Hello from Orkut | Hacker News Reader

Hello from Orkut

orkut.com

643 pointsshardul111323 comments

Maybe I'm just being cynical, but I see a large dissonance between this message and the 'hello' presentation.

He laments that "we stay with locals when we travel abroad but we don't even know our neighbours at home", yet the new social network seems to push more in that direction (it talks about connecting people based on their interests, not their proximity). He says "we are afraid of what we don't know [...] we are hateful toward what we don't understand", but hello's "folio" feature seems to dig in on that by carefully filtering out what's not "relevant to your interests".

And then there's the gamification ("leaderboards, milestones & rewards") which to me at least seem prone to encourage empty activities that don't really help with the loneliness mentioned in the message.

Because guess what, the letter is just a promotion for this new social network that they hope to sell everybody on. It doesn't matter if he really cares about any of those things, only that we think that he cares about those things and then go use his social network and divulge our private lives to yet another foreign entity.

Or the letter was written by one person and the presentation and app were designed by a group, and the latter's type of work rarely is as cohesive.

Gamification... because we know our app isn't interesting enough without it

Being hopeful is asking people to change, or at the very least give a thought to changing, sacrificing, open-minded to people who you don't like, etc. Making money is about keeping people happy which goes against the message.

The social network that forces people to interact with "the other" is one destined for failure.

I've not signed up (yet), but it can be both, right? You could have an overlap in interests in 3 of 5 things, and that means getting together with this person you have three things in common for sure, but also you can each introduce each other to 2 new things.

No, I read it exactly the same way - I guess the problem is that we probably need something paradoxical - we want to connect to things we know, but also to new things, people, places and experiences. But when we want them - otherwise they're an inconvenience.

I think just talking to people you meet at random will probably be a better solution.

(until I get murdered by a stranger!)

> (until I get murdered by a stranger!)

It's much more likely that you'll be murdered by someone you have a close realtion with.

(Apart from being a bit snarky, it's also true, and leads (back) to:)

> I think just talking to people you meet at random will probably be a better solution.

It is. (Speaking from experience)

That said, one also get to know people online - from irc to games. I don't see any reason why a new "meet strangers" social network couldn't work. But if a majority of its users can't motivate themselves to talk to random people they meet - chances are the network will be coopted for some other agenda than "making new friends". Like "have more one night stands". And while sex is a healthy human activity, meeting people with the aim to become friends need a form of level playing field, and mutual intention.

Fighting off one unwelcome sexual advance every now and then is part of the human condition - but having to do it every time you "meet" someone, it gets old really fast.

Which is probably one reason people can meet in games: while people game for many aspects of gaming - most do it to relax and have fun.

I guess the thing is that it can be a bit awkward when you're not expecting to talk to someone randomly.

If there is some way for people to "opt in" for random encounters such as Tinder, couchsurfing Meetup.com, it makes things much smoother.

What other sites are there that facilitate things happening in the real world? The MP3 experiment is perhaps my favorite.

People don't need more connectivity. Excess of anything is bad. Social networks and connectivity is already in the realm of being evil and eating away all the time from people's lives.

Basically yet another one trying to jump on the social network bandwagon.

I would argue he's not really jumping on the bandwagon considering that Orkut was one of the first social networks.

Orkut was produced by him under Google as an employee. Now he's trying to run with it again even though the whole thing is gamified and the letter is an ingenious as it gets. My guess is that he got a kickback to advertise and be the figurehead for someone elses shitty new social network. I would not be surprised if some celebs get paid off to start advertising it.

Jumping back on it, perhaps.

Goodbye http://i.imgur.com/pYkbT3f.jpg

First, let me say something I would not have said a few years ago... a new social network to meet people interested in the other things I do... awesome!

I get why there is not a web version at first. Unlike most people, I dont see that as a deal breaker.

I downloaded the app and tried it out.

The good: I like the idea of limiting yourself to five personas. It made me sit down and think what I wanted out of this. See, FB has a big chunk of my social graph and meetup gives me access to events that are interesting to me. Reddit and HNs filter content that I find interesting. Nevertheless, as an engineer and startup founder, those mediums keep bombarding me with Startup/C++/Django/etc meetups/news and articles about scaling startups. All topics I like to read about.

But there are other things I like that get overshadowed by this content.

I like surfing and consider myself a curious foodie for example. That content does show up in those other mediums, but gets really overshadowed by the strength of my network around the other topics (be it my FB graph or meetups I keep an eye out for). Another network - concentrated on meeting other people that share these distinctly different personas is an interesting proposition. So I tried!

The bad: It is empty once the setup was done. I dont see anything except the ability to add a photo for a persona. not sure that you can get away with this.

Also, you made me type information that was available somewhere else. Why??? Think of it this way, even if Gitlab is competing with GitHub, they let you log in with your GitHub account. Do this. Import the information from FB, G+, or whatever other place that already has this info...

Anyway, I'll keep an eye out to see how this plays out.

Update: I see content now. It has an Instagramish feel

> It is empty once the setup was done.

I set everything up, there was no content for any of the personas, I closed the app and will likely never open it again.

If you love the idea of connecting people interested in similar things, check out a startup I'm working on. http://getreveel.com/

We are still in progress of building out the smarts of it, tying people together and suggesting new activities, as well as UX issues in signup (current sprint focused on these). Still young but we'd love you to check it out. It's focused for the Chicago market, will open up other cities soon.

> Import the information from FB, G+

I expect that would be against TOS and would result in an immediate ban.

Not if as part of sign in the app asks permission to get that information. That is how all oAuth logins from FB to Google to LinkedIn to Github work. You ask for permission to get exactly what you want and once granted the app can get that information without violating any TOS or getting banned

It's not the gathering per se, it's what you do with it.

When I checked their platform policies (admittedly several years ago), they explicitly forbid other social networks from using FB-provided logins and data. This seems to have changed, and at the moment I can't find anything of the sort in their current platform policies; but there is a "no reimplementation" clause that is so broad, it could easily be used to ban apps that reimplement anything FB already offers (friending, image sharing etc etc).

Wow, did not know that. Is there something in the TOS that prohibits importing Name, location, profile photo for that use case?

I'm echoing what others are saying: no web version means I won't bother at all.

My phone has access to multiple great browsers. Building a good lightweight web app means I can access the content from anywhere without having to deal with annoyances of push notifications or (as much) creepy tracking.

My favorite example of a mobile web app is currently Twitter Mobile [0]. I even like using it from my desktop. It's very lightweight, fast, and easy to read.

[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/

> no web version means I won't bother at all.

They are building a web version, they're just doing mobile first. And that may be a pretty smart move.

"You will work with our product designers, mobile engineers, and backend engineers to create a distinct web version of our mobile offering." (http://www.hello.com/en/jobs/)

Orkut was global, and in a global context, mobile devices may be more heavily used than laptop / desktop web.

"Smartphone ownership rates have skyrocketed in many countries since 2013. This includes increases of over 25 percentage points among the total population in large emerging economies such as Turkey (+42 points), Malaysia (+34), Chile (+26) and Brazil (+26)."

http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/02/22/smartphone-ownership-and...

Even in the US, I see all the kids with mobile devices and controlled internet access. If you're shooting for the next generation of people, e.g., the young'uns, then mobile first is probably critical.

"They are building a web version, they're just doing mobile first"

should be

"They are building a web version, they're just doing native apps first"

Doing mobile first can totally be web.

You're right, but "Mobile first" is the way they are describing themselves, it's the phrase used in the jobs link I posted. And I would personally interpret "mobile first" to imply native apps in just about any context, so I think it gets the point across.

"Orkut was global, and in a global context, mobile devices may be more heavily used than laptop / desktop web."

Mobile devices have web browsers. In fact, by some measure, the ability to run a web browser would be the defining characteristic of a "smart" phone.

We had a name for phones that just ran little applets - they were called "feature phones". Some of them had very interesting, even great features.

But it's the browser, and things like the browser, that make the smartphone smart.

I've had this sentiment for a couple years now. I'm so sick of having to download an app for everything. I want a slick web version that isn't half-assed, and is responsive to all devices. This is my number one priority building any new application.

Yes! Absolutely! The worst thing is when you're on a site and you're browsing it and something pops up saying something along the lines of "Click here to get our app!" or it overlays the screen and tells you to use the app. NO I don't WANT your app. I'm on your WEBSITE. If you made THAT usable and didn't try to interfere with the stupid app, I'd be set!

I haven't a smart phone, but I did try Win 10, and have a Win 8.1 machine kicking about. I don't use either much. But what I do struggle with, is finding apps. Under Linux, my Applications Menu at least groups by category, and makes it a bit easier for me to find something even if I have forgotten the name. On Win 10 I'm totally lost.

I'd fear I'd have a whole heap of apps, and have no idea what they are or how to get to them.

In some ways it's the same with websites! I guess I could tag them or add them to a bookmark folder or something.

> I'm so sick of having to download an app for everything.

Me too. BTW I think I'd be fine if the apps just downloaded themselves (assuming they're vetted and signed by the app store), and without occupying space on my phone-top (or whatever its called). I don't really need to know the difference between an app and the browser - for as long as it does its thing.

This seems relevant here: https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/03/with-apologies-to-theodor-...

I really hate having to enter a password to download a free app on the apple app store.

If the concept here is a social network which brings us closer to people who have similar interests and are geographically close to us then that is really cool. But a couple things don't feel right to me.

1) No web app - honestly I'm over installing apps and being bound to my phone. You lost me here.

2) A bit of 'wall of text' explaining what this is and I appreciate that the orkut.com bit is heartfelt, but this is not the best way to pull me in.

3) No actual content from the network that I can browse on the web to understand through immersion (this is what is needed instead of or to supplement the about text).

4) 'loves not likes' - Without delivering on the other bullets here I didn't connect with the product and therefore this sounded tacky.

5) The best of the jots - makes me feel maybe this is instagram?

It just feels that the product planner is checked out or there hasn't been much conversation with the market or something. I guess I'd understand a lot better if I installed the app and signed up, but not going to, I shouldn't have to jump through those hoops just to understand the product.

Admittedly I am just an average curious passerby with a short attention span here so my $0.02 is worth just that, $0.02. But hello.com could be onboarding people a lot more effectively in my opinion.

Hate to just parrot everyone else but having no web app is the root of all of these issues I think.

Orkut was great and I'm over FB/Twitter, hope this does well.

Re #2, consider that hello.com is the landing page for the app. The page linked here is a page with a different purpose that most potential users won't see.

>I'm echoing what others are saying: no web version means I won't bother at all.

Good choice, I've just tried their Android version and it's absolute bug-city to the extent that I'm unsure if they engaged in any real Android user testing / dog fooding at all.

In onboarding, the crop function simply did not work at all, showing a hyper-zoomed version of the image and then discarding the view when creating the final image.

In onboarding, twice (in three minutes total of usage) I was presented with a totally white screen. No UI. No back button functionality. Nothing on screen. Nothing to do. Only option: force close the app. It appears to happen after EVERY single step in onboarding is complete. Once after photo/basic profile, once after location.

Yes, I was required to force close the app _twice_ in three minutes of usage.

Criticism: Only 5 "personas"? Really? I was forced to unselect a number subjects very dear to me because apparently I'm too diverse for a social network????

And now the "join personas" button is failing, it attempts to bring up the onboarding menu but fails, dropping back to the already-completed personas menu over and over. I'll force close the app myself.

If you wanted free QA, you could have at least been honest with us about this being a total beta test. I wonder if the developers are in this thread. I bet they all use iPhone...

But since this is apparently released software, as a tester and developer myself I am deeply concerned with the state of your backend, based on the quality of your front end development.

I'm out as well due to the lack of a web version, although not exactly for the same particular reasons as you. I'm OK with native apps in my phone, but (1) I refuse the need to look at a small screen and type on a crapy on-screen keyboard when I'm sitting in front of my PC with large screen and keyboard like 10 hours a day, and (2) my Android phone with 16G internal storage has long ran out of storage for apps (the stupid inflexibility of the system and many apps refusing to go to the SD card plays a role here) and I'm already keeping to the strictly necessary, there are apps that I actually liked and used but I had to delete them.

There are plenty of reasons to not want to use a mobile-only social network. I really like the concept of meeting new people based on interests (it's something I've been missing since ICQ, which had that functionality, was replaced with inferior alternatives like MSN messenger) but there's no way I'm getting into this mobile-only train for applications that don't have any reason to be mobile only.

They seem to be building a web version, they are hiring for this:

http://www.hello.com/en/jobs/index.html#frontend_swe

I think they just thought mobile was priority and are launching a MVP before having the web version...

Bad move for not having a web version. I just don't feel like downloading apps nowadays. A few of my friends are also like that.

You're probably not the target audience. I'd bet ~98% of the people on HN aren't.

The app is aiming at the Instagram, Snapchat crowd. Instagram didn't have a web front until recently, Snapchat still doesn't.

I have no idea who they think they're targeting but there's still a huge amount of friction involved in getting users to install an app. I don't think that a younger audience is immune to that.

No web version which also means there's probably noting really new or revolutionary. No federation. Not open.

I've been messing with some of the old federated projects that never seemed to go anywhere. GNU Social, Diaosapra, etc.

I'd like to just get a few nerd friends on one, just to say I'm at least trying to get away from the current model.

Hello just looks like another ello.

The real federated social platform is WordPress, which has millions of deployments and serves a quarter of the most popular websites: https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management...

I still remember the time around ten years ago when a lot of people had independent blogs mostly free of clickbait and advertising. Nowadays, many post on social media only.

I would reckon you're definitely in the minority. Think of an app like Snapchat - huge number of users who couldn't care less about the lack of a web app.

Instagram has a web app, but I'd be curious to see how many users actually utilise it, in comparison to mobile app users. My guess is that mobile app users heavily outweigh web users. Instagram also chose to offer a restricted set of features on the web app, specifically to encourage using the mobile app.

That's not to say that a web app is unnecessary. I reckon that the number of web users for an app like Instagram is sufficient to warrant the existence and maintenance of a web app. But I think that the majority of social network consumers are not concerned either way, and to delay a release because the web app is still being developed would be a mistake.

I still prefer native apps when they're well-designed. A well-designed, minimal native app almost always performs better than a well-designed, minimal mobile website in my experience. But a lot of major apps have become so bloated that their mobile website versions work better. Twitter is one example, but Facebook is another infamous one. I'm sure many folks on HN have went through the experience of realizing that it was the FB app that was draining their smartphone battery like crazy.

That said, the lack of a website is still a dealbreaker for me in this case. I don't want to have to access a social network through my phone. I do understanding going mobile-first on a new social network, but I'm not really interested in jumping aboard until I can use it from my laptop/desktop. But that may not mean much in terms of the app's success. I'm probably just not in the target audience.

Seconded.

Is there a way to run Android apps in a VM on Linux?

A VM for phone applications would be similar to a browser. A browser runs websites in a safe environment. A way to run apps in a safe environment would be nice.

Many. I've used Android-x86(.org) on KVM which worked so well I didn't pursue others. There is some semi-commercial fork called Remix OS that's more polished.

If you only need to use an app and not the rest of the environment you can also run it as a Chrome plugin under ARC and not mess with virtualization at all.

I can't connect to bdownload.fosshub.com, which hosts the Android-x86 images. Are those download links working for you?

Look at Genymotion, I'm using it on Ubuntu 16.04 to test Telegram and Messenger bots without having to do it on my phone. There are some hops to go through to install Google Play but they are documented. I'll post some links when I go back to my computer with my notes.

Edit: instructions.

I downloaded Genymotion from https://www.genymotion.com/pricing-and-licensing/ (Individual, Basic, which costs no money). It's enough to run Android but you don't have Google Play.

I followed these general directions to install it https://inthecheesefactory.com/blog/how-to-install-google-se...

However the filetrip link didn't work (and I don't know if I want to trust it) and the google apps failed to install. I googled and eventually downloaded these files:

ARM to x86 translation: http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/general/guide-genymo...

Google Play: https://www.androidfilehost.com/?fid=24591023225177410 (banks_dynamic_gapps)

The latter is for Android 6 so you should run an Android 6 image on your emulated device.

My computer is still fine after installing those two files in the Android emulator but I don't take responsibility. Don't know how verified they are.

There is a way to run Android apps in Chrome [1], which I refused to believe until I tried it with a random APK and worked perfectly.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/apps/getstarted_arc

There are multiple ways to run phone apps in a VM on Linux. If you just want to try something, the quickest would be to download Android Studio or Eclipse and use the built-in VM meant for development.

That is the one thing I absolutely hate about Amazon's Alexa app. They have a super-fast browser version that, to date, has executed everything flawlessly for me with speed and precision. Then there's the native Android app - a slow, clunky, POS (when it even starts properly - usually after 30 seconds of watching a spinning circle icon). But hey, guess what? Trying to access the great browser version from your 1080p mobile device with a fully capable web browser? NOPE! Just a button to download the POS native app. Really, Amazon, I expected better.

Why would a web version be better than an app if you're using it on a phone? (Honest question, I'm just curious.) Most people say they dislike app clutter, but then they have to keep a browser bookmark (or bookmark icon) anyway, which is the same amount of clutter. The only reason I can see is that you'd have one less app annoying you with updates, but a browser version has its own set of problems--e.g. unreliable maintenance of state, inconsistencies between browsers, random breakages due to ad blockers kicking in, etc...

Apps have access to things on your phone that web pages do not. Like he mentioned, web pages can't send push notifications. To the best of my knowledge, web pages can't run in the background. Web pages will also work on any device, even Windows Phone or Firefox OS or WebOS or Blackberry, etc.

I don't have the Facebook app installed on my phone. Not for privacy reasons, not because the web page is better, but because the Facebook app was taking up over 300mb of my 16gb phone, and the only way I knew to get that space back was deleting the app. With a web page, I can get rid of all of its stored data and still be able to access the site.

Steve Jobs was right, even if he was a bit early in his predictions. Web pages are better than apps in a lot of situations. Facebook doesn't need to be an app. Hello doesn't need to be an app. They just need good responsive web pages.

Typing on my phone sucks. OK for reading. Sucks for typing. And half the time my phone is busy charging because I drained the battery. And my data plan sucks. And a desktop/laptop has plenty of storage. But mostly, typing on phone sucks.

I almost never bookmark on my phone. And I very rarely bookmark on my pc(except for minimal hot toolbar on 'new page'). Either it's good enough I can type in 1-3 letters and it appears via recent appear or I forget about it because it didn't provide enough value. E. G. Whenever I visit this site I just type n then enter because I frequent it enough and browser maintains this. But other sites fall off my radar. I deem them not worthy. Also when I do ok occasion bookmark(I never look at my bookmarks,excdpt when doing a transfer to new machine or phone and I wonder what all these bookmarks are for and I click a few. Then realizing if site is alive that it holds little to no value or interest for me anymore)

In addition I minimize apps downloads(loss of info, clutter, etc..)

When I close the tab on my mobile browser I know it's over. When I install an app I know it can notify me at any time and decide it needs my attention. I don't want that.

Those issues (unreliable maintenance of state, inconsistencies between browsers) are for the developers to worry about, not the end user.

Desktop versions should be as equally important as mobile, especially when you are talking about generating and sharing content.

I think they misunderstood the "Mobile First" approach!

A lot of web applications perform really poorly on mobile and apps are made for that nice 'native' feeling. You also don't get push notifications or badges on the home screen. Mobile sites work for news sites and blogs, where you poll for content at your will, but for interactive applications, a mobile application that notifies you of interaction is a must in my opinion.

Have you heard about Progressive Web Apps? They are bringing all those things you mention to the table: push notifications, background sync, offline access, home screen badge...

And even the android app is limited to "Android 5.0 and up" and to a few countries and it has low ratings and reviews from users.

So it looks like a really weak "launch" :(.

And from the descriptions I don't see how its "features" are different from the other social networks.

Twitter Mobile is horrible. It's bloated, it frequently crashes my browser, it tries to do autocomplete of @handles but is slower than my touchscreen typing. In fact, Twitter Mobile is so bad that I'm considering installing an app to replace it.

Really? The new mobile Twitter site is super fast and reliable on my phone. The native app is still better but it gets really close in terms of performance and usability. However apps still have better OS integrations (notifications, sharing) and touch handling (swipe etc).

Really? It doesn't like my phone. And every time the train enters a tunnel, Twitter tells me my connexion is unavailable and ruins whatever I was doing at the time.

You may like www.tagschat.com, it is the same concept, but web based. I am the founder and we are releasing the new version (exiting beta) in a few days: stay tuned! Meanwhile, you can subscribe!

If you like mobile.twitter you might like dabr.eu

Apart from the default bright pink color it's lovely (and this is configurable)

I use it to keep twitter more work-friendly

> no web version means I won't bother at all

That's too bad. Lyft and Tinder users seem to be getting along without the web, though.

Not just that, it also requires a phone number just to get started.

I wish all social networks were like this, it would cut down on bots and spam significantly.

I must say, I loled at this:

> hello is the first social network built on loves, not likes.

I know that the intention is great; it's just that I automatically pictured this as a scene in "Silicon Valley" (the TV show).

Totally. It reminds me of the hooli web page: http://hooli.com

What is hooli?

Silicon Valley's theoretical-lawsuit-friendly version of Google.

It's interesting to me that a lot of shows do this, and I'm not sure why. Silicon Valley has Hooli. Veep has Clovis. Person of Interest had "Fetch and Retrieve", which honestly guys are you even trying. None of these shows seems to shy away from portraying other large tech companies, and it's trivially obvious even to someone nowhere near the industry what these ciphers are supposed to represent. I don't know of a case where anyone has actually gotten sued over depicting an actual company. So I'm not sure whether these "not really Google but yeah totally Google" companies are meant to defend against that threat, or exist for some other reason of which I'm not aware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)

Watch it someday, it's hilarious, particularly the first season.

What a disappointment! I hoped it would be a site for hooligans, where you have 'hates' instead of 'likes' :-)

and ironically, it is not, twitter first had 'love' or 'heart' for tweets, but then changed it to like

Oh, I hadn't seen your post. I was worrying that no one had commented about it.

"We are living in a strange time. We hide behind our devices, ignoring the people around us."

So... a mobile app is the solution?

I mean, the people who have adopted Pokemon Go are now connecting with each other outside in their cities' public spaces, often reconnecting with old friends to go out together. I'm not sure this was intentional on the app designers' part (maybe "go outside" was, but the residual social effects of getting so popular so fast in combination with "go outside" probably wasn't so well-appreciated, since they deployed v. 1.0 as a mostly-egocentric game).

There is the definite potential for a device to change the way we hide behind devices into an opportunity to meet people and connect.

Right but don't criticize devices if your solution is to use a device?

When all you have is a hammer..

If you click on the turkish version of the announcement, "gay" is replaced with "different" (in Turkish of course). Do people in Turkey say "farkli" (different) when they mean "gay"? Checked and all other translations actually say gay or homosexual.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160708083122/http://orkut.com/...

I think in some contexts using word "farklı" (different) may imply the meaning. However, in the Turkish version of the article this is not the case.

Most proper word for "gay" in Turkish is "eşcinsel". He should have used it. "gay" is also used as a loan word in informal speech.

I don't know what ratio of native English speakers know that the only meaning of "gay" was something like "happy" at some point. I know as a foreigner I learned this original meaning after years. I guess it's not surprising there may be borrowed, adopted terms in other languages.

Yeah, another prominent English surname that these days is sure to cause laughs in some circles: Cockburn. Though it's not pronounced as one might think.

The ironic thing is that "cock" is formally a synonym for rooster, just as "pussy" is formally a synonym for a cat. It is irritating that the slang made the meaning vulgar, and it is even more irritating that this happened because of political correctness.

Orkut was our go-to social network as teens, before we all moved to Facebook in 2009. I'm was going to join this out of sheer nostalgia, but it appears to be lacking a web app.

I'm curious as to why they went with ONLY native Android / iOS apps. That will not only drive away people like me, who prefer to use things from a desktop web browser, but also people in developing countries who might not have access to a smartphone. That sounds like straying away from "I want to help connect people" to something more like "I want to help connect people who own an Android / iOS device".

> people in developing countries who might not have access to a smartphone

I live across a river from Burma, and I can tell you it's at least an order of magnitude easier for people there to get access to a smartphone than a desktop or laptop.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-fa...

I mean, I agree that it's a deal-killer for people like you and me, but the idea that it would make it less suitable for underdeveloped countries is just silly.

I live in a first-world country, I do have an Android phone, but I'm always out of internal storage and need to delete apps. Most people in my friends/family circle are in the same situation. So even if we have Android, services based exclusively on mobile apps have an accessibility problem for us. I suppose this problem will be larger in places like Burma, where smartphones will be cheaper and older on average.

Most devices in the developing world have micro SD slots.

Mobile app means access (due to broken permission systems) to a user's contact, location, mic and camera. Also, captive web browser (user clicks a web link and that web page gets shown inside the app, instead of on the phone's own browser) means the app can track what sites you visit and for how long ("Dear buzzfeed.com, would you like to buy our stats for visits to your website?").

"broken permission systems" is just Android. iOS could offer more fine-grained options, but it's solid.

It's easier to suck up your information, access your contact lists and physical location, when you're stuck on a mobile app.

This, I believe, is the correct answer. I refuse to give most companies that much power.

> people in developing countries who might not have access to a smartphone

People in such countries are actually more likely to have access to a smartphone, specifically one of the myriad cheap Android devices one finds all over the world, than to a desktop web browser.

People use mobile more than desktop on social apps so it makes a lot of sense. Eventually there will be a web/desktop version as well(if it catches on). Shortly said mobile web sucks so a native app is better than a broken website.

Doesn't it suck for anything but simplest forms of communication?

I mean, I just can't stand touch-typing anything but very short messages. Whenever there's any conversation that involves more typing than posting a meme picture and replying with "lol" I run for a real terminal, with a real physical keyboard.

I don't know about others, but for me being significantly slowed down with typing is frustrating. And I hope to believe I'm not an outstandingly slow with touchscreen keyboards...

Services are becoming more and more "Mobile first" in recent times.

I do appreciate the importance of optimizing for mobile as a priority but share your sentiment in the poor experience left for those who us who actually like to use our laptops/desktops for some activities.

Watch the trend reverse once form factors that are both portable and usable as primary workstations (for light work) become the norm (like MS and Ubuntu's vision of a phone that can become your laptop in a dock)

Native app first is the problem, not mobile first.

Web apps designed for mobile first often give you a better desktop experience. Designers making a desktop web app feel obligated to fill the screen with stuff to make it clear that they did a lot of work. But if they start with mobile it stays focused on what's important. Additional interface element for desktop end up as actual enhancements instead of distractions.

Based on the size of the app and the interface, it's not native but some sort of webapp bundled with it's engine which means they could have done a mobile website, but my guess is that they know that if they do this no one will download the app atm.

Wow, this has to be the worst social network I have ever made the mistake of joining. And I joined Google+. The UI is sloppy. The navigation is atrocious. The personas are needlessly complex. The cartoon "Archer" character is childish. It's a mutant spawn of Facebook and Instagram.

I see no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

I'm just sitting here wondering how much they paid for the domain name hello.com

Hello.com was a product of Picasa when it was acquired by Google. Given Orkut's history at Google, I assume he was able to get a good deal on it.

Wow, talk about a nice benefit! I wonder if he had to pay taxes on its potential value? I'll take my stock options in small unmarked domain names, please.

I had the same question about orkut.com. Did Google allow him to keep or buy the orkut.com domain when it shut down the Orkut service?

seems like google is actually an investor in his new hello.com venture.

They should put dev page at www.hello.com/world just my 2c

They should also run an TCP echo server on port 7.

That was exactly my first thought when i read "hello.com"

Read/Write API or it didn't happen. There was a time a few years ago when I thought companies were moving in the direction of ensuring their products could be extended through APIs first and foremost and launching those APIs a the time of product launches, but either I dreamed it or that time seems passed.

Is there some kind of organization out there whose mission is (at least partly) to pressure companies into providing data import/export and full access API's to prevent lock-in, data loss and such?

Since when was there an obligation to provide an API for every new platform release?

Frankly, I get the sense that a lot of people want an API so they can build their own little businesses on top of someone else's good idea, only to feel shafted when the originator of that good idea goes in a different direction.

I guess I've been burned enough by drastic application/feature reworks, policy changes, and product shutdowns that I'm extremely wary of any new product that doesn't offer a publicly documented programmatic option for getting data in and out (and preferably basic interaction). Maybe my experience is unusual, but I can't believe it that more people aren't clamoring for APIs or at least data export options from their services before wasting time getting tied to them.

The HTTPS version of the site presents a cert for hello.com, which breaks the site for me.

both https://www.hello.com and https://hello.com work for me on FF

The orkut.com https site.

Yikes, crashed during registration, then after restarting it wouldn't let me upload a square profile picture (blocking progress on the crop screen), then once I took another picture it gave me a "Backend error" on the next screen, once again blocking progress. I give up. I hate to be negative, and I usually would cut a new app some slack, but the whole reason I am trying this is that I expected a high level of quality given the background of the founder.

Crashed 3 times on android before I could complete the registration.

UI needs work, if they add more countries they can not expect me the scroll down a list of 200+ items to find my phone country prefix. Just let me enter it.

For some reason on some pages the hamburger menu button is an actual hamburger while on other activities it is the standard 3 lines. I wonder if that is on purpose or a mistake.

Guess it managed to upload your phone ID and other stuff just fine in the process.

To the developers: Give me a website or leave me alone.

Yeah, I am always hesitant to give my phone number, but I had enough trust in this app since the founder had a solid background. I don't often give up that info. I regret that I did now...

Why oh why limit it from being available in countries like India? You want users, we got users. Can never comprehend behind a geo wall for things like this (and can totally understand why Netflix wasn't earlier).

PS: I wonder how much hello.com cost, and how did he have control over the orkut.com domain?

I wouldn't surprised if this is an attempt to get it established in the states / Europe before it gets popular in India / Brazil. One of the reasons a lot of people left Orkut is because it got too popular in Brazil and the default language on a lot of user groups / communities became Portuguese.

Yeah that was quite annoying, to say the least.

Any and every group would be spammed to death by Brazilians until you gave up and left them one by one.

That would make sense, except that most Indian Internet users use English online. Especially those who have been on the Internet long enough to have used Orkut when it was around.

> We even got married and had kids because of orkut.

This has a totally different meaning in finnish as orkut means "orgasms" in casual speak.

Wait, so the guy's name means orgasms? Oh dear oh dear. This must cause problems for Turkish men in Finland. Kind of like the unfortunate Indian family name Dikshit.

Ufuk Uras is also Turkish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ufuk_Uras

AFAIK it might be more common than you think. I have a female friend who's firstname is Fanny and another one who's lastname is Cocq. They both expect a few laugh when they introduce themselves in english speaking countries.

Dick is a english name. I don't see the problem.

My last name is koc (turkish..) and it's funny to observe english speaking people trying not to spell it like "cock".

Most English speakers would not know that the sound of 'c' in the Turkish alphabet is closer to the 'j' in 'joy'. The presence of the alphabet 'ç' also adds to more confusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_alphabet#Sounds

Flikr originally had a hard core community of a certain demographic in the Netherlands.

[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Flikker

The 'kut' part in 'orkut' means pussy (as in vagina) in Dutch. It was always clear to me from the get go why orkut wouldn't succeed in the Netherlands.

As a side note, meaning of the full name: Orkut: Blessed city (old Turkish) Büyükkökten: from big root (Turkish, literal translation)

well you do need to have orgasms to have kids.

A. Major bummer I can only use a mobile device. First choice for this sort of thing is my desktop/PC.

B. I had a lot of issues signing up. White screens of death, inability to progress further. Had to restart the app no less than 4 times to complete registration.

C. Now that I am registered, I see a "Welcome to your folio" screen that doesn't let me do anything.

What did I just download?

Bold move to launch it without a web frontend. I browsed the 'best of' gallery which looks nice, but I haven't seen anything yet that would entice me to grab my phone and go through both a sign up and an app installation process.

From the outside it looks like a Reddit meets Imgur type of application, perhaps like Pinterest. None of those have really strong communities in my opinion, not as strong as for example Facebook friends are. How are the community members connected to eachother?

> How are the community members connected to eachother?

Good question, is it tied to phone number or email adress?

I wish someone would do the social network that is crossbred between indieweb and diaspora/friendica, that would seem like the way forward at least.

For some reason, orkut.com is serving an SSL certificate for hello.com (the new social network the site is referring to).

Getting a certificate error here. I'm using HTTPS Everywhere. So I assume they didn't anticipate people using the HTTPS version of the site, and misconfigured it?

It is strange for me in a era with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIN to imagine a new social network.

Nothing against it, just sound as a enormous work to learn this soon-to-be-sensation of the internet. We keep looking for ways to improve our social relationship and skills, but in the end we still in from of a computer texting and prioritizing the people that is far, instead of the people that is closer.

It seems to me that social networks are really good at keeping closer those that are far and keeping far, those that are closer.

This looks incredibly familiar to me. We basically tried the same idea at Bunch starting around 2012. The core idea was the same: connect people based around sharing content related to their interests. We made it into the thousands of users but ultimately weren't able to build enough traction. I think there still might be room for something like Hello.

The website where you share content based on your interests is called Tumblr. It solves the personas problem too.

What's the solution to the personas problem on Tumblr? (I'm not an active Tumblr user.) Interestingly enough, we did see a lot of the type of content relevant to this on Tumblr. We built a Tumblr import tool to allow people to pull in their content from Tumblr. We also cross-posted some of our content out to Tumblr.

The red flag for me is all the gamification (points/coins etc.), which is clearly all about increasing engagement for the sake of advertising, and strongly contrasts the opening message from Orkut ("I did it all for the love").

It feels like a college project. Some of the stuff seems ironic: Comic sans in onboarding, burger icon for menu, the weird character (I imagine one artsy person in the group probably made that character in their free time and they insisted "Oh! I've got a mascot we can use...").

I wonder how public this is?

I've been thinking a lot about social networks recently, and what i want (as far as i can tell) is the ability to conversationally share with a group, but in an either private or ephemeral manner. The goal of ephemeral being, i don't like the permanency of the web. I want to join twitter, following tags and/or individuals i like, but i don't want anything i say to be locked in time.

I'd like to build real relationships, with real people, and have it feel like real life. Where there is no record of everything[1]. I'm sick of everything being recorded in stone.

[1]: Note that some record makes for a good UX. Logging onto FB to see what someone posted yesterday is nice. Beyond a relatively short timeframe though.. meh.

Something like Snapchat for text only would be amazing. You post a thought, or maybe a link to an article. People can do the typical like / comment stuff. If a post doesn't receive any comments for 48 hours it is deleted from your profile and other people's feeds.

Ephemeral Reddit

What was the eventual outcome of Affinity Engines suing Google over copyright infringement with Orkut, the product? Back in 2004 they claimed Orkut, the person, copied source code when he left the company. I've always been curious what happened to that suit.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB108870389649953006

Looks like it was settled: https://dockets.justia.com/docket/california/candce/5:2005cv...

I think people who build these kind of services greatly overestimate peoples' desire to "connect with people who share your passions".

I tried the app. It's lame. Super childish UI, things cost coins (you buy more coins), looks like a quasi dating app for teens - there is actually no one there! And the Android app crashes a lot

Orkut was a million times better. Wonder how much they paid for hello.com

Not my intention to bikeshedding but I think it is possible to change the configuration so the server has a valid certificate for Orkut.com and not just for hello.com

It's a bit ironic that this new social network that is supposed to connect people is not available in my country...

I must say it's light & easy to use. Most importantly really fast and minimal taps. This is very important for any new app.

As for the mobile only situation I would say this is a good business decision to minimise (not eliminate) spam accounts and possibly would be a good idea if people get indexed into search or people share this will promote installations. It worked well with IG this concept so I'd say in its early conception it was a wise move.

It's also very obvious that this team has experience with social networking.

Now for my negative comment, I'd say gaining traction in the app era of today is hard when it comes to social networking due to the reason is that everyone is bombarded.

I would recommend focusing on the need or the feeling of why one would want to open the app again which as of now I am finding hard to see personally. This is the most crucial part and All energy needs to put towards exposing the app in an organic way with that need.

As much as of a no brainer it sounds we have seen previous start ups fall from this lack of identification

Teach me. How did you get through registration? (I'm on Android, and typing in my 4-digit code just whites everything out. I can't finish registration!)

Hit back, then when it asks if you want to leave registration hit continue. (I'm stuck on a later screen though.)

Mobile only doesnt make any sense. I am not sitting on my mobile all the time, I am on my laptop, my gaming desktop, my android tablet, and now a beautiful surface. And I rarely ever install an app, I prefer web sites mainly because I hate the tracking, the permission grab, the clutter, the push notifications, and everything that comes with an app.

Shameless marketing bullshit. All they want is our money (personal data). I don't have to install the app to already know that you have to agree to allow access to everything on our phones.

Your cert mismatch does not inspire confidence. https://cl.ly/3C213w1L3Y0b

The "personas"/ interests aren't working for me. This might be better solved with a more organic approach like tags that get clustered. I was hoping to get into pottery and Japanese language. The closest the app offers is "crafts". No thanks. At the same time I must choose five interests. I guess I'm back to Pinterest and Instagram for pottery and Tumblr for Japanese language.

Edit: those other apps also made it way easier to get to interesting content quickly. On hello, I finally found a way to see profiles of other people with the same persona. However, looking at their profile, I feel like I'm just stalking some stranger rather than getting valuable content related to my interests.

Except there's already a social network called Hello that was launched a year before them: http://www.myhello.co

hello.com must have been really expensive! Did they check for trademark conflicts beforehand?

Wasn't Orkut dominant in Brazil? I suppose they killed it to pump Google+? Anyway it makes you wonder if Google Cloud will really survive. Can the world's #2 public tech company by market cap really afford to be a distant third (fourth?) in a market?

It was big in Brazil and India. I saw the transition from Orkut to Facebook in India. I arrived in India with a Facebook account in 2005 and nobody was on Facebook, so I created an Orkut account. By 2008 Orkut was gone, Facebook was all everyone knew.

I think it (Google Cloud) can. I suspect there's a pretty big difference between being a dominant social network vs being a dominant cloud platform. People evaluating cloud platforms are going to be looking at cost + functionality in a much more pragmatic way compared to people just joining whatever network happens to have the highest number of their friends already registered. While there are still certainly network effects for platforms (third party tools, people with experience, etc...) Google can really compete on cost + performance by nature of their existing scale without needing to throw tons of money at the problem like another competitor would

One of my worries is that there seems to be the "Google way of doing things" which the rest of the world can't easily adjust to, the way Google insider policies can dictate. If they're too much of a special snowflake it'll slow adoption. Hope you're right though.

I believe it was very popular in a few countries. Brazil and India come to mind but I'm not sure.

WOOF.

200 hello coins – $0.99 1100 hello coins – $4.99 2300 hello coins – $9.99 4800 hello coins – $19.99 13000 hello coins – $49.99

Feel slightly sorry for ello

Same here. However ello stayed competetive in the niche of a social network for artist and creators, which is probably fine for the people behind it.

Yeah these guys got the H they always needed

its okay, they will probably combine into one company...

I tried this, because Orkut was different from all other modern social networks, and I wanted to see if this one was going to be too.

Orkut didn't have a "news feed" where other people's content would appear before your eyes, feeding the ego of content creators and making people talk to themselves and about themselves, post pictures of themselves and all that.

This thing is the same. I started getting random "loves" (which are the same as "likes") from strangers wanting to gain XP after 10 minutes using the app.

No web version isn't the killer for me, its the terrible design.

The logo sucks, the app sucks, the colors are like Homer's makeup shotgun from the Simpsons. I downloaded it just because I always try new things. There isn't foresight as far as I see for username/URLification for web and its not focused on being photography of in progress life so its more like tumblr than it is instagram.

It looks like another social network built by engineers. The ONLY thing it has going for it is the URL, hello.com.

I always loved how one service launches in a 400m country, but not in some 10m population countries.

hello! My name is Ashley and I'm the Community Manager at hello. Stumbled upon this and wanted to see if I could answer any questions you may have? I see a lot of great feedback here and have passed this along to Orkut and our team. Cheers!

I thought just the other day "if only there was another social network I could use instead of Facebook (and convince my friends to join it)...", so seeing there's a new social network by the guy who made Orkut sounded like good news.

However, from the website, I'm not sure "connect with people and content around your passions" is what I want. I'll wait and see how this pans out.

And the "passions" seem to be very coarse. Photographer, baseball fan...

I can see those bogging-down like the genetic Twitter hash-tags. Can you imagine trying to follow #photography?

Yeah, to me it's also unclear what their values are, won't be joining now but will see how it pans out...

and convince my friends to join it

To compete with FB you need to launch on day 1 with all of FB's major features. This is the mistake G+ made. Who cares about a social network with no Events for example?

At first I thought Google released their new messaging app, but then realized I was thinking about "Allo"[1] not "Hello".

[1]. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2016/05/allo-duo-apps-messag...

Hello used to be some kind of picture messaging app related to Picasa if I remember correctly.

PSA: There doesn't seem to be an obvious way to delete one's account.

If you're thinking of just giving it a go, keep that in mind.

How many apps can one have on a phone? Or how many would one want to have?

Each app would keep running its background processes and such; keep draining battery.

Maybe people don't bother checking what permissions does an app want; from reading your contacts to stuff on the SD card.

Nonetheless, it's intriguing to see that people still see room for new social networks.

Well, I tried signing up, and can't get through the registration. Apparently my email is not a valid email. I tried exiting and restarting, and it noticed and asked if I wanted to start over or continue where I left off. So I tapped continue and it sent me back to the first screen and erased the info I entered....

edit: Managed to try again, and now my email is valid. It's crashed several times in the registration process so far....

double edit: I can only choose 5 personas?! What if I have more than 5 total interests like I'm sure everyone does? (For anyone who hasn't registered, there's a least 100 choices)

Final edit: It crashed at least 5 times before I could get to any sort of feed. Every "persona" is just filled with pictures of memes sometimes related to the topic. All the other tabs are empty. And there doesn't seem to be any way to delete your account. Just awful....

Limited to some countries (I can't pick my countries phone prefix and you can't skip that part)? Why?

I'm the age Of Snapchat and Instagram Stories I'm not sure how a Facebook clone can be successful

Based on nothing more than 30seconds looking at the page, it seems to be attempting to connect strangers via common interests than by being a facebook clone which connects already established friends.

Google+ already tried that. Why do they beat a death horse?

Ex-googlers stuck in the same mindset, is it that strange though?

So .. Reddit :P

It's actually teenager-oriented snapchat clone with gamification. And phone-only too.

The gamification alone would be a reason for me not to join.

In the time when every mobile telephone and every computer have a web browser, why would I want to download a proprietary binary executable application for "hello" to run on a proprietary operating system on my mobile telephone? Um, no, that is not how I am going to play.

I downloaded this application a few weeks ago, and I had such high hopes. Connecting to people based on interests is such a great idea. I think it's a significant reason that Reddit is so strong, and I would love to see a product take it to a deeper level (multi-interest connections).

I was immediately disappointed by hello. The pre-defined interests are limiting and the presentation is nothing more than an instagram feed. Over a period of days, people were adding me as connections, and I had no idea why. None of it made any sense. When I log into the app, all I saw was random content completely unrelated to any interest at all.

This isn't about connecting based on interests. It's about being bored and needing instant gratification from notifications.

Bit disappointing it's not available in my country.

no no no no god no

It looks like a points based social network[0]. So I doubt they're going to be similar to snapchat/fb. With this I don't think many people are going to take it seriously, because some are going to take it very seriously and try to get to the top[1]. This is going to one of the many reasons that this will go to crap. This won't be living long enough to justify the purchase of the domain name. I hope I'm wrong because I hate fb buying/doing everything

[0]http://imgur.com/pCCrLW6 [1]:http://imgur.com/a/juSKP

I figured I would try it even though there's no web app... It might be nice to get in on the ground floor...

but there's no desktop app, either.

I don't live in my phone. I live at my desktop/laptop. On vacation, I've spent long periods on my phone without a desktop/laptop and the power of the user interface is not sufficient for me.

Steve Jobs said we should all use phones instead of desktops, because we all drive cars and not trucks. That's true for the majority, but I am a "truck driver." I want my freedom to exercise power, not the constrains and strain of using a phone to be social and do business.

Perhaps a tablet would work, but I find my iPad to be a media-consuming device, not a media-leadership device.

If you are a "truck diver" you may like TagsChat: same concept, web based. The UX and colours are being replaced in a few days by a new version, exiting beta. You may try it and give me your opinion! Thank you, Matteo (TagsChat founder)

Still... no love for free software.

Well, hello there and welcome back (I guess).

What I'm wondering is does the Internet need another social network today, in late(ish) 2016? With the sheer number of people online today (be it via the web or mobile) and the undeniable usefulness of social networking to the users at large, I'd say the answer is yes, sort of.

Would he (they) be able to (re)gain critical mass? I'd say my guess is as good as anybody's guess, but with the still lingering brand recall of orkut of the past, he has a better shot at it then, let's say, a totally new entrant.

Also, I did not find any info on how this is funded - it would certainly be interesting to know something about this.

Okay, I'm going to be open minded and I want to try it.

What will you do with these private data? Is your company aiming for a privacy quagmire on par with Facebook (loaded question I know, but it also shows what my worries and reservations are).

Strange move. The social networks are dying afaik. To me it looks like social is integrated more and more with other things you do every day. Even Facebook seems to be struggling. This is not the time for another social network. Maybe there won't be any serious time for social networks again.

Maybe a businessmodel would be to think of social networks not as a standalone thing but as middleware that connects other services like video, short messages, quotes, cat pictures, games, work environments. Make a social middleware business model, not a new app.

Crashed 3 times in installation (Nexus 5X).

Finally get it installed, and there's nothing in the home area but bad gamification.

If it _has_ to have gamification it should be linked-in style, tracking profile completeness. But there is no way I'm installing a social game on my phone. The social connections should be their own reward.

I'd love to have a new social platform to meet people and connect with old friends without the creepiness of FB. Just basic communication fabric to share & communicate. This isn't that.

So, this is Google? I approach Google "consumer products" mostly chronologically, now, and also with an eye to "dog food".

If it came after Docs ("Drive", whatever you want to call it, now), and/or it's not being used heavily, even at first primarily, within Google itself, I won't invest (my time, effort, learning, data) in it.

Simple as that. Because odds are, it won't stick around, nor get better.

Is this a Google app? "hello.com" feels like very expensive domain! feels a bit downplayed. It would also explain the lack of desktop support.

Yeah this is confusing. The domains appear to belong to Google, but then the apps are listed under "Hello Network, Inc.". The overall language and design seem to be a bit unpolished for a Google product too.

Been fooling around with it. The UI is very buggy (using iPhone). Despite this, it is attractive. I would like to see better support for doing purely text posts. Otherwise I don't see much of a difference to Instagram. I like the personas idea, but I'd like it to go a step further: say if I had a writer persona and wanted to have a nom de plume different to my own, that would be very useful.

The original creator of this product graduated from my school. Stories about him was told all the time. He was a very eccentric guy. Deserves best.

By the way, I don't think this is "new".

The page has been up since (at least) June 27, 2016 - https://web.archive.org/web/20160627134942/http://orkut.com

The first release of Hello listed in TAS is 1.0.8 on Nov 17, 2015.

Hello hello...

Oh wait...you don't send SMS to my country even though I am Irish but without access to an Irish mobile number (Nepal).

Goodbye hello...

Update. I posted one photo. I got rewards, which was like, little winks and a "kick me" sign I can put on I think someone elses profile. This app fucking sucks officially. Who signed off on releasing this? Its like orkut's poor design plus candy crush game incentivation. Goodbye, hello.

At the moment it feels very much like Instagram except with the ability to filter by tags or something.

Only with Instagram I can curate my content based on who I follow and they also provide a better means of discovery.

As a new social media platform I don't see yet what this offers that will allow it to take off.

Not super excited about this, but if the attention scares facebook into improving its user experience, I'm all for it. Kind of like how github got some bad press and competition from gitlab and then magically started pushing out features people had been requesting for years.

The gamification seems really unnecessary for a social network. It may improve retention rates, but only for a very small demographic (that I'm definitely not a part of).

The consensus in the comments seems to be that there are some other bad decisions that went into it too...

In the new version of Tagschat.com (same concept, web-based) you won't have gamification, but only endorsements by whom recognize your knowledge in the field of your interest.

I'm not a social networking fan, but this is very interesting. We'll see where it goes.

The bigger question is what is their business model? Same as fb, to sell ads?

You also get access to a lot of user information.

Performing analytics on user content gives you even more information.

Information means $$.

Is there a single company outside Facebook that actually makes money this way? Seems like a complete myth like the idea that Google "sells your personal information".

I fail to see anything interesting or new (except the story).

Don't really care for yet another social network, but the letter Orkut wrote was beautiful.

File under “refined marketing ploy”.

I love how confident people seem to be that this won't be successful (the truth is I'm still shocked that airbed and breakfast was so popular ;-D). I for one don't mind a gamified version of Facebook that's about real world interaction.

HNers are just as terrible at predicting the (tech) future as regular people. Maybe even worse because they tend to be biased against social software.

If you believed HN users' tech predictions, Snapchat would've shutdown a month after launch.

What is snapchat? ;-)

Male or female, honestly? In 2016?

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Not really. Despite it going on for a while now sadly quite a few sign-up processes[0] haven’t yet caught up. I understand grandparent’s irritation about a freshly created social network making such a blunder.

I may be stating the obvious, but for those who are wondering…

* One issue is that this information is sensitive for many, and begs the question why do you require it.

* Even if it’s not that sensitive for me, I still don’t get why are you asking. Are you planning to pivot into a dating app later?

* I personally know quite a few persons whose legally determined[1] sex may well differ from how they’d describe themselves for the purposes of, say, dating. Are you intending to compare this information with my gov records in future for ID verification purposes later? The straightforward binary selector kind of hints at it.

* Could it be that you just went with the cargo cult—didn’t really think about whether you need it or not and decided to collect as much info as used to be perceived acceptable just in case?

[0] Most popular ones like Twitter and Facebook, of course, are not among those.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_assignment#History_2 (criteria in various countries are evolving and can be difficult to keep track of)