Show HN: Popcorn Messaging – Anonymously chat with people within 1 mile

Were you guys at the YC startup school? I remember talking with someone about a similar product, although the target market was slightly different...

So, talked with some folks about an idea similar to this a few months ago.

As the conversation evolved, they came up with "tagging" a given chat room to denote what was in it, and letting people choose their own names...some kind of "handle" on the identified "channel".

The proposed messaging fabric would use servers hosted in the cloud, each functioning as sort of a repeater to their client mobile devices.

A sort of internet-relayed chat, if you will.

There is nothing new under the sun.

EDIT:

The location functionality of this could be bodged together really quickly with the geo pg extensions, I'd bet.

Yeah, I wonder how that works actually. If radius A intersects with B and C but B and C don't intersect with each other, do B and C see A chatting to someone who they don't see?

I almost created one of these, except for news. Hyper-local news is largely missing - I was going to mash up Twitter, Instagram, and in-app updates to help people get a sense of what's happening immediately around them.

This is actually a great idea to solve this problem though.

The news use-case is for city life. When you hear a gunshot or a car accident occurs on your street or you see smoke off in the distance or you hear music playing nearby or you see a drove of cop cars driving by - how can you find out more about that?

News doesn't have a hyper local channel, but it could.

This app points at a bigger market - the "directly nearby" market - that really has only been fully tapped by mapping/location-sourcing applications.

JuicyCampus for the mobile age. And this time administrators banning it from campus wi-fi won't do any good, with everyone on 3G and LTE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JuicyCampus