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Ask HN: Review my weekend project - MobilePly

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Re: Ask HN: Review my weekend project - MobilePly

#11

Post by corin_ »

Jordanian wrote: post #5
djb_hackernews wrote: post #3

Not to be a total downer but you have a lot of competition in this space. If you plan on building this out so it is widely adoptable you'll need to differentiate yourselves.

Thanks for the feedback! We've seen a few competitors out there that are really big. Glympse ( http://glympse.com/ ) I think is the biggest one and we tested out their app and weren't impressed with their mobile to mobile experience. If one person is on a computer the other on their phone their app is amazing but if you don't have flash all they do is show a picture of a blurry map to show the other person's location…

"Ready to start sharing your where? Get Glympse" made me vomit too much to read on any further.

Re: Ask HN: Review my weekend project - MobilePly

#13

Post by bravo_sierra »

Definitely useful. Love the simplicity of it. Foursquare and Gowalla have too much going on, and it's weird to pull out your Spot at a restaurant.

One enhancement might be to use the location of your friend to get directions to each other.

Charging for something like mobileply.com/matt sounds like a good idea too.

My other thought comes from how Spot does it - they use passwords to make sure you can't get in just by knowing the URL. You could even mix that up so the password you give your mum only lets her know you're in Chicago, while someone else can see you're on 42nd & Grand. Maybe that's too much though.

The simplicity of it is the best part - keep it up.

Re: Ask HN: Review my weekend project - MobilePly

#14

Post by hcarmichel »

corin_ wrote: post #10

Tried it on my BB Bold 9700, asked permission to get my location (and I gave it), then just stuck on "Map Loading..." Should it work for this handset? (UK, in case that matters)

I tried using on my work BB and it wouldn't load the map. Than I remembered that google maps won't work at all in the BB browser. When I try to go to maps.google.com it tells me to download the google maps app for BB.

Re: Ask HN: Review my weekend project - MobilePly

#15

Post by djb_hackernews »

Jordanian wrote: post #5
djb_hackernews wrote: post #3

Not to be a total downer but you have a lot of competition in this space. If you plan on building this out so it is widely adoptable you'll need to differentiate yourselves.

Thanks for the feedback! We've seen a few competitors out there that are really big. Glympse ( http://glympse.com/ ) I think is the biggest one and we tested out their app and weren't impressed with their mobile to mobile experience. If one person is on a computer the other on their phone their app is amazing but if you don't have flash all they do is show a picture of a blurry map to show the other person's location…

google latitude, foursquare, brightkite, pretty much any geolocation based social network.

Re: Ask HN: Review my weekend project - MobilePly

#17

Post by jordanmessina »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #15
Jordanian wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! We've seen a few competitors out there that are really big. Glympse ( http://glympse.com/ ) I think is the biggest one and we tested out their app and weren't impressed with their mobile to mobile experience. If one person is on a computer the other on their phone their app is amazing but if you don't have flash all they do is show a picture of a blurry map to show the other person's location…

google latitude, foursquare, brightkite, pretty much any geolocation based social network.

Looking at this and these competitors there's a few things I like a lot more with this app:

Google Lat - Disgusting barrier to entry, 99% of my friends don't know what it is yet they HAVE to be a friend of mine on the service to see where I am.

Foursquare,Gowalla,Brightkite - Not Realtime tracking, I'm not going to 'check in' every 10 seconds to achieve the same effect. Also these are much more 'stalkerish' while this app is pretty anonymous.

This seems like the opposite of a social network and more of just a utility.

Re: Ask HN: Review my weekend project - MobilePly

#18

Post by djb_hackernews »

Jordanian wrote: post #7
mrduncan wrote: post #4

Please don't use sequential IDs for this. I went to the "Track Me" link and got a tracking id of 54. I was then able to look through plenty of other peoples locations for IDs less than 54. I'd suggest switching to something that's much harder to guess. With that harshness out of the way (sorry :)), it does seem like a pretty cool little app. I could see myself using it for a long road-trip or something so that others…

Good point, we'll switch this soon. The current code base is more for proof of concept purposes. We were also concerned with having easy ids to send others. We'll get on this!

noticed you used python. Check this discussion out on how to do this really simply.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/367586/generating-random-...

Re: Ask HN: Review my weekend project - MobilePly

#20

Post by kliebles »

samratjp wrote: post #19

Well, this is kind of insulting to YC and it's longest running posterchild, Loopt - http://www.loopt.com/ Can't believe no one here mentioned it.

I think what sets this apart from sites like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare is that those sites are oriented towards the social networking aspect of geolocation. Those sites are community based where as this seems more like a nice little utility app for giving someone directions. The real time tracking and simplicity is what makes this unique I think. Not sure where these guys are going to take this but I would urge them to not turn it into a another geo-community to find new "friends" and "places".
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