Lookmark Blog

The official blog of Lookmark.
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• 2012-11-13

  The Most Engaging Sites on Hacker News

  Most social news sites like Hacker News measure the popularity of an item by the number of votes it receives. Digg augments their own vote count with social sharing data from Facebook and Twitter.

  A problem these sites face is that votes and shares tend to favor short-form content, because people take the action *after* reading, and most (for many reasons) don’t make it all the way through long articles. Strong headlines also allow for sharing or voting while only skimming the actual article, if it’s read at all.

  At Lookmark we’re interested in measuring engagement (and thus quality) through both active and passive measurements. We capture the fact that you read an article, and we allow for comments and reactions (e.g. like, dislike). But because we live in the browser we’re also able to capture other signals, like how far down the page you scroll and how much time you spend on the page.

  How Lookmark measures engagement

  It turns out that measuring engagement isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. You can’t just measure the number of seconds a tab is open — many people open multiple tabs at once, and return to read them later. Modern work environments are filled with distractions, and we may stop reading in the middle of an engaging article and return the next day.

  Lookmark approximates engagement with text-based content with a timer. When you activate a tab, the timer starts ticking — up to 10 seconds. Each scroll event resets the timer, because if you’re scrolling, you’re probably reading. If you stop scrolling, the timer will hit 10 seconds and add its value to the total time. Multiple visits to the same article are additive — if you read half an article and then come back to read the second half, we do our best to track that. The extension periodically sends your engagement data back to our servers.

  This means that we’re not tracking exactly how long you spend on a page, because doing so would be near-impossible without tracking your eyes (are you actually reading?) and having some insight into your intentions (are you scrolling down because you’re bored?). Across many users and sites, however, our metrics can offer insight into relative engagement.

  The most engaging sites on Hacker News

  To generate these lists, we whittled our data set down to sources that have at least 2 links submitted to HN, and had been visited by at least 5 unique users on Lookmark. This left us with 111 sources and a total of 801 articles, from 37Signals to ZDNet.

  Top 10 sites by total time

  1. TechCrunch (11964 seconds)
  2. New York Times (7681 seconds)
  3. Slate (2477 seconds)
  4. Wired (2385 seconds)
  5. The Next Web (2357 seconds)
  6. Ars Technica (2248 seconds)
  7. The Atlantic (1961 seconds)
  8. Fast Company (1785 seconds)
  9. Daring Fireball (1559 seconds)
  10. Pando Daily (1514 seconds)

  No real surprises here. TechCrunch has the largest number of articles in our data set as well. The more interesting question to ask is, “What sites produce the most consistently engaging content?” And here’s our answer:

  Top 10 sites by average engagement

  1. Worry Dream (Average of 175.2 seconds per visit)
  2. Priceonomics Blog (163.7 seconds/visit)
  3. The New Yorker (155.8 seconds/visit)
  4. Bloomberg (125.6 seconds/visit)
  5. Code of Honor (118.2 seconds/visit)
  6. Jason Shen’s Blog (114 seconds/visit)
  7. Datagenetics Blog (91.2 seconds/visit)
  8. Information Architects (91 seconds/visit)
  9. Fast Company (85 seconds/visit)
  10. Paul Graham (77.8 seconds/visit)

  Caveats

  There are some obvious caveats here. First, the data we’ve collected only come from our active users who have our plugin installed, and their tastes probably don’t align with the overall tastes of the HN community. Second, as described above, we’re approximating engagement through a number of heuristics. Third, we haven’t integrated with all the Flash/HTML5 video players out there, so we’re not properly capturing engagement with non-textual content. Finally, sites like the New York Times that publish a lot of content of varying lengths don’t fare well in a matchup like this — but that’s the nature of the beast. Still, we think the data are interesting.

  Conclusion

  “New Yorker-style content” has become shorthand for the kind of long-form, quality nonfiction writing that is currently in vogue — and for good reason, because the New Yorker is the #1 publication on our list for active engagement. But other bloggers (Bret Victor) and even company blogs (Priceonomics) have managed to consistently create engaging content. If you’re looking for examples of solid long-form writing that appeals to HN readers, the top 10 is a good place to start.

  At Lookmark, we haven’t yet found the secret sauce to mining your engagement data, but we’re working on it. Want to share what you’re reading with your friends, privately and automatically? Try Lookmark now.

  By getting this far, you’ve given us the best upvote we could hope for: reading the entire post. We’d love to hear your feedback and comments.

• 2012-10-16

  October Product Updates

  We’ve been hard at work improving Lookmark and we wanted to share what we’ve been working on with you.

  Here are a few of the new things you’ll find:

  1. Public accounts. You asked for it, now you have it—share your Lookmark profile publicly. Check out a public profile or make your profile public now »
     
     
     
     
  2. Everything Realtime. Most interactions on the site now happen in real-time — new stories, reactions, comments and likes stream in. It’s addictive.
     
     
     
     
  3. Tag your friends.You can now tag a friend in a comment via email, Facebook or Twitter by typing “@” or clicking the “Tag User” button. They’ll get a link to participate in a realtime discussion.
     
     
     
     
  4. Anonymous public feed. Take a look at what people on Lookmark are reading and sharing in realtime. Check it out »
     
     
     
     
  5. New ways to share. You can now share a link by emailing share@lookmark.com, using our new Lookmarklet, or by pasting a link into your main feed. Learn more »

  As always, we appreciate your feedback. Thanks!

• 2012-09-20

  Why we built Lookmark

  When I first joined Facebook, I updated my status and added photos often. It was a place for me and my actual friends to have actual conversations—a welcome change from Myspace, which had been filled with animated GIFs and lots of quote-unquote “friends.”

  Five years later, I barely update my Facebook at all—maybe once or twice a month. When this update from a family member appeared in my News Feed a few months ago, I knew my relationship to Facebook had changed permanently:

  

  Facebook has achieved their goal of building the best social graph on the Web. And that’s why I stopped updating—every single update is shared to 700 current friends, former friends, random people from high school, coworkers and former coworkers, professional contacts, immediate family, not-so-immediate-family, and randoms. Each update now forms a piece of our Timeline, to chronicle all of our life events for posterity.

  I stopped sharing because I don’t want every link I share to be permanently archived and viewed by any of my friends and family, or the HR department for my next job, or my future kids (if Facebook is still relevant by the time they’re old enough to use their iPhone 19).

  This is exactly the problem that startups like Path are trying to solve. Path is meant to be a new, virgin territory — a place for your real friends and family. It’s also the reason that I will never use Facebook Social Reader apps, like the Washington Post app, which automatically share all articles you read to your Timeline. I don’t want to share every article with my 700 friends, and I don’t want to permanently, publicly archive it on my Timeline. And I don’t want to see every article my 700 friends read, either.

  Automatic sharing can be very compelling, though. When Last.fm launched (way back in 2002!) it was one of the first services to take advantage of automatic sharing—by simply installing the AudioScrobbler plugin, you could share everything you played in iTunes, automatically.

  While brainstorming ideas for new apps, I thought: “What about a Last.fm for news, a browser plugin that shares what you read automatically?” I built a prototype of the concept in a few days back in April to test the concept. When I showed it to my cofounders, we all agreed that it was very compelling, even with a total of 3 people using it—so we’ve spent the last few months building and refining the product. We call it Lookmark.

  Lookmark is a Chrome extension* that automatically and privately shares what you’re reading from sites you choose (like the New York Times or links from Hacker News) with the friends you choose. Lookmark solves many of Facebook’s sharing problems because we designed from the ground up it for private sharing with a small group of close friends. It’s become an addictive source of news and conversation over the past few months—and we’re just getting started.

  We’re slowly opening Lookmark to new users.  Interested? The first 50 users who sign up with invite code LOOKMARKBLOG get access to our private beta. Click here to sign up.

  Thanks for reading. We’d love to hear your feedback.

  —Dave Zohrob

  *We’re targeting Chrome right now but will support more browsers in the future. If you don’t use Chrome, sign up for our waiting list and we’ll let you know when we support your browser.

• 2012-06-21

  Friend or Follow?

  Any new social network must decide how people will connect with each other. The three most popular options include friending (e.g. Facebook), following (e.g. Twitter, Pinterest), and sharing (e.g. Google Plus).

  A few weeks ago, we moved Lookmark from friending to following. We reasoned that because some people would want to share everything they read with the world, making them “friend” everyone who wants to see their lookmarks would get messy. For example, on Twitter, Kanye West doesn’t need to follow everyone who follows him; his feed would be literally unreadable. 

  We couldn’t just make everyone’s account public; we still believed that most people would want to keep their activity private. So we borrowed from Twitter’s model of “protected” accounts and made all accounts private by default. 

  Unfortunately, this made finding and following your friends very complex. Let’s say we’re friends in real life (we are, aren’t we?) and you sign up for Lookmark (you will, won’t you?). In our “protected follow” model, here’s how we would follow each other:

  1. You find my profile and click “Request to follow”
  2. I get a notification saying that you want to follow me; I approve your follow
  3. Then I click to request to follow you, and finally,
  4. You get a notification and approve my follow

  That’s a lot of steps for a pretty common use case. With a “friend” model, here’s what happens:

  1. You find my profile and click “Add friend”
  2. I get a notification, and click to approve your friend request

  As of today, we’ve moved back to friending because it simplifies this common interaction. Once we open the site up to more people, we’ll allow a sort of  “half-friendship” for people with lots of friends (the Kanye Wests of Lookmark) so that they don’t have to clutter their feed in order to let people see their lookmarks.

  We learned a lesson here—we need to think through our design choices and optimize for the majority of our users. In other words, we need to be opinionated about how we think people will use Lookmark. We run into design decisions like these often because existing social metaphors and UIs don’t quite fit what we’re doing. Lookmark isn’t Faebook or Twitter or email or Google  Plus, and that’s a Good Thing. 

  We’re happy to hear any feedback you might have on this change or any of the other big changes we make over the next weeks. 

  Thanks for using Lookmark. Really.
  dave
  http://lookmark.it/user/dave