After traveling to over 25 countries I created an app I wanted | Hacker News Reader

After traveling to over 25 countries I created an app I wanted

tripl.com

105 pointspjsullivan356 comments

A few small things:

- you seem to have some crazy js loading on the facebook auth page. In chrome/mac it resized my window to fill my screen length wise. I would recommend going with facebook's default auth popup. Then again maybe you are and their js was just acting goofy.

- the image resources on the autocomplete for your location suggestions do not load.

- the video explanation after you sign up could be more clear. Maybe have some steps to go through in order to "complete" my signup process like making my first recommendation and planning a trip.

- when I create a trip and select that "me myself and I" are going on the trip (ie. I am going alone) the trip shows that two people are going on the trip.

- A lot of the encouraged interaction on the site seems passive. I suspect people are going to be good about setting up their own trips but lazy about making recommendations for other people's trips. Whether it's gamification or something more you should find some way to encourage or even force people to interact.

Daniel seriously big thanks on all the feedback. - I think chrome is having a bug, its been a pain in the ass - ok cool we will look into it, it should have been flags - we are enabling more of a guided tour using png over lays soon - thats just me be some bug, looking into it - we have a light gamification aspect that we want to highlight, our vision is the more you help set up recommendations, introductions and interact with people comeing to your city or helping your friends, you earn points that translate to great discounts or freebies when you do get to travel!

The error page is pretty funny :) http://tripl.com/themes/html5/img/error-pages/503-bg.png

On first look I thought it was a rainbow penis sticking out of the ground. It took a second or two before I realized what the picture was.

Heh, the cloud could use some outlines, perhaps silver?

It's a transparent .PNG, there is a white cloud in there if you put it on a colored background.

normal cloudy has light blue outlines! let us know if you want a sticker

cloudy drinks heinies, lol

good observation!

Could you please remove the 'sign in with facebook' option? or at least allow other methods of authentication (I prefer Google but ideally people should have the options).

As an avid traveler, I've been relying on friends' friends wherever I go. I could see your app flying!

The site needs the information from a social graph to be useful. I can see it being hooked up to G+ in the future.

yeah right now g+ doesnt give you social graph data yet, we are working on linkedin and twitter however with twitter a lot of people follow brands or people they don't know

scaling friends of friends, combined with geo location, timeframe and interest tags has been an engineer challenge but we are starting to look into other graphs like above

It frustrates me to find yet another site that is unusable without signing up through Facebook. Not everyone uses Facebook (cough, cough-- me), and some who do don't want to grant access to personal information.

Also, what makes this site any different from simply utilizing one's social graph directly on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc? Why would one need your service when he/she could just tell their Facebook friends, "Hey everyone, I'm traveling to Rome this week. Does anyone have friends there I should meet?"

I think if you have a solid answer for this, it may need to be communicated more clearly on your landing page.

On the upside, good job with the site design. That part is pretty solid for a first go.

I'm also not willing to use it until I can authenticate without giving this information:

Your profile info: birthday, hometown and location Friends' hometowns Friends' locations

I'm taking a year off work and traveling across the world for 2012 and would love to use the app but I see no reason for it to want that information.

My friends are already my friends on facebook, so I don't need them on the site, I need to find new people.

We take your friends locations in order for you to grow your network. Our goal is to link you with friends of friends for your next travel. Since the API doesn't allow us to draw this information we need your help. Thats why we base our recommendations around people.

Everytime you recommend a friend from a certain city, that friend (even if they are not using the site) will be visible to all your other friends using the service. They see that this person was recommended by you.

You too share the same benefit. You gain all your friend's recommendations. Again these people have been handpicked and selected. I know I have 10 friends in China, based on some people I have added from my masters program, but I would never really recommend them.

Thirded.

The idea looks really good and I've long wanted such a thing. In fact, I'd use it today if I could sign in. But I'm not on Facebook and know that there's no point joining Facebook just to sign in since they "need" your social graph and mine would be empty. So, no point doing that.

I'll bookmark the site and drop it into my "visit monthly" folder. On the visit that it doesn't require Facebook I'll sign up.

Thanks for the insights and we will let you know when we create a way for that to happen. Right now that social graph is really important to us in helping build you connections. Is there another service like foursquare, twitter, or linkedin that you use?

I use my e-mail which has a contact list :)

Cool idea. The user experience of adding tags is pretty terrible compared to the rest. The placeholder text in the input field suggests you can use commas and judging from the tags it suggested such as "Design, Food, Movies" "Beer,Tech,Music" a lot of people noticed that. The suggestion pop-up is also kind of awkward sometimes as it occludes the input field and won't go away when you expect. You'll have to do some serious deduplication on this even after you fix the interface.

Also, it got stuck on me a couple of times after clicking "let's get started", with no way to re-do (it's all AJAX) and refreshing the page required me to do everything over.

I know :( we noticed that yesterday, and are now manually having to separate the user generated tags that include commas, we are going to try and push these changes ASAP.

What do you mean it got "stuck on you", it wasn't processing correctly?

It just failed to proceed and submit the form on my unreliable 3G connection. No way to cancel and try again though.

I can definitely see this being very useful but man is it slow right now... Every time I hit a "Loading..." it never finishes. I end up having to refresh the whole page and trying again. Perhaps it should at least throw an error if the server's getting overwhelmed?

Things are really slow on chrome at least. It takes forever, but sounds promising the idea.

Great idea! It would be awesome to couple this with a planner type system as well so you can plan your adventures with your fellow travelers. A hook into AirBnB or another service to get discounted room & board with other people might be another cool idea.

Nice work!

All good suggestions that we are already working on :) hence why they are so good!

Nice! How long did it take you guys to develop the released version?

Also, the name reminds me of the Belgian Bier "Tripel" ;-)

A "dating" site for travel partners, nice!

haha use it as you want ;)

Heh, I wasn't advocating to use it as a dating service, but the functionality and business models are going to be substantially the same.

My only criticism so far is that I really dislike the font colors of the FAQ page

hahah yeah we didn't much love into these pages for our MVP, need to redo them big time. Putting it pivotal tracker!

couchsurfing already does this and has a much larger network. how are you different/better? couchsurfing is about quite a bit more than finding a place to stay, so you can't really say that.

You might want to improve the page load speed. Some quick thoughts:

- load above-the-fold content first

- combine the JS to a single file

- include the country flags and other small icons as inline base64 PNGs

big thanks!

By the way I should be replaced by we. Although I'm the co-founder this project would be nowhere without our awesome team of designers and developers!

Not loading on Chrome for me... I can sign in with Safari but it seems really slow, right now its just stuck on loading... I want in! Arg.

I have no idea what this issue is, it seems to happen to me on every facebook auth window like on turntable fm as well

Did you do all the design and development yourself?

no I am lucky to have a kickass team of designers and developers building this with me. the team is everything!

The reason I ask is because I'm currently building a product and love the design. Is the team who did the design available to help? =)

sorry the guys are fulltime on this, from stockholm, sweden but making our way over to NYC

Why so cryptic... was it 26 countries?

hahah cause I never finished counting! I think its below 30 though

I would use it if it wasn't for the facebook thing, I already use couchsurfing, bewelcome, etc

we feel the facebook integration creates a better social experience than couchsurfing already provides. I've been a coachsurfer for many years but I really enjoy knowing that this person is somehow connected to me, ie friend of friends.

I only got 10 friends on FB... so i doubt this would be useful for me, right?

I tried to type in Maui as a trip i'm planning and it doesn't find it?

Ahh, if I type a specific city on the island (Makawao) it finds that. So its just ignoring the island itself.

It might be nice to define a general area. "Spain", "Maui" and not a specific city, since I plan to travel around the whole area not just a specific city.

will defs look into that!

Loos nice, but, I'd rather just talk and meet people when travelling.

Most of the time, that is easy to do. But sometimes it is not. Sometimes you are so remote, and just stuck in the wrong hotel/hostel and head out at the wrong times. That is fine, but you may want to meet people during those times as well.

As someone who is traveling around SEA at the moment, I will definitely check this you.

it's been saying this for over 4 hours now: Hold on, we are just loading... :(

working now!

Shit sorry for that delay, we really worked on making that as fast as possible

Great idea. I like it!

thanks so much appreciate it

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