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Review My Startup: GeoHello - location based chat
So, this is my most recent project.
What is it? It's a location-based, quasi-anonymous message broadcast service. What the heck is that? It's kind of like a geo-tagged message board, in real time. The barrier to entry is very low, as long as you have a GPS-enabled device, or browser. I say it's quasi-anonymous because as soon as I push my most recent code to this server you will be able to set a custom nickname for the duration of your session.
My inspiration for this initially came from me sitting in a traffic jam on the way to work, wishing I could tell what the cause of the slow up was. I was saying to myself, "if I could just ask the people in front of me what the deal is then I'd know how long I'm going to be sitting here." After coming home and coding this, I started thinking more about it and it's a lot like Citizen's Band radio. I go into a lot of that on the about page.
Ok, so what does this do? It simply lets you broadcast a message, in real time, to people around you. Your message will be broadcast to all users within 5 miles of you, all directions. Messages are archived for the location from which they were sent. This means that when you connect, you should see the 5 most recent and closest messages for your current location. If you see none, that just means there have not been any, yet. This also means that messages may be left for future users, too. So, real-time discussion is not the only option.
This does not work in IE, as far as I know. The browser does not support geolocation (?). This works great on my iPhone 4, and updates your location as you move.
Check it out! Feedback is appreciated!
http://geohello.com/about
- Skywing 16y agoclickable: http://geohello.com/ http://geohello.com/ http://geohello.com/about http://geohello.com/about
- weixiyen 16y agoLove the concept, but really needs a ton of users to make it work. You should think about promoting it at a specific event.
- Skywing 16y agoYea. For the real time part of it, which is the coolest part, it would need enough concurrent users to where when you connect from any major city you would see at least a few people broadcasting. This is somewhat why I added the message archiving, initially. So that it didn't seem like a barren, open zone of no broadcasting. But, I think that the archiving of messages is a good addition for other reasons, too, after the fact. I do like the idea of focusing on launching at a single event, or location first. That's probably the most realistic and feasible way to go about it.
- faikr 16y agoWe tried it at work. Firefox tells me my location is in Stockholm (proxy), and chrome shows the correct location, guess it is because of how they determine your location, just wanted to let you know. Would be good if I could see the location of other users, if they enable it that is. Also maybe even allow users to change their current location so that they can follow other places.
- hasenj 16y agoLike the idea; sounds a localized twitter-like thingy. No one around where I am seems to know about it, which is a bummer.
- jparicka 16y agoIt's not working for me. I get just empty dialog window (chrome).
- djb_hackernews 16y agoI don't know what I am supposed to be seeing. I see an input box and a tiny sliver of a gmap. I typed something hit enter, and then nothing again. Should my message show up?
- Skywing 16y agoYea, sorry. You happened to try it during the exact moment that I was pushing some minor JS/CSS changes to that server. It should be properly functioning again. Your messages should appear as you send them. And, when you first open the page you should see any previously sent messages for that area, too. (if there are any)