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Show HN: Popcorn Messaging – Anonymously chat with people within 1 mile
- AbhishekBiswal 13y agoCreates a chat room with all the people around in it or it just randomly connects you to a single person?
- tsheng 13y agoYeah that was the question I initially had - I'm assuming it's a chat room, which I like a lot better.
- adamb_ 13y agoAssuming it's a one mile radius for everyone, making it a chat room the app would either need to intersect or union everyone's area... This would make the novelty of the app unusable or pointless, respectively.
- melvinmt 13y agoYeah, I wonder how that works actually. If radius A intersects with B and C but B and C don't intersect with each other, do B and C see A chatting to someone who they don't see?
- jcutrell 13y agoLooks like there are "areas" to unlock.
- jaredsohn 13y agoA previous app (now defunct) named ChatSquare would group people together based on the nearest Foursquare location.
- AbhishekBiswal 13y agoCreates a chat room with all the people around in it or it just randomly connects you to a single person?
- AbhishekBiswal 13y agoCreates a chat room with all the people around in it or it just randomly connects you to a single person?
- AbhishekBiswal 13y agoCreates a chat room with all the people around in it or it just randomly connects you to a single person?
- AbhishekBiswal 13y agoCreates a chat room with all the people around in it or it just randomly connects you to a single person?
- tsheng 13y agoMy location isn't unlocked yet, but this has the ingredients for brilliance. Marries the desire for privacy with the desire to feel connected to a local community... without being Whisper. A great example of digital technology facilitating in person communication. Look forward to playing around with it.
- drum 13y agohey thanks a lot! thats pretty much the same way i look at
- oofabz 13y agoIt 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.
- drum 13y agohmm, the 1 mile radius is important to me. psychologically, knowing that the people you're talking to are within walking distance is exciting
- tempestn 13y agoLess exciting if there's no one using the app within that radius though, no?
- drum 13y agothere 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
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoWow - 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.
- drum 13y agosorry 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.
- jmarbach 13y agoReally like this idea. There's been a deficit of anonymous messaging services in the college market since JuicyCampus went down.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- kawsper 13y agoYou don't build or defend with a site like Chatroulette, and that are very popular.
- notdonspaulding 13y agoScreenshot has a typo "...with people within in a 1-mile..."
- drum 13y agoahh, crap, thanks for pointing that out
- acritique 13y agoan android alternative - anyone?
- daveambrose 13y agowaiting for my location to be unlocked, i.e. midtown Manhattan
- daveambrose 13y agoso, a few thoughts now that we have a room created for midtown NYC: 1. no push notifications? seems like a no brainer to have this when a new user enters the "room" (i'm calling these chat spaces that) and when a new message appears. suspect you'll get more re-engagement 2. why do I have a ribbon next to my username? see: https://twitter.com/daveambrose/status/395630523961577473 https://twitter.com/daveambrose/status/395630523961577473 3. photos! would be good to share media in addition to just text. maybe for a v2
- nickdoesdesign 13y agoOn top of that, @replies would be awesome as well. We already have a nice Back Bay/Cambridge/Boston chatroom going that is going along fine, but we have already naturally used @replies since we are so used to them.
- drum 13y agoyea definitely sounds necessary. im just wondering - lets say you leave the 1 mile area, somebody @ replies you, when you open the app you'll be in a totally new spot and the message will be at the old spot.
- drum 13y ago1. you're absolutely right. just pushed an update for push notifications and coding in some logic as we speak 2. you get a ribbon for being an explorer (being one of the people to unlock an area) 3. i want to add media , but im scared it might get crowded with a lot of nudes. maybe if we add karma and let users with a certain amount post, it would work
- ddoolin 13y agoI'm kinda sad I didn't capitalize on this idea when I had it awhile back. I may still. I really like radius-based anonymous messaging. Good to see the idea getting some attention anyway!
- drum 13y agodave? pretty sure i met you a few times in SF at the TRUE car meetups. thanks for the comment!
- MProgrammer 13y agoThe app is pretty bare bones, but it has promise. Localization request: for anywhere but en_US, replace "1 mile" with "1.6 km" =)
- Zakuzaa 13y agoWhy does it require iOS 7.0?
- MProgrammer 13y agoBecause it's a new app, and actively doing work to support anything older than iOS 7 is a waste of time.
- Zakuzaa 13y agoUnless the app uses some iOS 7.0 specific API, it makes sense to support at least 6.xx considering 7.xx is just over a month old.
- alex_c 13y agoThe UI changes in iOS 7 make supporting both 6 and 7 more of a pain than most previous iOS releases. Certainly possible and not a huge deal, but it doesn't just come down to iOS 7 specific APIs.
- MProgrammer 13y agoSupporting iOS 6 is a non-trivial amount of work for many apps. Furthermore, you also have to test on iOS 6, and on more devices. All that for a piece of the market that now amounts to 25% and is shrinking every minute.
- mangotree 13y agoTo 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.
- jaredsohn 13y agoYou also need to do QA on the older version(s). (That said, I personally appreciate allowing it to work with older versions since I haven't upgraded to iOS 7 yet and waited a long time to upgrade to iOS 6.)
- angersock 13y agoSo, talked with some folks about an idea similar to this a few months ago. As the conversation evolved, they came up with "tagging" a given chat room to denote what was in it, and letting people choose their own names...some kind of "handle" on the identified "channel". The proposed messaging fabric would use servers hosted in the cloud, each functioning as sort of a repeater to their client mobile devices. A sort of internet-relayed chat, if you will. There is nothing new under the sun. EDIT: The location functionality of this could be bodged together really quickly with the geo pg extensions, I'd bet.
- christiangenco 13y agoAfter seeing the criticisms of Dropbox[1] on Hacker News, I'm much more analytical of the stereotypical "critical top post(s)" when introducing a new project. Getting candid, constructive critical feedback is certainly one of the values of posting on HN, but criticising that a product or service is just a combination of known technologies is an incredibly weak criticism: it could be applied to any innovation. Here's my litmus test for whether something has already been done: if I asked ten random people to solve the problem this thing is trying to solve, could they name a product that solves it? Ex: * "How would you have a folder on your computer that stays synchronized across multiple computers and is accessible online?" -> Dropbox or Google Drive (not an acceptable answer: "I'd set up rsync to run as a daemon syncing to a VPS on each computer") * "How would you send public messages to people you didn't know in close proximity?" -> Popcorn Messaging? 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- angersock 13y agoDon't get me wrong, it's a nifty little app. I'm just pointing out that I heard an idea a few months ago that was nearly identical. Our advice to the folks was "Yeah, this is cool--go code it!". These toy campus apps are really great for building experience and learning; that said, they're still just that: toy campus apps. The obligatory "but but but facebook" rebuttal is that it was a matter of timing more than anything else.
- jaredsohn 13y agohttp://near.im/ http://near.im/ is a mobile web implementation (in Meteor) of the same concept that I work on occasionally, although the frontend needs to be redone. No longer requires a Facebook login.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ecesena 13y agoWere you guys at the YC startup school? I remember talking with someone about a similar product, although the target market was slightly different...
- hallman76 13y agoI really hope this takes off - it would be great to use at events! Yobongo was trying to get this going a while back. For some reason they focused on specific cities (Austin, NYC, and SF) instead of using a generic 1-mile approach like this. I was always disappointed that they got aquirehired - their app died on the vine.
- jcutrell 13y agoI almost created one of these, except for news. Hyper-local news is largely missing - I was going to mash up Twitter, Instagram, and in-app updates to help people get a sense of what's happening immediately around them. This is actually a great idea to solve this problem though. The news use-case is for city life. When you hear a gunshot or a car accident occurs on your street or you see smoke off in the distance or you hear music playing nearby or you see a drove of cop cars driving by - how can you find out more about that? News doesn't have a hyper local channel, but it could. This app points at a bigger market - the "directly nearby" market - that really has only been fully tapped by mapping/location-sourcing applications.
- jroll 13y agoI would pay good money for this - I'm always trying to figure that sort of thing out and it always ends up as a bunch of random googling or trying to remember to check the news in a few hours.
- jaredsohn 13y agoCheck out http://app.bg/ http://app.bg/. It shows local Instagrams, Foursquare tips and tweets. Also http://www.nearbytweets.com http://www.nearbytweets.com
- drum 13y agothanks! one of our biggest goals was to maintain privacy by only requiring a username to sign up.
- muratmutlu 13y agoAnd we made InstaBAM for finding instagram users and photos near you (or anywhere on a map) https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/instabam!-explore-instagram/id437615875 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/instabam!-explore-instagram/...
- bcherry 13y agoJuicyCampus for the mobile age. And this time administrators banning it from campus wi-fi won't do any good, with everyone on 3G and LTE. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JuicyCampus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JuicyCampus
- soci 13y agoGreat idea, nobody in my area yet so I cannot check the execution. (Barcelona, Europe) Please, don't let this become something bad as happened with ChatRoulette when it became viral.
- draugadrotten 13y agoThe grindr app is very popular in Barcelona and will let you chat with people nearby in seconds.
- mikeflores23 13y agoWell, we had this on the roadmap for www.wobbleapp.me. Will be interesting to see the reception in advance.
- austinl 13y agoThe chicken and egg problem can be pretty frustrating with an app like this. There needs to be a critical mass of users in a certain area for it to be reliable, which is easier in some places than others. Best of luck though.
- zackbrown 13y agoOne option for a location-aware system like this: the chatroom-defining radius could be adjusted elastically to make it so there are always enough people to chat with, even if the nearest is many miles away.
- drum 13y agotrue! right now im targeting college freshman. if it catches on in the dorms i think itll work.
- nilkn 13y agoI'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?
- Dirlewanger 13y agodoes A see B talking to someone who effectively does not exist? No, why would you want them to see who else they're talking to? What messaging application allows you to see who other people are privately conversing with??? Not a popular one, I assure you that.
- jaredsohn 13y agoThis is likely referring to public conversation.
- nilkn 13y agoI'm not sure who, but clearly one of us has not understood the purpose of the app under discussion here. My impression is this facilitates public, pseudo-anonymous conversation with anyone in a 1 mile radius of yourself.
- cylinder 13y agoNo, I assumed it just arranges private chats with people nearby, like Chatroulette with geo features.
- grigio 13y agoa solution could be the geohash
- drum 13y agoi think you might be right... hadn't thought of that
- 13y ago
- quackware 13y agoI remember making an app similar to this a few years ago. Would automatically create a room if one did not exist, scale-able search range, anonymous users with an option of providing a name, all relied on a jaber server hosted in a micro aws instance. Was a fun project, but the critical mass factor makes things like this very hard to create. If anyone's curious, github source: https://github.com/quackware/Crowdsource https://github.com/quackware/Crowdsource
- jeanbebe 13y agoThe market problem is a very real reality. Popcorn is pretty simple, you need to invite you friends - but do you have to do that for every area to unlock that area? We've been working on the same problem for a few months now but haven't quick cracked the market issue. Our app, racut, has a similar feature called Shout where you can say something and it appears over a 6 mile radius. In addition to Shout you can also start a private conversation, or have a group conversation outside of the Shout stream. It's good to see others entering the space.
- jaredsohn 13y agoFrom my own research of the space while working on near.im, it seems like the companies that have done the best are the ones who make agreements with events (i.e. a networking app for people at a conference.) This is great because it has a clear source of monetization and has the added bonus of having the conference advertise that the app exists so that people might actually use it.
- jeanbebe 13y agoSeems logical to partner with a physical event or space, because it helps to provide some of that social proof that people often crave to use something. I think of it like a restaurant. You're probably going to eat at the restaurant that is busy, not the one that is empty.
- daveambrose 13y agowhere's the link to your app?
- jeanbebe 13y agohttp://racut.com http://racut.com Currently only available for iOS. The version in the store is a hybrid, we're working on an objective-C build that should be done in the near future. It's a fun project.
- 13y ago
- zoba 13y agoIn the early 2000s there was a device/toy called the Cybiko (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
- danudey 13y agoA 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 message, it would go to Twinkle's servers along with geolocation information, and then Twinkle would post it to Twitter in turn. Other Twinkle users could see your post via Twinkle's servers, as well as your actual Twitter feed. It was a fantastic way to discover new local users, and you could scale the radius up or down (from I think 1km to 10km). I know one person in particular I ended up seeing in my stream a lot because we both lived in one area and worked in another area, and lots of others just worked in the same area as I did. You could easily Twitter-follow them, which let you take those relationships out of Twinkle. For someone who was completely new to the city and the community, it was a great way to start getting connected to people in the area.
- SeoxyS 13y agoWow… 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 hated it, because its backend was horrendous and we had a lot of availability issues; the service would go down constantly. The very last thing I did at Tapulous / Disney (on my last day) was kill off Twinkle, shutting down the servers. Everybody was quite happy to see it gone.
- hrrsn 13y agoI definitely remember Twinkle! I used it daily.
- mrdazm 13y agoI wonder what the architecture for the messaging looks like.
- grigio 13y agoThere is also http://geospot.meteor.com http://geospot.meteor.com with auto purge.
- constantize 13y agoI also did a little adventure into local-anon-messaging, but my solution was to use wireless access points and udp for text, relying on a server only for image share. In retrospect it is primitive and ugly as sin, but I was excited about it so I put it on the app store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.constantize.blip&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.constantiz... The only problem? wireless routers that block udp ;)
- willchilcutt 13y agoHow will I know my area is unlocked unless I'm constantly checking the app? Also, does it take -just two- people to unlock? I'm guessing so because there is no way anyone within a one mile radius also has this app.
- drum 13y agoyep, just two! i just pushed an update that includes push notifications. you might need to log out and back in, but it should show the prompt. from there im coding in a notification for when the area opens
- willchilcutt 13y agoJust logged out and logged back in, but no alert view for receiving notifications. Do I need to create a new account?
- drum 13y agodang, friend reported the same issue. not sure why they're not going.
- willchilcutt 13y agoAlso I logged out, killed the app, and went back in, but to no avail.
- Abundnce10 13y agoIs this available on Android?
- jaseemabid 13y agoYes, there are 100x android devices in places like India compared to iOS devices.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- shellehs 13y agoI tried to search in App Store on my iPad, it showed me no result ?
- renownedmedia 13y agoThis reminds me a lot of a webapp I built called Whisper: http://zyu.me:5000/ http://zyu.me:5000/ https://github.com/tlhunter/whisper 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.
- languagehacker 13y agoThis looks really nice! I was very impressed at the download speed, so good job on that one. All I'm really missing is something telling me if anyone is nearby. That's probably not easy.
- wellboy 13y agoThat´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!
- wingerlang 13y agoThere is an app like this (I think - as I can't download this one) called WeChat which has a similar functionality. Not sure about the popularity in the US but in Asia it is huge and the "people nearby" feature is very fun.
- dzink 13y agoGreat idea! Be careful about nefarious use (aka sex offenders) if that's possible.
- jv22222 13y agoRevenue possibilities for this app: 1) Give it to participants at conferences. You could partner with conference promoters and advertisers 2) Partner with baseball and football stadiums and "teams" 3) Partner with bands and gigs
- jbrooksuk 13y agoI just got the username "James". This never happens. If you can solve the "AB—BC" problem, then you'll have a really powerful application that'll easily get some investments, you just need to market it right.
- fyolnish 13y agoblack status bar text on dark red background, this needs to change. But a very neat idea! Already found some people to chat with in Tokyo
- smtbsrn 13y agoit would be great to see closest online person to chat if there is no one in 1-mile. (Of course chat will be inactivated with that person)
- thibaultCha 13y agoThis app clearly reminds me of the device John McAfee promised us: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/30/4786008/john-mcafee-d-central-device-avoid-nsa-private-network http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/30/4786008/john-mcafee-d-cent... "the device [...] has a range of around three blocks. Everyone in those three blocks can then communicate with each other and that will obviously change as users move in and out of a local area." Will definitively try to maybe see people from HN in Paris.
- chris_engel 13y agoWell, I would have tried it, but upon installation, it says: requires iOS7. Sorry, not going to happen :)
- jmacd 13y agoCB Radio
- jbrooksuk 13y agoSome things I've noticed: - Push notifications are much needed. - I logged out, but now I can't log back in. - I'm unable to send more than one message at a time, but it's complaining that I need to wait 2 seconds.