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Show HN: HubChilla - Asynchronously Chat With Similar People Using SMS
- nono13 14y agoI'm getting spammed. #pause doesn't work...
- rsamvit 14y agoWe fixed it! there was a race condition in the code we hadn't noticed
- mehulkar 14y agoI almost signed up because of the demo chat on the home page.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ghostfish 14y agoFacebook login only? This is a disturbing trend I'm noticing with a number of new websites/services. I don't think I'm alone in saying I don't like allowing apps access to all of my Facebook data and timeline. I won't use anything that only takes a Facebook login. Any plans for a stand alone login or is the Facebook data necessary for matching you up with people to chat with?
- bherms 14y ago1) They only get access to the information you authorize them. 2) If this isn't enough control, there are chrome & firefox extensions to give you more granular control over the authorizations you allow, though disallowing certain things can cause issues sometimes.
- derrida 14y agoWhat about if you don't have a Facebook account?
- bherms 14y agoThen you don't sign up... Startups aren't obligated to give us everything we want and they certainly don't owe us anything. I personally don't like signing up for services using my email and I don't like signing up using Facebook... However, I don't expect startups to cater to everyone with a non-majority preference. Either I make some sort of sacrifice to use their free service, or I don't use their free service.
- koopajah 14y agoOk but this is a Show HN. If we want to give feedback and test the service we HAVE to use our facebook account and give our info when we don't want it and that's problematic.
- bherms 14y agoOnce again though, I don't think it's problematic. I often feel that a lot of times, people don't want to pay the entry fee or wait in line to get in (figurative analogy here) and then feel left out. We're in the tech space... If I designed a new tool for XBOX Live stats and posted to Show HN, it would follow that you would have to 1) be an XBOX Live member and 2) give me your information... I see using Facebook sign in as an extension of Facebook and not the other way around. Just a matter of opinion from all around, though, obviously.
- rsamvit 14y agoThanks for your feedback! We use facebook login because its the easiest way for us to get the basic data to provide intelligent recommendations. We have plans to roll out a separate stand-alone login soon, where you can fill out a profile with whatever information you choose to include
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- veyron 14y agoHow are you addressing ... fraudulent information on the FB profile? Automated bots? Trolling pedophiles?
- 385668 14y agoThat sounds like a good plan, I'll check back then. I had a facebook back in high school, but got creeped out by some of their privacy issues and deleted it, this sounds like kind of a neat idea, though.
- d0m 14y agoSo just don't use it. You're clearly not in the market audience. This audience loves facebook, uses it every single day and authorize all kind of applications without a single thought about security. Why would they when their password is usually password or 123456. I understand it may comes as a rant but it's not. If Github would force all developers to use Facebook login, then I would agree with your comment. But for a social app like this?
- kurokonaa 14y agoAlso, some people don't have Facebook's, myself included. I hope the "Facebook login only" doesn't become a standard.
- alexlin 14y agoalready signed up. get at me.
- rsamvit 14y agothanks for the support!
- jhuckestein 14y agoDuring the signup, I wouldn't animate the progress bar. I waited for half a minute expecting something to happen until I realized you were waiting for me to fill out a form. Other than that, let's see what happens!
- jhuckestein 14y agoAnd hitting return anywhere in the signup page just reloads the page and looses the form for me in Chrome Canary.
- jhuckestein 14y agoThere seems to be conflicting copy on the site. Some places say the number is (408) 555-3938 other say 422 333 4737. And some places say the start command is #start and others say it's #play
- ritikm 14y agoSorry about that, the correct number is 422-333-4737 and #play is the correct command, not #start. Fixed, and pushed live!
- ninetax 14y agoCould you be more clear about what exactly you will tell these "people I want to meet" about me? Also, please clarify some parts of your privacy policy We may collect the following information when your register on or fill out a form on our site, HubChilla: 3. Other information relevant to our surveys or offers Such as?
- rsamvit 14y agoWe tell all people three Pieces of Information: 1. Your Gender 2. Your Age 3. Your location (City, State) Thats all! Everything else is private.
- simantel 14y agoSo the example on your landing page where the user's school is disclosed is inaccurate?
- rsamvit 14y agoYes, that was a screenshot from an earlier version. As of right now, only age/gender/location are used, though we use your education history to train our model for smarter recommendations. We are toying with the idea of putting back the school displaying feature back in if you encounter someone from the same school. It will depend on the data we gather.
- jessedhillon 14y agoMy partner was told I live in NY, strangely. Also, consider changing the message posted to Facebook. This sounds... strange: "Jesse made a new 23 year old male friend on Hubchilla." (or whatever it is you post, something to that effect)
- hnriot 14y ago"and both go to UC Berkeley", this is in the example conversation.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jenntoda 14y agoSMSroulette? Hmm...
- rsamvit 14y agoPretty much! Except with intelligent recommendations :)
- petitmiam 14y agoTried to sign up, but it kept refilling the phone number field with the default value. Could just be a Firefox Beta (Android) thing though.
- Axsuul 14y agoHow long did it take to build this? Fun idea!
- ritikm 14y agoFriday 7/27/12 morning - thought of the idea, briefly talked about the features and did a basic spec Friday 7/27/12 evening - started coding the backend text message routing logic and the website front (standard stuff - Node.js, custom MVC framework, Twilio API, MongoDB, Redis, Heroku, etc. - the works) Tuesday 76/31/12 late night - Feature complete, things are all good to go and working (including edge cases, etc.) Wednesday 8/1/12 - Built out Open Graph integrations, made minor tweaks, chose the name and bought the domain, some branding stuff (i.e. the chinchilla logo), submitted Open Graph actions to Facebook Thursday 8/2/12 afternoon - Open Graph is all approved, did a test launch with a small set of users, ironed out a ton of bugs Thursday 8/2/12 evening - posted on HN, making a huge list of things to do next, getting good feedback, and setting up all our other distribution techniques to be fired off tomorrow 6 days from idea to launch! We tried hard to go as fast as possible on this one (although we overbuilt a couple features that we've retracted for the launch - could've saved us a day of work if we had realized they weren't necessary). [edited to correct the months on the dates]
- Axsuul 14y agoNice, thanks for the play by play! And I'm assuming you mean 7/27/12 morning? =p Are you guys by any chance from ASU? Been meeting a lot of people from ASU :)
- rsamvit 14y agoWe're from UC Berkeley
- lucaspiller 14y agoYou might want to look into using Nexmo, they have a better global reach and they don't charge for inbound SMS (only the number rental, which is cheaper). I've been using them for the last few months and can't praise them enough!
- ricardobeat 14y agoAlso known as 0800-LOVEMATCH since the 90s.
- ardakara 14y agoGood stuff man, just signed up. Congrats! My first conversation: - "Show me your .vimrc and I'll show you mine" - "Ah, I can't I'm married to emacs" Sounds promising :)
- rsamvit 14y agoHaha thats amazing! Glad you enjoy it.
- ievans 14y agoFYI: there's a typo on the homepage screenshot: "you to to"
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- voltagex_ 14y agoAny chance of allowing this to be used internationally?
- rsamvit 14y agoIts in the works! This is definitely something we're going to do, but we decided to perfect our launch in the US first before we start accommodating international phones. Stay tuned!
- obilgic 14y ago"15 people use this app" This is basically chat between hn people. I don't think this is the place to create this kind of user base.
- rsamvit 14y agoActually we have hundreds of users chatting, and we're growing fast! Facebook only refreshes its numbers once every 24 hours, so if you check back again later you'll see more updated results. We've been focusing on several different distribution strategies, and we have a strong user base of college students as well.
- DeepDuh 14y agoThe telco providers will love you ;).
- werdnanoslen 14y agoIntegrate with common chat clients like google and I might've more interested.
- ritikm 14y agoWe've gotten this request multiple times actually, so expect an integration soon!
- werdnanoslen 14y agoI was one of those requests via your chat, just making it here too :)
- dm8 14y agoCool idea. Signed up and talking with someone via texts. Couple of features that you should add - 1. Give questions to participants to talk about based on their FB likes or whatever data mining you could do. 2. Multiple people chats - SMS is not real-time medium. So not sure whether other person has read my SMS or not. And I have no idea whether to wait or not. It would be cool to text multiple people at once
- rsamvit 14y agoWe agree! We're working on those features and hopefully will be rolling them out soon.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- nc 14y agoSupport the UK please? It's really easy if you're using Twillio
- rsamvit 14y agoWe'll get on that soon. Stay tuned!
- nono13 14y agoI've tested it and it's really cool. 1000x better than airtime :)
- robbiet480 14y agoUh, this posted to my Facebook timeline without my permission.
- rcavezza 14y agoWhen giving permissions to apps, change the settings of who can see updates from this app to "Only Me".
- robbiet480 14y agoUh, this posted to my Facebook timeline without my permission.
- Johngibb 14y agoJesus, I just got like 2 dozen texts all at once before #pause worked. Thanks, I love paying for my texts. It should NOT start until you text #play, as it seemed like it would.
- progrock 14y agoStill not really sure what it is. I tried the help page, but it foisted a login upon me before I could go any further. The about link is hidden from eye, and still doesn't really explain things.
- melvinmt 14y agoSince it doesn't rely on an internet connection, I would love to use this as an alternative to Omegle (I have crappy 2G) but it should definitely be anonymous. There's not a chance that I'm going to sign up for this with Facebook.
- rsamvit 14y agoYour name is never disclosed - all the other person sees is your age, gender, and city.
- yuranlu 14y agoThis is awesome! It's like Omegle, except where you only talk to Hacker News readers. Hacker News readers are much more interesting to talk to anyway :-)
- isharabash 14y agoStarted texting someone... they told me their first name and I was able to easily find their phone number + address from there. :o
- felixchan 14y agothis looks awesome! tried it and actually met someone cool :) ahah
- Xcelerate 14y agoThis is intriguing. I'm getting a lot of people from California, namely Palo Alto. Pretty cool. One of the conversations didn't make it through though. (I'm the guy from Georgia who's up at 2:20 AM).
- ritikm 14y agoWe're sincerely sorry about any problems people have been having with #pause to make themselves unavailable to chat. There was a tricky race condition that was making it difficult for the #pause to propogate through, but it's been fixed now!
- jim_kaiser 14y agoPlease consider adding a disclaimer, that it is not supported internationally. That is really not clear from the home page and clicking on help needs me to login on FB. Getting the user's to connect on FB before they are made aware that the application won't work in his country is kind of a dark pattern in my view, and makes me trust your site less.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ritikm 14y agoDuly noted. Added it to the front page and pushed it live just now. Sorry about the miscommunication there -- we're going to put up better copy along with "What is this?", "FAQ", etc. pages (that don't require you to login to view) soon.
- lmm 14y agoWhen I worked in the industry we saw a few people try user-user chat. It always ended up with users sending threatening/harassing messages to each other, the service provider needing to hire moderators, and then realising that paying someone to be the other end of the chat is just as easy as paying someone to moderate and more effective. So I guess what I'm saying is I hope you've figured something out to deal with those kind of users.
- 385668 14y agoHave a spam filter that directs them to only be able to talk to other threatening/harassing users and let the problem solve itself?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- beaugunderson 14y agoThe Facebook auto-share any time I start a new conversation, text someone (for EVERY TEXT?!), or login to your website is awful. I liked the service but opt-out auto-sharing should be nuked from orbit.