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Show HN: Alias – Google Alerts for your favorite people

alias.co

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Re: Show HN: Alias – Google Alerts for your favorite people

#2

Post by jonathancai »

Probably like a lot of you on HN, in my downtime, I closely follow people that I think are high-signal in their various domains (science, computers, startups, longevity, philosophy, cryptocurrencies, etc).

Once I find someone, I consume all their content obsessively, reading all their books, tweets, essays, and watch their videos/podcasts.

But I noticed a few problems: 1. A person's content is scattered around the web on multiple platforms. 2. Twitter is too fresh and noisy. It's hard to find someone's most seminal work across the years. 3. It's unusually difficult to be told/notified every time they release something new. People don't always like to self-advertise all their podcast appearances, or panels/interviews they've done.

So we built alias to address these issues - we've indexed all the content on some of the best creators in many fields, for you to subscribe to, which means you get an email whenever they release content.

For info on how this is built - Some of the indexing is done by cron jobs that fetch from RSS feeds, utilizes the Twitter API, and scrapes the web, but also some of it is manual, performed data contractors.

We'd love to hear your feedback and also - whose profile would you like to see on the site next?

Re: Show HN: Alias – Google Alerts for your favorite people

#3

Post by cameronbrown »

Awesome stuff. A couple years ago I built my own bespoke service (which I won't plug here) to do exactly this, but in a generic way. In retrospect, it would've been far more useful to build around this idea of following online creators, rather than letting people figure out the use cases on their own.

Have you thought about expanding this beyond just the people here? There are more casual use cases like following specific creators across Twitter/YT/Patreon are also be valuable imo.

Re: Show HN: Alias – Google Alerts for your favorite people

#4

Post by jonathancai »

cameronbrown wrote: post #3

Awesome stuff. A couple years ago I built my own bespoke service (which I won't plug here) to do exactly this, but in a generic way. In retrospect, it would've been far more useful to build around this idea of following online creators, rather than letting people figure out the use cases on their own. Have you thought about expanding this beyond just the people here? There are more casual use cases like following spe…

We are definitely looking to expand beyond the tech/silicon valley scene. We only started in this space because it's the kind of stuff we read, but we're looking into which spaces make the most sense to scale into, and we index new people every day.

Which areas/use-cases would you be interested in seeing?

Re: Show HN: Alias – Google Alerts for your favorite people

#5

Post by Maubry »

jonathancai wrote: post #4
cameronbrown wrote: post #3

Awesome stuff. A couple years ago I built my own bespoke service (which I won't plug here) to do exactly this, but in a generic way. In retrospect, it would've been far more useful to build around this idea of following online creators, rather than letting people figure out the use cases on their own. Have you thought about expanding this beyond just the people here? There are more casual use cases like following spe…

We are definitely looking to expand beyond the tech/silicon valley scene. We only started in this space because it's the kind of stuff we read, but we're looking into which spaces make the most sense to scale into, and we index new people every day. Which areas/use-cases would you be interested in seeing?

I think fitness and marketing experts could be interesting.

Re: Show HN: Alias – Google Alerts for your favorite people

#9

Post by iMuzz »

thegabez wrote: post #7

Looks awesome and the concept is great.. One comment, the first person I clicked into, ralph-merkle, the most recent content is dated October 1st, 2021 then when clicking the link shows a paper dated from 4th Quarter 2008.

Ah, thanks for the heads up. Our scripts still mess up the dates sometimes. It's harder than you'd think to pull dates from papers.

Just fixed. Thank you!

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