For a community of technology enthusiasts, it’s natural for its members to flock towards sources of news, articles, opinions, and other sorts of writings on the web and to share them to be discussed. One of the most popular sites is Hacker News (HN) which is hosted by Y Combinator. For Indonesians however, there are very few sites that serve this purpose, so Urbanesia’s head of technology, Batista Harahap, decided to build one called GeekTalk.
In his own words, GeekTalk is “a collection of readables for geeks”. The site was done using Telescope, a Hacker News clone built using Meteor, an open source platform that developers can use to build web applications much more quickly and easily.
GeekTalk was built because there are currently few places in which Indonesians can use to discuss news online among ourselves. There are online forums, mailing lists, Facebook pages, Google+ communities, and sites like Lintas or MindTalk (both of which belong to the same group that DailySocial is in), but obviously the experiences are different and there are those who want to have a similar experience to HN, hence GeekTalk.
To share links on GeekTalk, the site asks that you sign in using Twitter or create a GeekTalk account and each shared link will be filed to specific categories. Since this is still very early days, certain categories may not be available just yet.
Shared links at this point does not get automatically posted, but goes into a queue for approval. While this approval process may not scale, it works for the time being to ensure people don’t spam the site with inappropriate links.
GeekTalk is not the first to build a local HN though, a few years ago a startup called Fanesia pivoted from a failed daily deals site to a community news site, designed as a complete clone of Hacker News, except it was red, and HN is orange. Unfortunately it was also short lived. The Fanesia address now redirects to Sidomi News, a general Indonesian news portal.
Seeing the demise of Fanesia gives pause to the thought of GeekTalk’s chances but the current popularity of some Indonesian tech communities on Google+ proves that there is an audience for such a place. The question is whether the audience will flock to GeekTalk.
The site was just launched over the weekend so there’s not much activity going on but Harahap has been furiously adding links to articles for people to discuss as there are roughy 40 articles linked on the site after less than 24 hours. He also said that the are still issues with the site that are being taken care of, so consider this a heads up if you decide to pay a visit or join the site.
The site is obviously aimed at tech geeks and software engineers, which means there is a strong emphasis on articles on computer language and software/web development, but if that’s what you’re looking for, it could be a valuable reference.