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Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

kabadge.com

11–20 of 31 posts

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#11

i could see this becoming useful if you did ALL the work for the users. get their email & facebook connect, and then scrape their browser history for visited links and find them there.

Or you could operate more like the credit bureaus do for banks by selling your service directly to websites instead of end users. You connect in the back end with all the sites, they send you users information, and then you parse it all into one solidified reputation.

Doing something like this, you could act as a sort of social network background check, as users would not even need to opt-in to your service, they would automatically be signed up when they join the various sites.

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#12
post #4

It's an interesting idea but there are a couple of things you should think through before taking it too much further. I don't think depending on partnerships is necessarily horrible, but what I'm trying to determine is what the benefit for the partner is. In the Stack Overflow example, Stack Overflow has to create the logic of when to award the badge, create the badge asset (e.g. what it looks like), and call your se…

I would agree with some of this - as a potential partner site, I would sign up (and maybe pay?) if you were providing me with a complete reputation system, as this would save me coding my own, ala Steam and XBLA Achievements. Is this in the game plan?

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#14
post #3
post #2

My goal is to create a service that allows users to carry their good reputation from service to service. The idea is to collect the achievements you have earned from many sites and make them accessible via a single API. These badges or achievements could come from many types of sites and service. Some example might be Stackoverflow.com, Plurk.com and Kongregate.com which already award their users achievements. I’m ho…

ok, interesting idea and nice site but where's the business case? i.e., "show me the money!"

At scale, this site/idea could theoretically "own" the reputation market. There's definite value in that.

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#15

Seems like there are still some growing pains with this site. I received a few errors just trying to explore the site. Also, I agree that even though this is a great idea, I think it is going to be difficult being first in this market.

For example: The "About" link on the home page didn't work, so I went to http://www.kabadge.com/about and got an error.

I like your idea though. Keep going.

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#16
My first thought was "Xbox Achievements for the Internet". This may be a good 1-sentence elevator pitch for certain audiences.

Definitely think working with the partner sites to make the end-user experience as transparent as possible is the way to go. Also want to make it very easy for partners to hook in to your system (e.g., simple API calls around their existing login/event logging process).

This may sound silly, but you want better icons/eye candy for your badges. They should be things you want to collect.

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#17
post #2

My goal is to create a service that allows users to carry their good reputation from service to service. The idea is to collect the achievements you have earned from many sites and make them accessible via a single API. These badges or achievements could come from many types of sites and service. Some example might be Stackoverflow.com, Plurk.com and Kongregate.com which already award their users achievements. I’m ho…

Ah, I see now. This strikes me as an idea that people will like, but I just can't see the use case.

Maybe it's because I've never understood the whole "achievement" thing anyway, but I can't come up with a reason to care about them at all. I can't think of a reason to use a system that restricts access only to people with completely arbitrary credentials. I can't think of a reason to implement such a restriction, either.

I can think of a reason NOT to export my application's "badges" to other applications, if any: it would encourage people to create accounts on my system for the sole purpose of gaining these badges. It further encourages behavior designed to obtain badges.

That said, I don't want to be too down on the idea. It's got some potential as an information hub. I would consider losing the "badge"/"achievement" terminology, downplay the "access control" angle, and bill it as a more generic hub for sharing information about what users get done in a given application.

I could see benefit of sharing information about -- say -- how often a user makes posts on user-moderated discussions, as opposed to voting, or that sort of thing. Swapping numbers and ratios instead of boolean data reduces the arbitrariness of the thing. The ability to use them in subtle ways, as opposed to ham-fisted restrictions, would likewise reduce the temptation to create throw-away accounts.

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#18
The main page you've linked to tells me almost nothing about the service you're offering. From the first page I should be able to answer the following questions:

- What's an achievement? What's a badge?

- How do I earn them? If I want to go off and earn something right now how do I do that?

- Why do I care? What's in it for me?

It's difficult to review something when I have no idea what it is.

(Edit: formatting)

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#19

i could see this becoming useful if you did ALL the work for the users. get their email & facebook connect, and then scrape their browser history for visited links and find them there.

Or you could operate more like the credit bureaus do for banks by selling your service directly to websites instead of end users. You connect in the back end with all the sites, they send you users information, and then you parse it all into one solidified reputation. Doing something like this, you could act as a sort of social network background check, as users would not even need to opt-in to your service, they wou…

That's a pretty cool idea. A web-of-trust problem would have to be solved: the various systems that connect to the system would need to trust each other's internal reputation systems. You'd have to prevent people from inflating their total reputation by using a single site with an easy-to-game reputation system. Some interesting challenges in there :)

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#20
post #2

My goal is to create a service that allows users to carry their good reputation from service to service. The idea is to collect the achievements you have earned from many sites and make them accessible via a single API. These badges or achievements could come from many types of sites and service. Some example might be Stackoverflow.com, Plurk.com and Kongregate.com which already award their users achievements. I’m ho…

I would never limit access to a feature on my site based on badges someone has earned on another site. It's like slapping a big sign up that says, "In order to use this site, you also need to sign up for X, Y, Z, ..." It's hard enough to get users to sign up for my stuff, let alone make them sign up for something else. Throwing in additional roadblocks is definitely not the way to go. That's not to say I'd be against…

I'm not exactly sure what legwork you're talking about for the 'consuming' sites. From what I understood of the description, the KaBadge site is the sole repository of badge information, with consuming sites pulling from that data when displaying a user's information (hence the API). As such, consuming sites will simply access that user's full or partial list of badges (possibly sorted by importance, or order of acquisition, or a genre system?).

A consumer might have to do specific badge checks for restricted sites like the WoW forum example (I agree that I would never use this feature myself, but I can see some value in it), but they would clearly know exactly what they were looking for beforehand.

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