Ask HN: Should I build this? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I build this?

7 pointsfizx9 comments

I want to build a service called "Treefort", "Speakeasy", "Fight Club", or perhaps "Clique". It would be a social network with emphasis on group communication and privacy.

Sweet spots for the service include teenagers with nosy parents, gay people who want to show different sides of their personality to different groups, and people who just don't like the public-default models of the current social networks.

While the basic features would be the standard status updates and photos, I think there are some interesting points of differentiation:

1) No one knows whether you have an account. There is no people search. If I want to be friends with "Joe User", I type it in, and get the response "If Joe is using Speakeasy, and wants to be friends, we'll let you know."

2) Groups/friendlists/gangs are 1st-class citizens. When you accept a friend request, you put the user in a group. When you send a status update, you send it to a group.

3) Group management is made easy via good ui, intelligent defaults, and machine learning. The dropdown box to select the group receiving your status update defaults to your most recently messaged group. The dropdown box that asks you which group to put a new friend in defaults to the group with the most social-graph overlap with the new user. You may occasionally receive intelligent suggestions to add a user to a group. Imagine that you are using Speakeasy to share class notes in college, and one of your friends is taking the class, but isn't in your group. If enough other people in your group added him, then you might receive the suggestion that you should allow him in.

This service would be in many ways more email-like than social-network. It's something I wish existed. I'm not entirely sure how much money there is in this, but I think the overhead of running it would be relatively low.

Thoughts?

The problem with this isn't technical - it's getting users. You need users to get users, social networks aren't much fun if your friends haven't joined. Joel Spolsky has written a good article on this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html

That being said, and if you can solve this problem which will take up most of your time it's a nice idea.

The funny thing about this service is that users might only need a few immediate friends to join. It's not designed to keep track of your 300 acquaintances like facebook.

>There is no people search. If I want to be friends with "Joe User", I type it in, and get the response "If Joe is using Speakeasy, and wants to be friends, we'll let you know."

So you need to know enough info, and pass that to the app, to uniquely identify Joe against all the other Joes. That means rather than have the user themselves define their level of anonymity you have the "friends" breech the anonymity in order to locate them. Either that or you make it nearly impossible to actually link up with a person that you know well; and of course you get no feedback to know whether the system bugged out or not.

The basic case is that you have some friend overlap to reduce the search space.

I have thought about a passphrase/secret handshake to get a confirmed connection.

I think it already sounds complicated to manage, with all sorts of different groups.

If you look at FB, it is really simple. You don't have to decide what 'group' to publish your feed to, to add pictures to, etc.

You just are doing what you do. They've done an admiral job of keeping things simple.

If you can do all this and keep it simple, then you might be on to something.

I'm a bit surprised to see you start off with the name, as I think that normally comes after you've decided what to build.

I think it's cool. I am part of two cliques and I maintain forums for both but would love a more fully fleshed social environment. Go ahead!

EDIT: Make sure you think about group leaders - administrators/maintainers/whatever.

So... what's the revenue model?

It took the privacy kills for Facebook to get out of the red.

I have a great audience aggregation idea as well, but I can't seem to make it pay short of selling it off.

This idea is awesome. You clearly have a good grasp of social networks. My and all my friends wanna join it as soon as it comes up. You better think about scaling before launch because you'll probably have 100 million users overnight. That's figuring conservatively if only 1/5 Facebook users switch over. Then you'll be a billionaire just like Zuck instead of a talentless career software engineer.

Clearly this is poised to then take over from HTTP as the backbone of the internet, but by then I'll have probably started an electric car company or two and invented cold fusion.

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