I am taking a break from video of the week this weekend to talk about the work of Kevin Marshall and Nick Grossman on USV.com. After the USV team built and launched USV.com, Nick and Kevin did a rewrite of the core web app and then open sourced it. Since then, they and others have been iterating on the open source code base and they have implemented a bunch of new features which launched yesterday. Many of these features are ones that I have been begging for and ones that members of the AVC community have been asking for. Kevin lays out a list of the big ones in a blog post he wrote this morning.
First of all, we believe we have gotten integration between USV.com's profiles (based on Twitter auth) and Disqus working. If that turns out to be true, then I owe Kevin and Nick a dinner at any restaurant of their choice in NYC. And I will be glad to pay that debt because this has been a nagging issue for the new USV.com since we launched it.
Beyond that, here are a few features I am excited about.
USV.com Tag cloud
This shows the topics that the USV community is talking about most. Since #startups and #startup are the same thing, that would jump to #2, and since #vc and #venturecapital are the same thing, that would jump to #3. A feature request would be to map some frequently used tags together that mean the same thing so that this tag cloud could become even more valuable.
User Profiles:
This shows the tag cloud of what I have been posting about, my posts, and there are tabs to see the posts I have bumped, and some other things. This is the beginning of a reputation system at USV.com. You can see yours by clicking on your twitter handle when you are logged in at the upper right of the main USV.com page.
Showing Bumpers:
I can't figure out how to screencapture this feature, but when you hover over the votes link on a post, you can see everyone who has bumped it. This works pretty much like the same feature on Disqus.
There are a bunch more features that I am happy to have and Kevin outlines all of them in his post. I would like to thank Kevin and Nick for all the work they have been doing on USV.com. It has been getting better and better and this recent push takes it to a new level. If you haven't been there lately, I would suggest you go check it out.
