Ask HN: Review my Twilio SMS app, friendpods | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my Twilio SMS app, friendpods

friendpods.com

16 pointsGraffitiTim27 comments

This app is only a few days into development, but I wanted to get some feedback as early as possible. There are some important features that are obviously missing, like the ability to edit or leave friendpods. If you need anything like that done, please email friendpods@gmail.com and I'll take care of it.

All feedback is welcome, but what I'm most interested in is if/how you could see yourself using this. If you need some inspiration, try making a friendpod for people you go out with on weekends, and give it a whirl tonight.

Congrats! How are you liking the twilio API? And what is this built in/on?

The Twilio API is fantastic; I was able to build a basic demo in an hour or two. The combination of the simple API with the knowledge that they're doing all sorts of crazy stuff behind the scenes is pretty impressive.

The app is built using PHP/MySQL and a bit of jQuery. edit: and Google WebFont loader, just to try it out.

They appear to suffer from outages sometimes though, which might be a problem.

Can you elaborate on that?

Few comments on minor details

Your definition of what friendpod is - includes the friendpod word itself. Also I had read 4 lines to get to the line what friendpod is actually is. It could be reworded as

friendpod is a group texting service. When one of you sends a text it goes to everyone in your friendpod. Use it for - your roommates - people you go out with on weekends - friends from home - a few coworkers

Friends from home ?. It doesn't make sense to me.

Also the other thing, there is a similar named website - friendspod.com ( a service in India) offering vaguely similar service. Choice of website name could have been better.

My $0.0.2

Thanks for the suggestions. I agree the explanation copy could use some work. I was worried "group texting" might sound like one person being able to blast a message out to a group, but I'm not sure.

Thanks for pointing out friendspod, I hadn't seen that. Agreed, a bit awkward.

I made a similar thing a few weeks ago (though much more crude) to use amongst a group of friends who were living in the same apartment complex. One thing I realized after I made it is that this general system of texting with Twilio is not going to be cheap since if you have a lot of users each text could cost a good portion of a dollar, nevermind if there were a conversation. You going to foot the bill or have you found a way to make it cheaper?

I'm footing the bill, and yes it could easily get expensive. I'm waiting to see if/how people use it before figuring that out.

Top right image should show user being awesome, not you being awesome, because you are boring compared to the user (in their mind).

Good point, thanks.

edit: Improved it a bit based on your feedback

Here's a suggestion, since I wanted to build something similar at some point. You should allow the friends you text to send back a yes or a no as to whether their in or out (interested or not interested in doing the proposed event). I'm constantly having to text all my friends to find out if there are enough people interested for things that require a certain number of people. For instance, going out with 2 other friends.. not so fun. Going out with 4 other friends, it's a party. Playing Settlers of Catan with 1 other friend... not so fun. Playing Settlers with 3 other friends, game on!

You would add a trigger that would automatically send out confirmations that the thing is going down when the threshold is met. Easy-peasey.

Cool. You should check out GroupMe -- they have been working on a similar app based on twilio.

http://groupme.com/

I really like the conference feature, call the group number and it initiates a conference call with all group members.

IMO its pretty useless. Especially for iPhone users, like your example images - because i've texted my normal bunch of mates as a group before, the iphone keeps that message together with the group, and every week if i want to send them a text i just find the last message i sent to them as a group, and their numbers are still there.

i suppose it makes sense if you don't have this feature on your phone, but its likely most phones will follow apple and have this feature in the near future.

also, more importantly i think, with no details on your homepage about costs, there is no way i'd sign up for something like this. For all i know it could rebill at $9.99 a week or something.

With friendpod, when someone replies it acts like a Reply All, which is what makes this useful in my opinion. You can also add the group to your contacts. It doesn't charge you.

Ah, completely missed that point about the Reply All kind of function

In this sentence (You can add up to 6 people, but less is fine.), you should use the word "fewer" instead of "less".

Fewer is for finite, less is for infinite. (fewer apples, less flour)

Strangely, I didn't like seeing the "We don't spam." I didn't even suspect it with a cell number.

I understand it's a small website and all, but perhaps a tiny privacy policy would be better?

More thoughts:

It occured to me that a lot of my friends probably don't have unlimited SMS, which is fine, but you might want a way to blacklist a number? Everything is all fun till money gets involved, after all =\

Looks good, but I'd like too know more about how it works on the homepage. A few things:

1. Do you text a specific number, and then it broadcasts it to the entire network? If not, I think that'd be great, because when replying to the message, things get hard again.

2. Does it work internationally (e.g. Australia, Canada, UK)? If not, specify on the homepage!

Keep it up!

Thanks!

1. Yeah, it sends everyone a specific number to add to their contacts. Everyone in the friendpod sends and receives texts from that number. (If you make a second friendpod you get a second number.)

2. Ah, good point. Twilio SMS only works in US for now.

pt 2. So I noticed. from Singapore. :P Like what I read so far, can't wait for it to launch international. Promising work.

If I remember correctly, this is what Twitter was when it started. You may want to see what issues they ran into that caused them to change their product. Maybe that will help you know what to tackle and what to avoid. This seems like a service that could be useful. Mailing lists for SMS.

If I'm not mistaken, early Twitter allowed you to follow people, so it was still 1:many communication. I thought of the idea for friendpod because it seems like "few:few" communication isn't very well addressed.

Are you going to enter it in the lunch with USV contest? http://blog.twilio.com/2010/09/win-lunch-with-albert-fred-an...

Looks a lot like groupme http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/25/groupme-born-at-techcrunch-...

Change the handwritten font. It's barely legible and feels kind of unprofessional. The top of the "F" of Friendpods seems cut off. And maybe provide some use cases for your app.

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