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Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

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Re: Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

#41

Post by mickdaisy »

mobileexpert wrote: post #36

Are you using public/legit APIs for all these services? Seems like you might be at risk for TOS violation for at least a couple.

Twitter is legit, otherwise I plead the 5th. I do outsource this risk (and pay for that), so stability shouldn't be an issue unless there's a broad and deep crackdown on everyone who scrapes, which I think is unlikely given recent sentiment around the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559

But it is a risk. Serpapi.com is helping me a lot with that - give them a tinker!

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

#43

Post by mickdaisy »

bromquinn wrote: post #38

This is slick! I could see using this for one of my own projects. How do you get the data? Are you using the official apis or are you 'scraping'?

Twitter results use their official API, otherwise I crackle sounds can't he- crackle what?.. call disconnected

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

#44

Post by mickdaisy »

weinzierl wrote: post #33

Love the pricing model and the UX is nice. Three small things I noticed during sign-up: 1. Please let me sign-up from the pricing page. At least on my phone I couldn't find a direct link or button. 2. The "Save Upgrades" button is annoyingly sticky on my iPhone. 3. Email doesn't autofill. Otherwise registering and adding an alert was smooth. Well done!

Thank you!!! Will address each of these, hopefully by the weekend depending on dayjob demands. Don't hesitate to let me know of any other friction points - I'm aiming for frictionless

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

#45

Post by mickdaisy »

alberth wrote: post #34

It's like https://www.sprinklr.com but 1,000-4,000x cheaper (seriously). Love the homepage. EDIT: Question, I just tried the demo out on some very popular terms (e.g. "google", "Microsoft", etc) - it appears results are only returned for Twitter. If I unselect Twitter, "no results found". Just an FYI in case that's not intended behavior.

Yeah - the onboarding flow (insta-results) only supports Twitter. Other platforms are polled run on a recurring basis and take ~10 minutes to show results, so when you create an alert you'll see stuff from other places. I need to make that clear on the onboarding flow - it's a UX bug. Thanks very much for the feedback and love.

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

#47

Post by mickdaisy »

amelius wrote: post #35
alberth wrote: post #34

It's like https://www.sprinklr.com but 1,000-4,000x cheaper (seriously). Love the homepage. EDIT: Question, I just tried the demo out on some very popular terms (e.g. "google", "Microsoft", etc) - it appears results are only returned for Twitter. If I unselect Twitter, "no results found". Just an FYI in case that's not intended behavior.

And I guess it's also like youtube-dl in the sense that it needs to continuously fight updates and/or banning from the sites it wants to download from.

yeah, it's not as fixed-cost as I'd hoped

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

#48

Post by riku_iki »

mickdaisy wrote: post #43
bromquinn wrote: post #38

This is slick! I could see using this for one of my own projects. How do you get the data? Are you using the official apis or are you 'scraping'?

Twitter results use their official API, otherwise I crackle sounds can't he- crackle what?.. call disconnected

Curious how scalable is this service? When services will start throttling/blocking your calls?..

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

#50

Post by mickdaisy »

riku_iki wrote: post #48
mickdaisy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter results use their official API, otherwise I crackle sounds can't he- crackle what?.. call disconnected

Curious how scalable is this service? When services will start throttling/blocking your calls?..

Everything "legit" scales along with the cost of API access

Everything else scales along with the cost of outsourcing that risk to services located outside of the US (like serpapi.com) who implement lots of proxies and workarounds

I'm not sure if there will be margins, so if it scales, it'll have to be very cost-consciously

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