any image or video available on the link is automatically retrieved and added to your post.
Post Page
Give this a shot. Take out your phone and visit allotrop.com
If you have any feedback, leave a comment below or send me a mail at [email protected]
Allotrop 0.2
I am launching the next version of Allotrop today. Allotrop has evolved from being a place to review things to a place where you can collect your favourite things. The freedom of choosing what to collect is still yours - I have articles, movies and Github repos among other things on my Allotrop now.
A good idea to start using Allotrop is to collect the things that you use to get your stuff done. That would include Coffeescript, Rails and Bootstrap for me. You can also add stuff that you find interesting and which you would like to explore later. I am eager to see the different things people collect on Allotrop.
Unlike the first version, this is now usable on mobile though there are still some rough edges. Adding a new post is simple now. You can just paste a URL or type in the name of a node and you are good to go.
Building Allotrop has been a long journey on the struggle bus. Collecting metadata for the things that people share proved much more difficult than I had anticipated. I allowed the engineer in me to get stuck in understanding and collecting structured data. Rookie solo-founder mistake.
But, I have learnt from my mistakes and will iterate rapidly on this version. I plan to bring multiple new features in the next few weeks.
Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of Wordpress, said: "Usage is like oxygen for ideas." Goto Allotrop and hit the signup button. I am waiting for some oxygen.
Photo: Flickr/stevendepolo
Pretty emails
I hate tables. I didn't like them back in school when I took my first baby steps of HTML. When the Head First HTML and CSS book - the first I was reading 3 years back to get a grip on these two topics - said that using tables is a major blunder, I was convinced of their evilness.
Imagine my surprise when I learnt that building beautiful emails needs tables, lots of them, nested inside one another.
Lately doing a lot of tables for email layouts and want to thank all those who worked on CSS and got us rid of this<table> monster.
— Rohit Mishra (@movingahead) April 30, 2013
I read a lot of my emails on my phone, and wanted the mails from Allotrop to be readable without horizontal scroll. I hate horizontal scroll, almost everywhere. I found the Zurb Responsive Email Template. Building on them and iterating over a few steps, I have been able to improve emails to a level where they look decent in my opinion.
This is how they look on GMail now.
And this is how the same mail looks on GMail Android app :
I would love to hear how you think I can improve this. If you have done responsive emails, lets discuss what techniques you used. Mail me at rohit [at] allotrop.com
Also, if you are on Allotrop, you can control what emails you receive by going to Settings -> Email Notifications
If you have not received an invite, comment here with the first thing you would recommend on Allotrop, and I will send you an invite ASAP. Deal :)
Hey, many of you have asked about how nodes get classified. I was doing them manually. Now onwards, you can now classify the nodes on Allotrop too.
To get started, click on the edit button next to the node name. You can select from one of those existing classes or create a new one.
We will use these classes to better understand and represent the nodes that you share.
Hope you find this addition useful. Let me know what you think of this in comments here or mail me at [email protected].
Shoot down the stars
While building the first prototype of Allotrop, one of the things I thought a lot about, was how the user quantifies her experience with the object she is sharing. The first obvious answer was stars - the most popular method of rating these days. You see one version or another of this all over. But, in the back of my head, I was thinking about this graph of ratings on Youtube.
Users rated at the extremes and most of the videos were rated 5 stars and few were rated 1 star.
Youtube concluded: "Seems like when it comes to ratings it's pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference. Thus, the rating system is primarily being used as a seal of approval and not as an editorial indicator of what the community thinks about a video. Rating a video joins favoriting and sharing as a way to tell the world that this is something you love." I wasn't sure what to do. I did not want to ignore the failings of the star rating system. I also had a lot of personal frustration with the way products were sorted by average stars, of which I saw a lot on Amazon. I always read the reviews, for me those stars did not mean much. I found this wonderful XKCD comic which aptly presents the issue.
I started reading more on how the star rating system became so popular. This Wall Street Journal piece on movie rating systems said: "The first appearance may have been on July 31, 1928, in the New York Daily News, which several critics and film historians remember as the pioneer in the field of quantifying movies' merits. The one-star review of "The Port of Missing Girls" launched the star system, which the newspaper promised would be "a permanent thing." Three stars meant "excellent," two "good," and one star meant "mediocre." And no stars at all "means the picture's right bad," the News's Irene Thirer wrote." Today that system has expanded to incorporate a maximum of 4 stars (Ebert), 5 stars (Hotels, Amazon, Yelp), 6 and 7 stars (used by some hotels), 10 stars (IMDB) or 30 points (Zagat). As you move from one place to another, you have to make an adjustment in how your brain sees these stars and numbers. As expected this leads to confusion among the users. The way we use these star systems differ not only from person to person but also day to day for the same person. Devavrat Shah, a professor at MIT’s Laboratory of Information and Decisions Systems, who has done a lot of research on improving recommendation systems summarizes this beautifully “If my mood is bad today, I might give four stars, but tomorrow I’d give five stars. But if you ask me to compare two movies, most likely I will remain true to that for a while,” Shah says in an article published this week on MIT’s news site. “Your three stars might be my five stars, or vice versa. For that reason, I strongly believe that comparison is the right way to capture this.” With Allotrop, the aim is to get more people to recommend, a lot of whom only do this offline. So, it is important to have a dead simple method of recommendation. It was clear that star ratings is being needlessly perpetuated in the future across various categories without taking its flaws into account. Even people like Roger Ebert, who have been writing reviews for decades are not happy with it. "Mr. Ebert himself is no fan of the star system. "I don't know where the stars come from, but they're absurd," he says. "Often, people will cite my stars who obviously have not read my review." The remaining options were a like/dislike binary system which is used on Youtube and Pandora or a single only positive recommendation system ( Stamped ). I believe that it is important to have negative recommendations. Helping people avoid bad things is the first step in helping them find great things. Despite its appeal of cleanliness, the only positive recommendation option wasn't viable. The next debate was whether there should be an option to convey neutrality or mixed opinions about anything users share. This was a hard one. I fell back to how we interact offline. 'The neutral/I am not sure' sentiment is often used there. Choosing how to present the avoid/neutral/recommend options to user was the next step. This is where I was struck by the traffic lights analogy. The red/yellow/green lights are a global standard, which most people intuitively understand.
All you need to do now is to make one of these buttons (lights) glow to indicate your choice. This is the story behind these Allotrop colors.
This is only the start. As Allotrop evolves and this system gets tested in the wild, there may be a lot of improvements to this system. Till then, play with the lights.
Let us know in the comments what you think of this system, and if you have any suggestions to improve this.
See Notifications and who liked and reposted your posts
I love reading Hacker News, and if there is one thing I could add to it, it will be notifications. Without them, keeping track of who is interacting with your posts, is a big pain.
I don't want users to go through the same, so here is the first release of notifications.
This is how they look
I hope you enjoy it.
There are some known issues with notifications and I am working on fixing them.
One of the other things that wasn't available in the initial release was who liked or reposted your posts. It only showed the count. Almost everyone found this bug. Thank you alert users !
This has been fixed and should be working for you.
Please let me know if you find any issues with these features.
My apologies if you had registered and haven't received your invite till now. You should get one real soon.
If you haven't registered for an invite, you can do that on www.allotrop.com
Also, all users can invite 10 of their friends, so look out for someone already using it. If you have any questions or feedback, please send a mail to me at [email protected] or catch us on Facebook or Twitter.
Welcome to Allotrop
Hi ! I am Rohit Mishra, founder of Allotrop. To explain what Allotrop is, and why I am building it, I will start with an anecdote.
When I joined high school, I was struck by the Google Reader virus. I enthusiastically added tons of RSS feeds, curated them in various categories and spent hours reading posts. It was the first web product where I spent hours. I owe a lot of my limited understanding to GReader.
But, as Twitter gained popularity, I felt that I was missing out on a lot more interesting content. While I was going through good, carefully selected feeds, the best links out there were on Twitter. So, I switched and have enjoyed the wonderful world of 140 characters ever since.
Lets now shift to the other big partner of our internet life - Google. Google has done some crazy great stuff over the past many years but, search has lagged behind. The competition from Bing has pushed it to a better design, but the core beneath is the same.
There is this huge gap on the web - where we share information increasingly in the closed walls of Facebook and Twitter, but when we need to look for something specific, we head to Google.
Some people are recognizing this gap and switching to use social networks to look for information.
I believe this can be made better. In the present situation, you need to follow the right person, be online at the right time, have a huge number of followers of diverse interests and a memory capable of recalling all the recommendations you see. That requirement list is too long.
This is what I want to solve with Allotrop. To start with, it allows you to share your recommendations and discover those made by others. Each recommendation has a node - which is like an intelligent tag and a light to represent whether its positive, negative or neutral.
We are looking forward to seeing what you put on your Allotrop. Signup to get an invitation for our beta here or ask someone who already has access for an invitation.
We are all ears for your feedback at [email protected] If you are interested in building web and mobile products, do get in touch with me.
A huge thanks to the beta testers who are using the app and have given me some tough love that every product needs in its creation.