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Facelette: On TechCrunch in Three Hours and $0
- jw84 16y agoStop and consider this for a second then move on with your day: Does this speak of Facelette's product quality or TechCrunch's editorial quality?
- holman 16y agoI think it speaks to the fact that today's technology lets you quickly make products that people want to talk about. I don't think it's necessarily a condemnation of TechCrunch or that Facelette is impressive (the latter of which is definitely untrue).
- dinkumthinkum 16y agoIs it that we really want to talk about it or that the TC/Valley echo-chamber makes us feel like we want to talk about it?
- Splines 16y agoIt's funny that the HN crowd talked about something like this 4 months ago, and it took holman just a few hours to ship. Only goes to show that ideas are cheap :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1472597 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1472597
- acgourley 16y agoI think everyone (who has ideas) had this flash across their mind when they saw facetime for the first time.
- AlexMuir 16y agoThis shows that not only are ideas cheap, implementation is now cheap too. Just monetization left...
- sensemaker 16y agoOnly efforts to self-train and be competent to carry out the implementation are not so cheap.
- naner 16y agoI happened to come upon a novel idea A derivative idea. Not that this takes away anything from the service. Most ideas and successful implementations aren't of the kind we've never seen before.
- AlexMuir 16y agoThis is a novel idea. Storing contact details for concurrent people and presenting them to each other in a randomised way. I've not seen this anywhere using telephone numbers, skype, email addresses - it's novel. Chatroulette connects people directly through its own servers, Facetime is one-to-one video chat. This is something that bridges those two in a simple way.
- kneath 16y agoSince we're being pedantic... What the human race perceives as creativity is largely mashup of what others have done in a new way. Mozart? Derivative of music played by instruments. Van Gogh? Derivative of people painting on canvases. Once you start being too picky about what an idea is, you start to lose sight of what makes the idea awesome or why creation is so much fun in the first place. Highly relevant to this: http://www.everythingisaremix.info/ http://www.everythingisaremix.info/
- jessriedel 16y agoSurely we can draw a distinction between chatroulette and facelette in terms of originality.
- hartror 16y agoEverything has degrees of originality. Google didn't invent the search engine but they came up with a great way to monetise it (oh and some algorithm too).
- 7402 16y agoAs I once said, "Originality is the art of concealing your sources."
- mburnett 16y ago"Don't be afraid to build things for the sake of building them" Completely agree here. Plus, it's only after you actually build out an idea that it really has any transferable value. There are definitely going to be ideas you have that seem a little off or even stupid, but don't let that stop you. Otherwise we would live in a pretty dull world of gray color and political correctness. Push yourself a little. Always Be building.
- atomical 16y agoI have often thought many of the review my startup postings are not startups but projects. I am happy that someone was brave enough to write this.
- cyen 16y agoI like this quote best - I’ve also come to loathe this mentality, at times. It’s the same mentality where someone whips up a two-page website and asks people to “review their startup!” I think startup is a phrase that’s been abused. You’ve made a project, or a mashup, or a hack, not a startup. And that’s cool! Embrace that. More people need to do stupid shit. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Don’t do it to make money. Don’t even do it to learn hip new technology X. Do it for the sake of doing something stupid
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- thewordpainter 16y ago"I think startup is a phrase that’s been abused. You’ve made a project, or a mashup, or a hack, not a startup" brings up a good point. at what point can we separate the real startups from the hacks? in general, the best startups are not started because of money. you'll lose track of the essence of what you're doing as money clouds your perspective. as guy kawasaki likes to say, "if you create meaning, you'll often create money"
- tgriesser 16y agoI’ve also come to loathe this mentality, at times. It’s the same mentality where someone whips up a two-page website and asks people to “review their startup!” I think startup is a phrase that’s been abused. You’ve made a project, or a mashup, or a hack, not a startup. I think this is so true. A startup seems to imply that it will at least in theory become a business at some point. I bet that Facebook didn't even call itsself a "web startup" when it started out at Harvard until it started to spread and raised some real money. To call every little project that someone hacks together in a weekend a startup is a misnomer, similar to the tendency for founders to give themselves C-Level titles in their startup companies which consist of nothing more than a prototye and a pitch, rather than just calling themselves 'founders'.
- alexitosrv 16y agoSo true. In fact, I also believe the word "founders" implies a glorified version of what at the end of the day simply are "authors", or to suit better this site: "hackers".
- bluesnowmonkey 16y agoMaybe we need a new word in the vocabulary for this employment category. It's hard to explain to people who ask me, "What do you do?" Well, I don't have a job exactly. I quit that in order to work full-time on something that I hope will make money someday. There is no legally incorporated business... yet. So it's not really a startup, but it's not what you think of as unemployment either. If I tell people, "I'm doing a tech startup," they go, "Oh! That's cool." And I count that as a successful social encounter.
- ajj 16y agoWe’re in the most ridiculous industry on earth. You can whip something up in a few hours and before you know it, people around the world will be using it. Oh how I love this field! Its exhilarating!
- savrajsingh 16y agoHow's chatroulette doing anyway? They were the media darling just a few months ago. Nice work whipping up this project.
- bobbywilson0 16y agoThe awesome thing about holman, is that he did this app just for fun and the love of "the hack". In my opinion he will gain much more than a chunk of ad revenue. A very well-respected reputation. This to me seems much more valuable than even $5k ad revenue. I don't feel like we would be talking about him near as much if facelette.com was some spammy looking "made for adwords" app. When you go to the site it is just so pure and honest, it doesn't make you question what you are doing, or who is doing what with your information.
- wyclif 16y agoThe core of it is 11 lines of code. The speed of shipping apps like this, the acceleration, is what impresses me.
- mahmud 16y agoNot to take away from Facelette, but for others who want to be on TechCrunch: make something with any new Apple product this week and the next. The first guy who makes a Mac Book Air case-mod WILL be on TC. Mark my words.
- bretthellman 16y agoCongrats.
- kenjackson 16y agoSo where's the code? I don't see it on GitHub?
- holman 16y agoSure, why not. http://github.com/holman/facelette http://github.com/holman/facelette
- kenjackson 16y agoThanks... although I'm not really sure how this code does facelette :-) I really should do a more non-trivial RoR project, so I can more easily read other peoples RoR code.
- stevenbedrick 16y agoThe real meat of it appears to be based around the new (to me, anyway) facetime:// protocol, which I'm assuming FaceTime.app handles. Take a look at the sessions/queue view for more.
- holman 16y agoYup. That's basically the whole reason behind why I made it, once I saw facetime://. Otherwise everything else would be unbearably cumbersome. With that snippet of knowledge, anyone could make a clone (and I encourage it!)
- adammichaelc 16y agoMost of the juicy stuff is happening in these 3 files: http://github.com/holman/facelette/blob/master/app/views/sessions/queue.html.erb http://github.com/holman/facelette/blob/master/app/views/ses... http://github.com/holman/facelette/blob/master/app/views/sessions/index.html.erb http://github.com/holman/facelette/blob/master/app/views/ses... http://github.com/holman/facelette/blob/master/app/controllers/sessions_controller.rb http://github.com/holman/facelette/blob/master/app/controlle...
- 16y ago
- maxogden 16y agomy facelette style stupid project project for the week: catmapper.com
- eljaco 16y agoAww, I was totally expecting something a la padmapper.com but with cats.
- barmstrong 16y agoCool how he recommended iWantMyName.com Has anyone else used it? Have been looking for a good domain registrar to move my domains from GoDaddy for a while.
- teccmo 16y agoI totally agree with you. I started a new thread here asking this question. I dislike their marketing among other things. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1817537 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1817537
- noglorp 16y agoWhat you are witnessing is the predictions of Alvin Toffler comming about. From WP, <quote>The gap between producer and consumer is bridged by technology using a so called configuration system. "Prosumers" can fill their own needs (see open source, assembly kit, freelance work). This was the notion that new technologies are enabling the radical fusion of the producer and consumer into the prosumer. In some cases prosuming entails a "third job" where the corporation "outsources" its labor not to other countries, but to the unpaid consumer, such as when we do our own banking through an ATM instead of a teller that the bank must employ, or trace our own postal packages on the internet instead of relying on a paid clerk.</quote> As more internet users become Prosumers, the idea of a 'startup' becomes trite. Instead, everyone is a business or two on their own.
- jorgem 16y agowhat happens if I submit someone else's phone number?
- city41 16y agoNothing. I submitted "foobar" and was then privvy to an endless stream of email addresses. A spammer's dream :)
- holman 16y agoBy "endless", you mean the 5-6 concurrent users likely on at the same time as you. Also, there's an extremely high chance that all the email addresses are throwaway accounts. It's not nearly as big of a deal as many have mentioned.
- senthilnayagam 16y agoI tried it on my mbp with facetime beta, connected with couple of people in spain, US, it was fun initially. we gave small intros, asked where they were from etc but the later group was not interested even to talk, they wanted chatroulette style, you would see empty walls, close up eyes and nose, they all disconnected under 5 seconds probably they wanted a girl on their screen
- rjboyle 16y agoWhy did the registrar give you a refund?