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

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

#111

Post by lsiebert »

drum wrote: post #71
oofabz wrote: post #9

It would be cool if the "radius" automatically scaled to ensure there are not too many or too few people in the chat. This could be accomplished with a Voronoi diagram.

hmm, the 1 mile radius is important to me. psychologically, knowing that the people you're talking to are within walking distance is exciting

I think you are right about wanting to know that people you are talking to you are nearby being important. I also think if you allowed a larger radius option in the form of 10 miles or whatever, you would NEVER be able to remove it without complaints. That said, I'd consider promoting the app in a specific large city.

Alternatively, a neighborhood/borough mode might be an interesting adaption that would let you shrink as you scale. In New York, maybe you only talk to people who are also in Brooklyn. Or just Nearby parts of Brooklyn (mash up with that app that allows you to see how far you can get in a time period). In North Dakota, you might have a much much bigger region.

This would also avoid the issue I have playing a game with a geolocation based chat on android, wherein I am in the Financial district in SF, and see "nearby" people in Oakland, when I would have to cross the bridge/take bart there.

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

#112

Post by renownedmedia »

This reminds me a lot of a webapp I built called Whisper:

http://zyu.me:5000/ https://github.com/tlhunter/whisper

You aren't limited to just one mile though, you can change the loudness, which affects the duration, and it's anonymous.

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

#113

Post by interpol_p »

mangotree wrote: post #59
MProgrammer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's a new app, and actively doing work to support anything older than iOS 7 is a waste of time.

To target a lower iOS can be as simple as selecting from a menu. For most apps, it really is as simple as changing the target to iOS 5.0.

You actually need to test your app on the lower deployment target.

There are quite a few crash bugs that are specific to, say iOS 6.0.1, but work fine in 6.0 and 6.0.2. And there are definite style and layout issues when using UIAppearanceProxy stuff on iOS 6 and iOS 5 (iOS 5 having a larger number of bugs related to this API).

Supporting both iOS 6 and iOS 5 is actually hard work and days, if not weeks of additional testing and bug reports.

Supporting iOS 7 and iOS 6 is much harder, since you have to have two different designs — you'll need separate code paths to style the app nicely on both versions.

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

#114

Post by hrrsn »

SeoxyS wrote: post #62
danudey wrote: post #52

A lot of the people whom I met in Vancouver via Twitter I actually met via an app called Twinkle, which was essentially a wrapper around Twitter that added this sort of geographically-located content, and which was released shortly after the iPhone 3G and iOS 2.0 added location-based functionality (but long before Twitter did). Basically, Twinkle could work on its own or with a Twitter account. When you posted a mess…

Wow… I had no idea people still remembered Twinkle. I was one of the engineers at Tapulous, back in the day, and worked briefly on Twinkle. That service was actually a huge disaster for us. The users were mostly tweens, and we had a huge Chartroulette-esque problem with child porn, where users would expose themselves through the service. Our community management team is probably scarred for life. Our engineers also h…

I definitely remember Twinkle! I used it daily.

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

#115

Post by drum »

nilkn wrote: post #43

I'm curious about how this actually works, geometrically. Example: A B C Those are three people. Imagine each segment is 1 mile long. So A can see B; B can see C; but A can't see C. If B and C are having a conversation, does A see B talking to someone who effectively does not exist?

turns out you're right. anybody have suggestions on how to fix this?

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

#116

Post by drum »

zoba wrote: post #51

In the early 2000s there was a device/toy called the Cybiko ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko ) which offered similar functionality. It was amazing in theory, however, adoption was never very high so it never took off.

yea that thing is ugly as sin

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

#117

Post by tempestn »

crindy wrote: post #107
drum wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry if it sounded hostile, i appreciated the comment! my point was that the integrity of the app relies on a fixed radius. im not opposed to increasing the fixed radius initially while there arent a lot of users. however expanding the radius according to nearby users makes the location aspect less relevant. if the nearest user is 20 miles away than they should probably use another app.

Just wanted to chime in and say I get you, man. "Chat with people within 1 mile" is just a better thing than "Chat with people within a radius adjusted based on how many users are online nearby."

Yep, that's fair enough. And you certainly don't have to make an app that's useful for everyone everywhere. Still, getting it to catch on will be hard enough even if people can find others to chat with, it makes sense to do what you can to help with that. How about keeping the tagline the same, and keeping it at 1 mile as long as there's someone there to chat with. But if not, you could prompt the user: There's no one else online within a mile. Want to look a bit further away? Or something along those lines.

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

#118

Post by wellboy »

That´s very exciting.

Introducing restrictions like Twitter with 140 characters is very powerful.

How to get users apart from PR? Spend $500 of Facebook ads per city, that gives you around 300 users. Done. Prove for one city raise Angel Money and do it for other cities.

You have something really powerful in your hands, however it might take a while until you really find what it is exactly. Take your time to find it. In terms of what features to add, as you read in many blog posts that the most important thing about finding new features is to learn how to say no. Your app needs to do one thing really well and only that one thing.

My gut tells me that there needs to be an upvote mechanism or an ability to communicate with individual users. However, then it would be whisper already. But something in that direction.

Good luck!

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

#119

Post by prawn »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #88
drum wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are a million and one apps that offer the ability to chat with people. if it's a concern people can use one of those

Wow - sounds kinda hostile and doesn't really address the original point (sorry if I'm misreading your response). What's so special about the exact mile radius that couldn't be, say, a bit more flexible if conditions aren't perfect? Couldn't the app expand that to a mile and a half if no-one's present within a mile? Etc. I think that's the original point that was being made.

Maybe it's a bit like Twitter's 140 character limit, ignoring the SMS size that inspired it. Sure, people might want to tweet longer messages, but tough - this is how it is and probably one reason it worked.

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

#120

Post by angersock »

danneu wrote: post #78
angersock wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you like me to give you some Ruby code that would emulate this functionality? I am fairly sure the size of the program would be less than 300 LOC, tops. That is indeed a "little app". The 30-something line regex parser Pike wrote ( http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/bea... ) ? Also a "little app". There is no shame in solving a small problem, solving it well, and solving it concisely. As f…

A recap of your pleasant original comment: "Don't get me wrong, it's a nifty little app. You probably learned a lot! That said, it's still just a toy campus app." A morsel of value from the world squandered. I'll bite your offer for you to mock it up in Ruby real quick. The problem with the "it's easy and I could do it" dismissal is that, even though you could, you didn't. Maybe you can team up with this guy[1]. You…

https://gist.github.com/crertel/7244841

There you go--left out the boring HTML scaffolding (original chat example modified from here: https://github.com/igrigorik/em-websocket).

EDIT: It's super MVP, but the concept is there.

A very, very simple addition would have the server echo back to the clients the lat/long pairs in question to dynamically update, say, a Google Maps window.

For real usage, I'd use a PostGIS query--something like this: http://unserializableone.blogspot.com/2007/02/using-postgis-... .

EDIT2:

Looks like we're both Texans--if you're ever in Houston, I'd be glad to grab a beer with you.

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