laterstars blog

Public Profiles and Top Links Now Live

One of the main things I wanted to do with laterstars from the very beginning was use it as a way of finding interesting links that I’d never come across on my own. Ever since the site started I’ve gone through and browsed peoples’ profiles from time to time and consistently came across some really cool stuff that people had faved from within their Twitter streams. There’s no way I’d ever come across most of these links since following more than the 250 or so people I already do on Twitter would just be way too much to deal with. Randomly seeing what some other people have chosen for themselves usually comes up with high quality links with much less filtering on my part… lots of interesting articles ranging from css techniques to interesting new startups to funny images and videos. The fact that the laterstars community has been pretty self selecting and is mostly comprised of people similar to myself (designers, web developers, music lovers, etc) doesn’t hurt either. So, I’ve been copying tons of links over to my account to read later (‘c’ keyboard shortcut or the ‘copy to your account’ link from the gear button).

laterstars top links

I always knew that once there were enough people using the service, and I had the time to work on it, that it would be pretty interesting to see what everyone was faving at that time. So, after some experimentation, an early version of the top laterstars across everyone’s accounts is now live. What it basically does is find all the faves people have made recently and runs it through a relatively simple algorithm to figure out what the hottest things are at that moment in time and presents it in a tumblelog style format. Even though it’s pretty basic, it floats some pretty cool stuff to the top that really reflects what the community is interested in at that moment. For instance, as I write this post, the list has a life hack about becoming an early riser, a link to the new Sharpie Liquid Pencil, an article about Riak and Clojure, an interview with @badbanana, a tutorial on making kickass CSS3 buttons, and tons more. By the time this is posted it’ll be a totally different set of links. If you see anything that looks interesting, just click the star icon and it’ll get faved and copied to your account. It’ll also give that link some more reason for staying in the top 20 and maybe even move it up the ranks.

If you’re not logged in and you go to laterstars.com, you’ll be shown the top links page by default so you can see what type of stuff people are faving to get an idea of what laterstars is all about. If you are logged in, however, you’ll still be taken to your inbox by default so you can start going through all your links just like normal. Either way, you can always get to the top links with the new top links button in the top nav bar.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that this is all still super new, so there will be some rough spots… some duplicate articles make it through, some summary paragraphs are too short/too long/too nonsensical, and the ranking algorithm will be continuously tweaked… but for the most part things are working pretty well. Give it a try, copy some stuff over, and let us know what you think!

Public Profiles Now Public

As I posted about before, the plan has been to begin opening up the beta to the public, starting with making everyone’s links available for public browsing. A while back we introduced privacy options so you could make your links visible only to yourself if you don’t want people to see what you’ve been faving, and brought over your protected account status from Twitter when you joined. Now, the beta locks are starting to be lifted and everyone who isn’t set to private (either by doing it manually in account > settings or having a private twitter account) can now have their links seen by the world. So start posting links to your pages to show everyone all the cool stuff you’re finding, and browse everyone else’s links to see what they’re finding!

Invite Your Friends

Now that things are a lot more public, we’re not going to be having people sign up and then sending out DM invites later… instead we’re giving everyone some more invites to give out to their friends, starting with 5 right now, and we’ll be refreshing them regularly. Like I mentioned earlier, the reason the top links are so interesting is that the laterstars community is really good at finding cool stuff on twitter (or using the bookmarklets). If you all keep inviting other interesting people, it’ll only get better.

If you have don’t have an invite-activated account, you can still copy links over from the top links or anyone else’s page and build up a nice collection of links. But, the true magic of laterstars lies in being able to fave tweets from any device wherever you are and have them automatically imported, so if you need an invite just ask twitter for one!

@takeo