Facebook 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?
So 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?
That 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.
1) 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.
Then 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.
Ok 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.
Once 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.
During 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.
There 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
My 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)
Yes, 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.
Please 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.
Duly 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.
We'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!
When 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.
Cool 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
Since 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.
This 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).
The 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.
Still 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.
This 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 :-)
Actually 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.
Its 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!
Friday 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).
You 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!
