Ask HN: Please Review WhereMyFriends.Be (Google Maps/Facebook mashup) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please Review WhereMyFriends.Be (Google Maps/Facebook mashup)

10 pointswesleyzhao22 comments

Hey HN,

We are the same students that released FavoriteThing.Me last week and we're back with another creation: http://wheremyfriends.be

This started as a very crude mash-up of the Facebook and Google Maps APIs that I put together one night after class. Then @ajaymehta and @dshipper saw it while in my room and we thought it would be a cool weekend project!

Basically it allows you to login with your Facebook and see a map with all of your friends on it based on their current location. We are using Google Maps' Latest Javascript API to geocode and place friends that we get from Facebook connect to show people just how worldly they are :)

We ran into some Google API rate limits, but fixed it by storing some of the geocoding data locally on our MySQL DB. We will learn MongoDB next.

We are also currently asking for permissions to publish to users' walls and are posting as soon as the map has finished loading. What do you guys think about this from a design standpoint? We are trying to balance increasing our virality with friction logging-in and potential user annoyance since we're posting on their wall (only once though).

This was meant to be something simple to create but really fun for users to play around with.

Any/all feedback would be great, and if you want to see the code we're releasing it on GitHub soon (after we sleep for 2 hrs and go to class).

[UPDATE] Our Facebook connect was down for several minutes because somehow our app was deleted from the Facebook developers page. We had to create a new Facebook app and change our config file. Should be up now. Sorry everyone! Thanks!

Personally I hate allowing applications to use my facebook account. (not your issue, just a personal thing) In good spirit, I tried it out and deleted it quickly after. I have 750 friends. It took about 30-40s to load them all up. Not a problem, since it did it all in real time, so I wasn't inpatient - good job on that part of the UX. I have friends all over the world so it's pretty cool to see those connections, but don't really have a particular use for this other than a one-time view. My friends who know I'm "worldly" dont need me to prove it to them :)

Your little team of hackers are on to some cool things. Good luck to you guys, you're on the right track!

Wow thanks so much for the kind words! It really means a lot and the encouragement is what keeps us going.

We do realize that it does happen to be a one-time view thing, and hopefully its still cool for the one-time!

The load time worried us in the beginning. We cut it down DRASTICALLY switching from Facebook REST API to using Fbql. We decided to load 20 users at a time and hoped people would enjoy watching it in real time.

Glad you liked it though :) Let us know if you have any more suggestions!

Thanks a lot for your response we appreciate the comments. And thanks for your thoughts on the UX a lot of time an effort went into making it load in real-time :)

I think people tend to forget how much "background work" goes into UX. I saw the pins flying down and I stayed on the page the whole time. If it was simply a progress bar that said "We are currently loading XYZ, which is X%" I would have left the page and then came back later (and maybe even forgotten). You kept my attention, that's important.

Thanks I agree completely. What users don't realize is that a graphical element that only shows up for a second or two on their screen, something that they might not even think about consciously but that enhances their overall perception of the site, was pored over for hours and hours by designers and programmers trying to figure out the best way to do it. I'm glad we were (moderately) successful in that.

Thank you so much! This means a lot to us.

Small things I immediately noticed:

- When initially loading, my map started out over India and I had to zoom out a bit to find where my markers were starting to drop. I don't list my current location on fb, which might explain that, but I do list where I went to school. Perhaps this could be used as a fallback for the default map center?

- The tooltip text for the markers have <b></b> markup tags in them that don't actually get rendered. Not huge, but it was a little distracting.

Other than that, cool toy app. It was fairly easy to use.

Thanks for your comments. I just fixed the <b> </b> issue. We'll definitely look at having the app fall back on locations other than your current location - we didn't do it originally just to keep things as simple and clean as possible. We appreciate the time you took to respond!

FB is not really my thing but I (too) think you guys are doing some cool and fun stuff. Keep at it and let's see the next killer startup come out of your dorm!

BTW, if you all need some help with doing the whole geolocation stuff locally on your own server, let me know; I'll be happy to do whatever I can. (We just floated this site - a small by-product of a larger project we're working on: http://IPLoc.info )

Thanks a lot we appreciate it and we hope so :). The geolocation is actually exactly what we were looking for because Google's API has very strict rate limits. Do you have an API?

Sorry, no API, but I can get my people to build one for you - give me a day to get back to you on this.

If you have the option to host everything (including geo DB) on your own server, we can make a self-contained sub-system (PHP + MySQL) and give it to you (with our compliments :-)).

Let me know.

Wow that sounds awesome my email is dan (at) danshipper.com I would love to hear from you!

email sent, with Sub: HN Forums : Geolocation

This is actually really cool and would help me quite a bit with my current project; mind shooting me an e-mail as well (in profile)?

Sent, same subject line.

thanks!

Facebook login isn't working for me.

If you post to my wall, just give me a box so that I can opt out.

Also, please make the header blue or something. The orange hurts my eyes.

What browser are you using? We've been having some issues with IE. We'll definitely add a box to opt out that's a good idea. Sorry you don't like the header I kind of find it fun :)

We just noticed that somehow the app got deleted from Facebook - we're still not quite sure exactly what went down but we readded it and everything should be working fine. Sorry for the downtime.

Really sorry about that!

clickable: http://wheremyfriends.be

sample profile: http://wheremyfriends.be/profile?id=1341720286

Update: Just made the FB log-in compatible with IE6-8!

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