While I do think the design is very well done, I'm not sure I see the benefit of something like this, vs. Delicious and other social bookmarking things.

Keeping it a gated community is going to make taking off VERY difficult, unless you have some over-sharing, highly prolific people in out of the gate (no pun intended).

While there may be groups that do want to keep their sharing semi-private, are there enough to build a meaningful audience (read: potential advertising revenue stream) for the service, or will you just charge for it (saw no mention of this, but may have missed it).

I do have a few members who share ~5 links per day on the site including myself. In a given day the site receives ~20 new links. Most of this is just now starting to gain momentum as Feb 1st is when the site launched with a new design and a few new features.

The site has close to 100 return visitors daily and building.

Revenue is not a concern at the moment.

>The site has close to 100 return visitors daily and building.

How many of those users actually post content?

Around 5% post new content daily. This number is steadily going up. But the site has only started to gain traction this month. There's a lot of room for improvement, but I feel like it's off to a good start. ;)

I noticed that loading the main page results in requesting 19 css files and 8 js files. I suggest combining those to provide a better loading experience.

Nice job noticing that. This is a high priority on the roadmap. I have some cool compressions and reductions planned for the site's assets.

Hello again :) I kinda like the site but... I'm not really sure what it's for? Is this for sharing my CV, getting a new job, sharing links... where does it fit in between Monster.com and HN/Reddit?

On the front-end optimisation end, that's my "thing" so hit me up if you want to talk about that!

I'd be interested in discussing this more. The quick answer is that it's 1st) a way to share what you're reading 2nd) a way to find others to work with.

The CV aspect is fairly unique to this sort of site, which is why I think it gets so much attention in these discussions. But as you can see it is a smaller aspect to the site compared to posts, questions, and even profiles.

The CV feature is rooted in this desire I had to host my resume, shown in its original formatting, on a clean, uncluttered page with stats showing me how many views it gets, by whom, and from where. I can share it with a simple link to anyone interested in seeing it and actually know with some certainty if they looked at it.

This looks like a crowdsourced curation of content relevant to a particular vertical (have I thrown in enough buzzwords?).

That actually seems like a reasonable idea. The problem you may have is that a site like Stackoverflow could (and IMHO should) copy it and integrate it into what they have. It actually seems like a good extension for the SO model.

That first sentence is amazing. Where did you get your MBA? :)

100% agree with your comments, thanks for making them - let's hope that SO doesn't do link aggregation anytime soon

I launched the site in late Oct of last year and it is growing by leaps and bounds. It's built with Ruby on Rails. My hope is to build a community around sharing links strictly related to development and design. No general tech news links or other distractions. I'd love to get some feedback on it from the HN community.

I recently(ish) starting to work on web design after years in desktop product management. A community like this could be terribly helpful.

Hah, I'm in the exact same boat and had the same initial reaction.

Excellent, be sure to request an invite and I'll make sure you get one.

Done!

How did you overcome the "chicken and egg problem" of getting the first batch of people to join?

I didn't realize how well the invite-only nature of the site would lend itself to attracting an audience. The hope was to merely keep the quality high by making it invite-only, but I have found it's a great incentive to join and to even has a viral edge as people like to give out invites and say they are on Talentopoly in tweets, etc. Also, just being really involved in the site myself everyday making sure that new posts were going up and things other posted were getting commented on. Now that it's starting to take on more of a life of its own I don't have to chime in on everything on the site, though my involvement is still very high throughout the day.

If it's just link aggregation, you can do it yourself. It's difficult, but possible.

When I was doing newslily (which isn't entirely abandoned, but we've moved on to new projects), we pretty consistently had better quality links than reddit or digg, but doing so took a ton of work on the part of my co-founder and I.

I haven't signed up for OP's service, so I can't say with certainty that it's a link aggregator, but that's what it sounds like. If it is, I suspect that OP is spending a lot of their time searching out quality content.

And if this is the case, good on them. They're probably learning a ton in the process.

It's not so much about searching out the content as it is about choosing what to post. It's easy to find links today with Twitter, etc. But it's hard to predict the ones that will be popular. I rely on my Twitter favorites and several other interesting sources for links. I have definitely learned a lot and know of some great, niche ways to find high quality links now.

By the way, if you want to read the public posts you can find them at http://talentopoly.com/posts

I like the design. The functionality reminds me of hackerbuddy.com.

What are your experience with ruby on rails hosted with heroku?

I'll have to check out hackerbuddy.com, hadn't heard of that site before. I've been a big fan of Heroku so far. There's a reason why others are mimicking their hosting strategy. That said, it stinks when there's downtime or the grid slows down for whatever reason. So you are more prone to those sort of outages. But to get started, it's easy and free. I'd highly recommend it.

Thank you to everyone who has checked out the site. I've gotten to have some interesting discussions in this comment thread. The HackerNews community has yet again lived up to my expectations. I'll try to keep the community up to date on the progress of this startup periodically.

Seems like it's forrst.com + resumes.

Forrst is great if you want to see what other designers and developers are working on. Talentopoly is great if you want to see what they're reading.

I think there's room for both as I am a Forrst member and still found myself wanting to build something like Talentopoly.

John -- Forrst is more for sharing actual work, we aim to be sharing what you're reading. We want it to be about the links to the stuff that matter to a developer or designers bottom line: new Google fonts, jquery plug-in, coffee code, etc.etc

For those interested in keeping up with the posts on Talentopoly you can find the RSS feed at http://talentopoly.com/posts/all.rss

That's quite a torrent. How about best-of-hour and best-of-day feeds? Each would get just one new post every interval, which makes for predictable volume in my feedreader.

Good idea. I'll see what I can cook up.

We just had our 700th member sign up! http://talentopoly.com/users/861

Almost forgot to mention the most important aspect, the site is invite-only. It's read-only to the public.

This becomes confusing - it seems at first like a social bookmarking site, but then there's resumes. It's a gated community, but read only to the public.

I'm not sure any of this is BAD, and I may just be stupid, but the 'why the hell should I care' bit seems to be confusing? Is it a job board, or a news/content sharing site? Both?

The idea behind the hosting of resumes is because the goal is to have it be one of the websites you check everyday. And for designers looking for developers, IT professionals looking for designers, and vice versa -- you can qualify potential co-work partners.

Pinterest, Dribbblr, and Quora in the early days were all invite-only and read-only to the public. I don't think it's confusing at all. However, you would benefit from exposing some awesome content on the home page to entice people to request an invite.

Great comment. Currently the site exposes the most popular post at the moment under the section, "What's on Talentopoly" on the landing page.

The next step I planned to take was to expose the Posts tab on the landing page.

Down the road I expect to make the landing page the popular posts page and the Request Invite links would take you to what is now the landing page (the request an invite page).

That's the 3-step process for exposing the posts more and more as I currently have it planned.

I think the simple answer is that it's a community serving the needs of this vertical, which includes things like learning from what others are posting and also finding others to hire and work with. That's where the resumes and profiles come into play.

Not really a job board -- but a easier way for IT pro's to share that aspect. We've had people be contacted because of their talentopoly hosted resume already from some of the big boys -- so that function is getting noticed.

Seems like a really great way to share things your working on and get feed back.

Looks great. Who did the web design, if I may ask?

Thanks! Brian Hoff did the design.