Review our new social game, theWorldChat: Chat using your FB pic. | Hacker News Reader

Review our new social game, theWorldChat: Chat using your FB pic.

theworldchat.com

10 pointsrebelvc20 comments

Too bad it's not actually anonymous at all.

You can easily identify anyone by viewing the source of their FB pic. For example:

  http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/hs444.snc4/48985_665523839_4409_q.jpg

profile ID is 665523839, which you can plug in to see all their details: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=665523839

Haha yep. Anyone know of a way to hide that? We might have to save the pic from fb. That would be a pain though.

It shouldn't be too much of a pain to do. I do something like this on http://thingist.com (Not caching facebook photos, caching the randomly generated 3x3 pictures that it gives you if you don't connect with facebook [the script to generate the pictures is expensive])

The python to do it would look something like this:

def cache_fb_photo(fb_uid,cache_name):

     import urllib
     import time

     request = urllib.urlopen("https://graph.facebook.com/%s/picture" % (fb_uid))

     photo = request.read()

     photo_location = "/path/to/photo/cache/cache_name"
     cached_photo = open(photo_location, "w")
     cached_photo.write(photo)
     cached_photo.close()

This may or may not violate facebook's ToS. Obviously it would take more than this to actually put it into production, but this would kindof work.

There really isn't a way around that (as far as I can tell) beyond caching them on your server.

Your relaxed attitude to privacy is enough to make me never use that site, sorry.

The fact that it is a 'pain' to make the effort to protect someones identity means you're probably in the wrong business.

While the site itself is interesting, I don't like that it posted a message to my Facebook wall without asking or telling me. (I know I gave it permission to but still, I'd like to be notified before that occurs)

This is against the API rules of Facebook, remove it asap.

What part of the Tos? The app is explicitly asking you for permission to post things to your wall.

I agree we should remove that feature at some point. Let me ask you how is different from how farmville build up traffic.

"Farmville does it" isn't a valid excuse. Be kind to users. Don't sink to the lowest common denominator.

This isn't a game, there are no game mechanics built into this. All you do is click the 'Next' or 'Accept' buttons. People will obviously only accept chats with people with an interesting or attractive profile image.

Another issue I find is that I am unable to 'chat' with anyone. It makes me feel like you site is padding with bots that don't speak back to you. They just sit there.

I don't see this site 'blowing' up or even becoming that cool. My recommendation is not to quit your day job. Use your skills on another web site.

Really? What separates you from chat roulette besides one is video and one is text? What is suppose to keep my coming back to your app? There is no value to this IMHO, others may fell different, but don't ask for a review and then down vote the honest ones. After all, I didn't make another account to post a comment and upvote comments that benefit this post.

Flagged, given it posts on your wall without permission and is misleading about anonymity, I think this post should be removed to stop other HNers using it until those issues are fixed.

The site will be great once it reaches critical mass traffic!

This account was registered two hours ago and has never made a submission or a comment other than this one.

Charles (person that submitted this), if you want people to check out your app, fine, awesome. They're doing that right now. I think people are offering constructive criticism about it.

Blatantly registering puppet accounts to try and get your site onto the front-page is just bad form.

Charles didn't create the bonzhai account. My name is Alan! This is my account.

Do you think this has potential? It just launched so the number of people chatting is not quite there yet.

I think this has more potential than chatroulette due to its lack of anonymity.

The fact that users can be (at least partially) identified by their facebook profiles, should prevent predatorial behaviour.

I would include a three strike policy where your users could denounce rude and abusive behaviour, and after 3 complaints, the accused could be banned from using the application.

Be careful and smart about that 3 strike policy. Remember the ability to "warn" back on AIM? It got really annoying. How are you going to keep people from abusing this 3 strike system?

Also, identification of a Facebook profile does not necessarily prevent predatorial behavior. It doesn't promote it, sure, but anyone can make a believable fake profile.

More potential than chatroulette is a bold claim considering they came first. Despite that, your app does have potential, and personally, I would use it, at least the concept of it. Right now it's not very usable. It rotates through like 5 people and they're not necessarily 'there'.

Yup, definitely.

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