I built a 'Crush Notifier' 3 years ago. No one cared. | Hacker News Reader

I built a 'Crush Notifier' 3 years ago. No one cared.

apps.facebook.com

34 pointsmkrecny24 comments

Coding is necessary but not sufficient. You may have the most stunning Crush Notifier implementation out there, but what have you done in terms of marketing? I suspect not too much. In the case of "crush notifier", the developer is surfing a wave he himself created through the huge splash that "breakup notifier" made.

You're right. I was a student at the time and had no idea how to begin marketing. Nor enough time. In addition, the FB notifications API was deprecated shortly after I release it - so it didn't work for much longer than a month. It still made a chunk of change whilst in operation though.

So by "no one cared" you mean "a significant enough number of people noticed that I made money"

why the long face?

Fair point : )

Well, to be fair, the original idea wasn't a "crush notifier" it was something more interesting and useful, a breakup notifier. That's what was banned. I'm sure there are a dozen other crush notifiers out there.

I'm sure there are a dozen other crush notifiers out there.

And there has been for at least ten years.

Back then you entered your email address... and the email addresses of everyone you had a crush on. Of course, if any of those latter ones weren't the original crush, they would get email saying someone had a crush on them. And so on. The original "viral".

Here's one of the messages I received.

Subject: Somebody has a crush on you

Date: 3 May 2001 16:42:01 -0000

From: CrushMaster@redacted.com

To: wrader@redacted.edu

Guess what... you've got a secret admirer! Want to find out who it is? Just click to <http://www.redacted.com/index.php3?email=wrader@redacted.edu...;

Email address: wrader@redacted.edu

Invitation code: 5nmwa

Make sure you enter in this information exactly as shown above.

See you soon!

Sincerely,

/The Crush Master/

Frankly, I for one and probably many other people still don't care about it, or about Crush Notifier.

Look I built a crush notifier too (www.adore.ly). I made a few attempts to even market on HN but I didn't get to front page. You forgot luck is a huge factor in entrepreneurship.

Timing is everything (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwL0G9wK8j4#t=52s).

I was about to say that. Crush notifier just about valentines day, and social media developed as it is now, it is another thing;

As well a few days beforehand facebook had a media blitz about adding a new relationship status (domestic partnerships) into the mix.

"Timing is everything"

It's related to "critical mass" People do things differently now then they did 3 years ago. What didn't work then may work now. You felt you had a great idea? It didn't work?

Try again, things have changed.

Dating on Facebook is creepy in general.

it's all about the marketing and who you know.....

Maybe you can use a browser plugin to implement your own Breakup Notifier and use the current buzz to get some traction. How hard can it be to automate looking at that info?

The jealousy of success is always a constant.

marketing, marketing, marketing!

Well, A. everyone's thought of that app, and

B. you didn't just create a wildly successful app that got banned for basically no reason.

I don't know why people keep saying it got banned for no reason. I can think of a very good reason, mind you, I don't think it is a fair reason...

Basically facebook makes money of eye-balls. A lot of people may be checking profiles of there stalkerish-intent on a regular basis to see if they are still in a relationship. More stalking, more eyeballs. Dan basically took that away from fb. With Break-up Notifier people did not have to log-on anymore. They would be informed automatically when the objects of their affection changed that relationship status. That is a whole different beast. You have just attacked fb's main monetization strategy. Expect swift retribution.

Now on the other hand if you develop a wildly successful game which gets people to log-on again and again to water their plants, expect fb's full support.

That is the reason why break-up notifier got banned.

I am pretty sure there's a better reason it got banned. Facebook does not allow storing user's data externally. You can cache them but they must be up to date:

-- http://developers.facebook.com/policy/ -- You may cache data you receive through use of the Facebook API in order to improve your application’s user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date. --

Plus, applications that rise to millions within days usually employ spam tactics. I 'm curious what's the motivation behind all this blog attention, though

This is 100% correct.

(And the reason I never promoted my facebook app "unfriendly" - which notified you when someone dropped you as a friend)

> basically no reason

Basically no reason? Am I the only one who thinks that there is an elephant in the room here?

Let's face it, the breakup notifier was creepy and had privacy implications. Facebook gets slammed a lot for privacy (or the lack of it, or the difficult of the controls, etc). How would an average girl feel about using Facebook while in a stable relationship if she knew that people were using breakup notifier on her? How would this go down in the press? Could this dissuade people from publishing their relationship status on Facebook, thus removing valuable demographic information for advertisers? Is this even ethical? If you were running Facebook and were worried about this, what would you do?

Not everything is black and white. Lawyering in the TOS is fine, but if you don't find anything in there, that doesn't mean that it's automatically OK. Facebook might not have specifically provided a reason, but it doesn't take a genius to figure it out. It doesn't matter if the raw information was available already; it's what people can do with it that makes the difference.

On the other hand, a crush notifier is "opt-in"; nothing happens without reciprocation. I can see why they may be less bothered about that.

There are thousands of apps that went from zero to millions through the years that facebook's platform has existed. Mostly it was through spam, but some were good at manipulating the crowds (snowballs, yawn). That's how zynga grew to be what it is. Why the sudden attention now? I guess this is it: lack of anything interesting in technology lately.

I still don't care.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com