Show HN: location-based messaging | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: location-based messaging

4 pointsricefield4 comments

Hey HN - this is something our team (a bootstrapped startup based out of Berkeley and SF) has been working on for the past couple months. Basically, Crumbs is a mobile app that lets you leave notes for friends in at a location, which they pick up later. Its useful for reminders, discovery, and can be all around fun.

We'd love to get some feedback from the HN crowd. We seem to have trouble getting trouble getting traction, but so far feedback from users and testers has been very positive.

find us at: crumbsapp.com Thanks!

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In the crowd of Facebook Places, Gowalla, Foursquare and many other location based services companies. You may find difficult to get traction initially. Because,people are afraid of trying one more location based app unless, it is completely different or keep them engaged all timer or their friends from other social networking are participating in it or if they get filtered and appropriate data, rather thank junk notes.

If you can add some more aspect to it like photos, offers or tags etc and most importantly market it well. Let people know something like this exist, let them try at least once.

Then you well get traction and from there you learn from feedback. It's only about passing first hurdle.

Clickable: http://crumbsapp.com/

I think it is a cool idea but that its success will come down to how non-geeks adopt it. If you can get that large pool of non-geeks, whose interaction with the web is dictated by Facebook & Google, to feel incentivized to place notes to their friends then I think it could be a hit. There are also potentially interesting opportunities for local business owners to get 'spontaneous business' via notes placed around their business.

How would you describe your differences from a service like http://geoloqi.com/ ?

I like the idea, but what is the relevance of the location? Notes have a time component, are the notes time independent?If so what is the situation where I would use them? I think the friend aspect might be too limiting, but could be an addon.

I might be more interested if they were just notes from anyone like "look up and notice xyz", especially if I was someplace new. Kind of how there are guest books in a bed and breakfast.

Possibly a new kind of location based virtual graffiti even for places where I live, with poetry, call XYZ for a good time etc.

The time aspect is pretty huge - the examples they were using were pretty much time dependent.

However, I could see this being useful for groups of friends who decide to split up during a group outing. Traversing a huge outlet mall or large park or something. Imagine walking past a playground and you find a note from a friend "Hey guys, we're meeting at this playground at 5pm." That would be pretty neat.

However, outside of that, I'd love to hear more examples from the creators as to what else it would be good for!

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