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Beginner's guide

Technical issues

Likehack Tools

Common Issues

Beginner's guide

What is LikeHack?

LikeHack is a productive way to read your social news.

LikeHack:

  • Aggregates content from your Facebook and Twitter feeds, as well as your favorite blogs;
  • Makes all stories and links, - including every link you’ve ever liked, tweeted, e-mailed, or shared, - searchable by link content;
  • Highlights all must-read content for the day, filtering it by using the feeds of the people who like the same links as you.

Think of LikeHack as a:

  • Stumbleupon for your social news;
  • personalized Google Reader for your social feeds;
  • personal content curation service & personal search engine.

Why LikeHack?

  • If you're someone who gets their news from their social feeds, using LikeHack can save you about an hour a days. Just check LikeHack, and you can be sure that you’ve seen all best news content and stories out there. Now when you visit Facebook or Twitter, you can just check your messages or post personal updates, without wasting time scrolling the clutter of your news feed;
  • LikeHack makes all your personal content effortlessly searchable. You can find any link you’ve seen, liked, shared, or e-mailed in one click! No need to bookmarking and organize your personal collection of links; LikeHack does it for you;
  • So, if you want stay in the loop and still be productive, check LikeHack in the morning or evening and get only the most relevant stories in ten minutes instead of spending hours scrolling through junk content.

Bonus feature: to make LikeHack even better, save time with our Chrome extension or e-mail delivery!

Is it easy to use?

Easy as pie! Just connect all your favorite content sources - Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, favorite blogs - to LikeHack, and we'll do the rest for you!

We will extract links from your feeds, aggregate them, index them to make them searchable, explore your likes and interests using your share history, find personal content curators who like the same things as you, then personalize and filter your feed, freeing it from everything that's boring, useless, and unnecessary. That's a lot of work - for us, not for you.

You get to sit back and enjoy reading the top 10-20% of the best stories from your feeds, every day. And you will be always sure that if you want to follow up on one of them, you can find any link through LikeHack.

You can also get your content via e-mail, web app, or Chrome extension. (Mobile app coming soon!)

How does LikeHack work?

Really ****ing well.

After you connect your social network accounts and favorite blogs, LikeHack goes to work:

  1. First it extracts links from your feeds. For example, when it sees a tweet like “WOW! t.co/blabla” it goes to this t’co link, analyzes it, then goes back to the original link and checks whether you shared or saw this content before. If so, it doesn't show you the link again After all, we want to save you time, not spam you with re-tweets and re-posts;
  2. Then it pulls the link's title and description. “WOW!” or "OMG check it out" doesn't really convey much information about the link's content. So, to save you time, LikeHack extracts information about all links to help you decide which ones are worth clicking on. Again, we want to avoid spamming you with useless junk, repeat stories, and other things you won't enjoy;
  3. After that, LikeHack indexes all content behind the link. After all, you might need to find this link later. Maybe the link has info you are going to urgently need in a week's time, and you'll want to find it straight away. That's why we index the content behind links - to make them easier to find. Just one more way for us to save you time and help you avoid - you guessed it - spam, junk content, repeat stories, and other crap you don't need or want.

So, now LikeHack has all this content from your feeds. How does it decide what you will find worth reading?

This is where the magic really starts.

LikeHack doesn't just show you the most popular content. You are not a crowd; you have specific personal interests.

And we want to cater to those interests, not treat you as a nameless faceless consumer.

So, do we use super-clever algorithms to rate content like you would? What? Impossible, you say? Well, yes - it is impossible. Algorithms are not people, after all. We're not going to bullshit you and say that we've invented a way to read your mind. We don’t use algorithms - we use something far more reliable.

So how can LikeHack give you the content you want if it has no gee-whiz algorithm to read your mind? By using real people to curate content for you.

Simply put, LikeHack finds people that have liked same links from same sites as you. When they like something from your feeds, LikeHack interprets that as a signal that you will like it too. It’s math, sure, but it uses human-powered content recommendation.

That's why it works: LikeHack filters and highlights must-read material according to the opinions of real people like yourself.

You can always access all link lists from your feeds, but you don’t need to do it. LikeHack is always up to date, and it always keeps up with your likes and interests. You don’t need to keep telling us what you like; we do all that boring stuff ourselves, to make your life easier.

Why?

Because we care.

(I know, it's tear-jerking.)

How do I get LikeHack?

By signing up, of course. When you do, you will see our welcome page that will let you connect to your accounts and information sources.

First of all, take a couple of seconds to think which social networks you check for updates on a daily basis.

It's probably going to be Facebook, Twitter, and 3-10 other favorites sites and blogs.

Remember the more of your favorite content feeds you connect to LikeHack, the easier it will make your life. Reading these feeds from top to bottom every day eats into your precious time. And think about it: of all the stories you scroll through, how many do you actually read every day? Ten? Fifteen? That means that scrolling through 90% of a newsfeed is basically a waste of time.

Secondly, think about how you usually share content you like. Do you do it via Facebook, Twitter, Gmail? Connect the accounts you use most often to share interesting content - stuff that you will probably want most to be searchable.

Don’t be afraid to connect every account you have. LikeHack will deal with all the information for you. The more you give, the more you'll get.

And that is all. LikeHack will then start the initial analyzing and indexing of all this stuff for you. When it's done, it will notify you.

Which information flows can I curate?

You can add all your incoming information from:

  • Facebook newsfeed;
  • Twitter feed;
  • All Google Reader blogs (you can import all the feeds in one click);
  • Any site or blog that supports RSS.

In addition, you can add services you use to save and share content to make links you like searchable:

  • Facebook timeline (no need, if you’ve connected Facebook earlier);
  • Twitter timeline (no need, if you’ve connected Twitter earlier);
  • Gmail (to save all links you’ve e-mailed to your friends).

How will LikeHack save me time?

As we have said, LikeHack can help you to save about an hour of aimless scrolling a day.

Here are the steps:

  1. Connect all the information sources and feeds you check every day;
  2. Choose your method of delivery for the best stories (web app, e-mail, Chrome extension) through the Settings page;
  3. Start changing your surfing habits. Before going to a blog and wasting twenty minutes there, check LikeHack for updates first. The same goes for Twitter and Facebook. We suggest you do this in the morning and in the evening. You will notice that you’ve already seen the coolest stories linked on LikeHack. With that out of the way, you can use Twitter and Facebook for communication rather than wasting time scrolling through useless content.

And when you find yourself trying to remember where you saw that link you need right now, you can just search for it in LikeHack!

To get fast access to your personal search or to add any link to your Favorites, try our Chrome extension.

Technical issues

Does LikeHack have any limitations?

LikeHack doesn’t aggregate posts or tweets themselves; it aggregates content. For example, if your friend tweets, “That was an awesome party. Has anyone seen my pants?”, LikeHack will not import it, because the tweet is not considered to be useful content.

If you first connect to Twitter, LikeHack will store the last 3,200 of your tweets. This is a Twitter restriction, not one of ours - we simply can't store any links beyond this number.

Talking about your newsfeeds, LikeHack stores all links for last 3 months only. And LikeHack doesn’t import old news, - just the new content.

Any link that you like or share on Facebook will be stored in LikeHack. Please note that we don't use Facebook content like your friend's photos or their status updates - only links to third-party websites.

From your Gmail account, we store only those links which had been pasted into the body of a letter. We do not import service links such as "unsubscribe" or "password reset".

How do I change my notification e-mail?

Go to the Profile menu and find the “Notification e-mail” section. Use it to tell us which e-mail you would prefer for LikeHack notifications.

How to delete my account?

We hope you won't, to be honest. But if you're absolutely set on it, then I guess we can't stop you. (Though we will still be sad to see you go.) Remember: destroying your account means that we will delete all your data. To do this, go to the Profile menu and click on the DELETE ALL link. Deleting your data can take up to 24 hours. If you change your mind, you can stop the process at any time just by logging in.

How fast will a new link from my online accounts appears in LikeHack?

It will take between 1 minute and 1 hour after we finish your first importing and indexing process.

If you do not use LikeHack for a week or more, we will re-start updating your account only after you log in again, to keep our servers from exploding.

Why am I seeing the message "This social account is connected by another user"?

Most likely you have already registered this social network account with a different profile - that is why the system thinks you are a different user. If that is not the case and you do not remember registering that account before with LikeHack under any name, please inform us at contact@likehack.com.

Likehack Tools

How does e-mail delivery of top stories work?

Go to the Settings page, check "Every day delivery", and set up the time when you want to get e-mails with the best stories from your social feeds.

Your everyday summary of top stories will be a list of 10-15 trending stories, recommended by people you trust.

What can I get with the Chrome extension?

Our Chrome extension delivers the best stories right to your browser. It also shows how many new stories are currently in your inbox, makes all your content searchable, and lets you save any opened link to your Favorites with one click.

How do I embed the LikeHack feed into Wordpress?

Simple: just install the LikeHack plug-in for Wordpress, get the access token on the Settings page, and add the LikeHack widget to any part of your site using the Wordpress admin panel.

How do I import Google Reader?

  1. Go to your Google Reader account.
  2. Click Settings - Import/Export tab and export all your data into the archive youremail-takeout.zip.
  3. Then go to your LikeHack account, click Settings, and upload your archive using Google Import Migration feature.
  1. Go to your Google Reader account.
  2. Click Settings - Import/export tab and export all your data into archive youremail-takeout.zip.
  3. Then go to your LikeHack account.
  4. Click Settings and upload your archive using Google Import Migration feature.

We will import not only your feeds but also all links you marked as Favorites in Google Reader.

Common Issues

What about my privacy & security?

LikeHack knows that you care about how your personal information is used and shared, and we take your privacy very seriously. Please read our Privacy Policy to learn more.

What does the future have in store for LikeHack?

Subscribe to our news, follow us, and be the first to know!

Currently we are focused on improving the curation, sharing, and the social components of our service. We have lots of ideas, but we welcome your feedback too. Please check out our Uservoice forum to make suggestions and vote for features you'd like to see.

Our goal is to become a filter for the web that people will use to avoid information overload and get the best experience out of their internet activities.

Is LikeHack free?

Right now, while we are still in beta, yes. However, we are planning to make LikeHack a paid service eventually. Sign up for it while it's still free, and you'll get a ton of perks as well a long period of free use once we start monetizing the app. It will pay to be an early adopter - you guys are the best and most important people to us!

That's nice, but I still have questions

We await your feedback at contact@likehack.com.

The LikeHack Team is always happy to help, and we would love to hear what you like and don't like about our start-up. Please feel free to contact us with any questions!