Show HN: Radar Chat – Geolocation based communication
app.radar.chat
app.radar.chat
My first customers non-profits in the STEM space who are using Radar Chat to tag the businesses they partner with (Planetariums, Science Museums, etc). When students visit these places they can then check into them (if they're close enough) and get entered to win a prize. Here's an example of a STEM customer channel:
https://app.radar.chat/#/channel/glbra-stem-pipeline
Paying customers unlock additional features like permanent messages, always-visible messages, and messages that can be checked in to. Non-paying users are able to leave messages that have a maximum radius and an expiration time.
I do server programming by trade so any feedback on the UX would be greatly appreciated!
Edit: Here's a link to the website with marketing information. It describes the produce a bit more than what's available in this post:
The concept at the time was "4chan meets foursquare." and the inspiration was rediscovering some graffiti in a bar bathroom that years before had particularly tickled some friends and I. For awhile, I added new locations as I traveled extensively for work, so there are hidden little message boards around NYC, SF, China, Seattle, Europe...
I do love the idea of "hidden messages", invisible communities that only a few will ever see.
My concept had a sort of anarchic bent at the time, so anonymity and fighting the man was the guiding principles in theory, but as I was only just learning JavaScript and PHP, ideals were going to be a later development and design phase than I ever achieved ;)
Edit: But with Tosslet you don't need to (get to?) have an account to see (catch) messages or provide any other information (e.g. email). We have a privacy-first focus and don't require or allow the use of your actual location (gps).
Disclaimer: I'm the developer of Tosslet
It's invaluable for hiking and exploring places. I guess it is moderated however, since I never saw spam there.
I do hope people use Radar Chat for hiking as well. They could put down markers for trail heads and stuff. But, the biggest differentiator with Radar Chat is that they can put down timely information, such as a tree being down, a trail being washed out, etc.
It might be cool to show a rough estimate of how many people are able to hear your messages? I tried shouting to my entire city but I noticed the global channel had around 78 subscribers, so I figured it was unlikely that anyone heard my message.
It would also be great at this stage to let you see a history of messages received in your location while you were away.
Also maybe let people send or at least listen to messages anywhere in the world, at this early stage? I'd love to see if anyone in my hometown is using this, but I don't live there anymore. Maybe you could set up a limited number of spots that you always get messages for? Say your home, work, etc.
Awesome job! Looking forward to updates. (If you have an RSS feed or something then I'd love to subscribe to it).
One thing that made the game system work though, I think, was that they gave a very limited selection of phrases to combine. So you'd have a list of descriptions (dangerous, look out for, incredible, safe) and things (chest, monster, door, room). So people could put something like "look out for monster" to indicate an ambush, or "dangerous chest" to indicate a loot-chest that is trapped. Limited vocabulary mostly* kept the unpleasant** trolling to a minimum
* people would occasionally put "incredible chest" in front of female NPCs, which was not the intended use of the messaging feature!
** leaving an "safe room" message in front of a trapped corridor full of monsters was, of course, entirely in the spirit of the game.
I've seen about a dozen apps that do just this. Here's one I used to use, called Kites: (https://www.krishan711.com/).
It was a very nice app, but the network effect was missing, and eventually the novelty wore off. Which presumably is also why its creator pulled it from the appstore.
I wish you luck, I still think it's a good idea. But beware that there may be a good reason why you can't find "anything else like it out there" at the moment...
For individual channels the goal is to allow administrators to moderate them, kinda like with Reddit.
For global channels it'll probably end up being me doing all the moderation until I can hire someone to do it.
I also plan on importing Open Street Map data on school properties and then preventing most users from being able to post messages within such boundaries.
My early customers have channels that only administrators can write to so the paying use-cases aren't as social media.
I do hope to open the service up for more use cases outside of mobile apps. For example, it would be pretty cool if my customers could embed their maps on their website via iframe.
The #sf-311 channel retrieves data from an external API, and so posting already isn't limited to the app (the data is all proximity based so you can't see incidents unless you're nearby):
Is there any spam control in place?
I will say though that my early customers are giving away prizes that are only useful to locals, like coupons to offline stores, so I'm hoping that'll keep most cheaters at bay.
If you've disabled geolocation access then Radar Chat is basically dead in the water.
That said, we can only really use it to show a vague position for the user. Since everything is so precise (some message can only be seen if you're within 10m of them) the geoip data isn't as useful as one might think.
I was also a bit confused because the home page buttons theming seems broken, and I had not read the instructions.
I was only able to find a few direct competitors in my searches. They were mostly shut down with their apps no longer in the app stores.
Radar Chat is almost entirely useless on desktop since it's rare that they have high resolution GPS, but there are some use cases. The main one is that when a user first visits certain channels there is a default origin location, particularly useful when showing "beacon" messages that the user can see regardless of distance. Here's an example:
Flag all keywords you would need to do a bomb threat for review.
Preferably have a client side filter, like profanity, so users can customize to their liking and you aren't censoring too heavily.
Some server side filtering for illegal messages like threats.
Open mod logs for even more transparency.
There was a link a few days ago on the HN front page that rather humorously covered the difficulty of this. http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...
"We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he’d created the following sentence: I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny. "
Client side AI filters can attempt to get rid of raunchy messages.
Keyword filters and flagging for things like threats can stop the illegal stuff.
Don't try to over censor and nanny state people.
edit: to clarify, messages "like that" refer to the kid's message in your above post.
When they're veiled bomb threats against schools, yes. That gets media and regulatory attention that kills the brand - again, as YikYak quickly found out.
> Keyword filters and flagging for things like threats can stop the illegal stuff.
Again, the idea that keyword filters can handle this is silly. It was silly a decade ago. The big social networks have invested enormous time, money, and effort into increasingly sophisticated AI... and the result is people still get incorrectly and absurdly flagged for innocuous posts while clearly offending ones slip through.
Fast forward and YikYak does have some similarities. The main differences are that YikYak has a universal 5 mile radius, all messages are in the same "namespace", and they're anonymous, plus no map. I'm sure they anonymize the posting location with jitter to promote anonymity.
Radar Chat definitely caters to a different use-case with the precision of the post being important. If you leave a "whisper" message (L1), it has a radius of around 10 meters, which isn't as useful for shouting ideas to the masses like YikYak.