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Circular developer here. Ok, so last month I launched an open source clone of Buffer, built on top of Backbone, Bootstrap and MongoDB, and named Tampon. Many p
by julien_c 14y ago
Circular developer here. Ok, so last month I launched an open source clone of Buffer, built on top of Backbone, Bootstrap and MongoDB, and named Tampon.
Many people hated the name... However, the app as well as the open source project have seen some nice early adoption, so I've gone ahead and chosen a less controversial one.
I've also implemented multi-account support, which was by far the #1 feature request from users (As suggested by 37Signals I've discarded every other feature request :)), as well as many many other improvements.
Let me know what you think!
- chanux 14y agoI was thinking this is the same thing as tampon until I saw tampon logo on the homepage and realized that tampon has changed the name. I didn't have much of an issue with the name but the change is sure for the good!
- julien_c 14y agoThis is the exact reason why I left a small visual cue to the old name :)
- engtech 14y agoGood on you for renaming the project... but why would you chose that name in the first place? I'm not trying to start a flame war -- just curious because I've been in a similar situation. After university I named the first C unit test framework I wrote the oh-so-obvious C*NT. At the time I thought I was being funny, but over a decade later and I can see that this is a symptom of the underlying misogyny/"boy's club" that is high tech.
- julien_c 14y agoPlease, let's not talk about it again – what do you think about the app itself?
- lmm 14y agoWould you consider a project called DICK or COCK to be misogynistic too? Without wanting to start an argument, your example doesn't strike me as misogynistic; it doesn't seem like it would be any more offputting to women than to men, if we're assuming the same baseline personality.
- grimboy 14y agoSecond wave feminists decided that that word in particular was bad no matter the context.
- aaronblohowiak 14y agoAnd third-wave feminism flirted with post-structuralism..
- reinhardt 14y agoYou guys should stop poking fun at feminism and check your privilege m'kay?
- pgeorgi 14y agoSince feminism is by definition confrontational, "checking the privilege" could be considered paternalistic.
- aaronblohowiak 14y agono poking fun intended, merely a historical note that feminism (as a loosely-defined movement) had changing views about language and its use... if someone were to just hear about second-wave feminist stances on the language of oppression, they might have a hard time understanding things like the "slut walk" and other acts of linguistic reclamation.
- reinhardt 14y agoKinda glad that my sarcasm went mostly undetected, otherwise it would have been downvoted to oblivion.
- grimboy 14y agoBecause it stems a flow of twitter posts?
- mcrider 14y agoIsn't that good marketing? And won't most engineers use the code regardless of what its named? Seems like an interesting strategy to me :)
- rglover 14y agoThis wasn't an oversight, just a bit of failed translation. Julien mentioned it in the original launch thread, but Tampon in French loosely translates to "buffer." See what happened there? Give the fella a break.
- engtech 14y agoThanks for the clarification -- I'd never heard of circular/tampon before so I wasn't aware of what had happened, hence my question. I'm even one of those people who never figured out what buffer app was for despite all their posts on HN.
- olalonde 14y agoIt actually has both meanings in French. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampon_hygi%C3%A9nique http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampon_hygi%C3%A9nique
- vilius 14y agoSimilar story here, I thought of writing a testing framework, somehow Testicle seemed as a funny name. Surprisingly it was already taken http://testicles.rubyforge.org/ http://testicles.rubyforge.org/
- finnw 14y agoI wonder how many development tools (and presumably other products) have been less successful than they could have been because their creators picked "clever" or "catchy" names (not necessarily rude.) For example I would not look forward to explaining to my boss why I had chosen something called "COWSEL", "MUMPS", "SPITBOL" or "ZOPL" for a new project. Lisp and Subversion were lucky enough to reach critical mass, but I reckon the people who picked those names were taking the same risk.
- Evbn 14y agoGit, the stupid content tracker.
- xoail 14y agoI was this " " close to acquiring the domain. Congratulations on the new name.
- julien_c 14y agoI love .io domains because as they're slightly more expensive you only buy them when you need to use them.
- kowsik 14y agoVery cool - just a few weeks ago, I spent two weekends (8 hours total) building https://www.delayed-tweets.com https://www.delayed-tweets.com. Sinatra on Heroku + Stripe along with a bunch of gems to connect up to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It's mainly for my personal use right now, but awesome to see others having simliar needs to schedule and cross post social updates. [edit] The "big" monthly cost for this project for me is primarily the SSL add-on. Everything else amounts to nothing since I have no long running dynos, even for resque.
- wamatt 14y agoPure awesomesauce! :) Congrats on name pivot, Circular is a great choice. With regards to Buffer, a potential friction point I pointed out to the team earlier this year, was the inability to select: Who? (Friends, Public, <custom list>) and Where? (private message, private group, wall post) a message should go to. This is standard functionality in the Facebook sharer app, for example. (http://imgur.com/HPsXU http://imgur.com/HPsXU) Of course, Buffer and Circular adds When? (eg temporal dimension) to the mix, but no app I know of, has implemented all three, leaving you with a tradeoff, if all of those are important to your social workflow.
- batuhanicoz 14y agoThere was a scheduler app for FriendFeed (ffscheduler.com), did all three. It was made by @alpb (ahmetalpbalkan.com). I'm thinking about forking and adding that features to Circular. Need to add Facebook support to it first though. No promises.
- bravura 14y agoYou seriously need auto-link shortening built in.