Show HN: HubChilla - Asynchronously Chat With Similar People Using SMS | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: HubChilla - Asynchronously Chat With Similar People Using SMS

hubchilla.com

61 pointsritikm77 comments

Facebook login only? This is a disturbing trend I'm noticing with a number of new websites/services. I don't think I'm alone in saying I don't like allowing apps access to all of my Facebook data and timeline. I won't use anything that only takes a Facebook login. Any plans for a stand alone login or is the Facebook data necessary for matching you up with people to chat with?

1) They only get access to the information you authorize them.

2) If this isn't enough control, there are chrome & firefox extensions to give you more granular control over the authorizations you allow, though disallowing certain things can cause issues sometimes.

What about if you don't have a Facebook account?

Then you don't sign up... Startups aren't obligated to give us everything we want and they certainly don't owe us anything. I personally don't like signing up for services using my email and I don't like signing up using Facebook... However, I don't expect startups to cater to everyone with a non-majority preference. Either I make some sort of sacrifice to use their free service, or I don't use their free service.

Ok but this is a Show HN. If we want to give feedback and test the service we HAVE to use our facebook account and give our info when we don't want it and that's problematic.

Once again though, I don't think it's problematic. I often feel that a lot of times, people don't want to pay the entry fee or wait in line to get in (figurative analogy here) and then feel left out.

We're in the tech space... If I designed a new tool for XBOX Live stats and posted to Show HN, it would follow that you would have to 1) be an XBOX Live member and 2) give me your information... I see using Facebook sign in as an extension of Facebook and not the other way around.

Just a matter of opinion from all around, though, obviously.

Thanks for your feedback! We use facebook login because its the easiest way for us to get the basic data to provide intelligent recommendations.

We have plans to roll out a separate stand-alone login soon, where you can fill out a profile with whatever information you choose to include

How are you addressing ... fraudulent information on the FB profile? Automated bots? Trolling pedophiles?

That sounds like a good plan, I'll check back then. I had a facebook back in high school, but got creeped out by some of their privacy issues and deleted it, this sounds like kind of a neat idea, though.

So just don't use it. You're clearly not in the market audience.

This audience loves facebook, uses it every single day and authorize all kind of applications without a single thought about security. Why would they when their password is usually password or 123456.

I understand it may comes as a rant but it's not. If Github would force all developers to use Facebook login, then I would agree with your comment. But for a social app like this?

Also, some people don't have Facebook's, myself included. I hope the "Facebook login only" doesn't become a standard.

During the signup, I wouldn't animate the progress bar. I waited for half a minute expecting something to happen until I realized you were waiting for me to fill out a form.

Other than that, let's see what happens!

And hitting return anywhere in the signup page just reloads the page and looses the form for me in Chrome Canary.

Thanks for the feedback! We'll fix that right away.

Fixed! Thanks for catching that.

There seems to be conflicting copy on the site. Some places say the number is (408) 555-3938 other say 422 333 4737. And some places say the start command is #start and others say it's #play

Sorry about that, the correct number is 422-333-4737 and #play is the correct command, not #start. Fixed, and pushed live!

Could you be more clear about what exactly you will tell these "people I want to meet" about me?

Also, please clarify some parts of your privacy policy

We may collect the following information when your register on or fill out a form on our site, HubChilla:

3. Other information relevant to our surveys or offers

Such as?

We tell all people three Pieces of Information:

1. Your Gender

2. Your Age

3. Your location (City, State)

Thats all! Everything else is private.

So the example on your landing page where the user's school is disclosed is inaccurate?

Yes, that was a screenshot from an earlier version. As of right now, only age/gender/location are used, though we use your education history to train our model for smarter recommendations.

We are toying with the idea of putting back the school displaying feature back in if you encounter someone from the same school. It will depend on the data we gather.

My partner was told I live in NY, strangely. Also, consider changing the message posted to Facebook. This sounds... strange: "Jesse made a new 23 year old male friend on Hubchilla."

(or whatever it is you post, something to that effect)

"and both go to UC Berkeley", this is in the example conversation.

Uh, this posted to my Facebook timeline without my permission.

When giving permissions to apps, change the settings of who can see updates from this app to "Only Me".

Please consider adding a disclaimer, that it is not supported internationally. That is really not clear from the home page and clicking on help needs me to login on FB.

Getting the user's to connect on FB before they are made aware that the application won't work in his country is kind of a dark pattern in my view, and makes me trust your site less.

Duly noted. Added it to the front page and pushed it live just now. Sorry about the miscommunication there -- we're going to put up better copy along with "What is this?", "FAQ", etc. pages (that don't require you to login to view) soon.

We're sincerely sorry about any problems people have been having with #pause to make themselves unavailable to chat. There was a tricky race condition that was making it difficult for the #pause to propogate through, but it's been fixed now!

Jesus, I just got like 2 dozen texts all at once before #pause worked. Thanks, I love paying for my texts.

It should NOT start until you text #play, as it seemed like it would.

Good Point! We'll definitely be adding that in - Sorry if you got surprised.

This points more to the flaw in the SMS plans than it does for his service.

Who the hell doesn't put unlimited sms on their plans these days - its my primary form of communication!

When I worked in the industry we saw a few people try user-user chat. It always ended up with users sending threatening/harassing messages to each other, the service provider needing to hire moderators, and then realising that paying someone to be the other end of the chat is just as easy as paying someone to moderate and more effective.

So I guess what I'm saying is I hope you've figured something out to deal with those kind of users.

Have a spam filter that directs them to only be able to talk to other threatening/harassing users and let the problem solve itself?

Cool idea. Signed up and talking with someone via texts. Couple of features that you should add -

1. Give questions to participants to talk about based on their FB likes or whatever data mining you could do.

2. Multiple people chats - SMS is not real-time medium. So not sure whether other person has read my SMS or not. And I have no idea whether to wait or not. It would be cool to text multiple people at once

We agree! We're working on those features and hopefully will be rolling them out soon.

Since it doesn't rely on an internet connection, I would love to use this as an alternative to Omegle (I have crappy 2G) but it should definitely be anonymous. There's not a chance that I'm going to sign up for this with Facebook.

Your name is never disclosed - all the other person sees is your age, gender, and city.

This is intriguing. I'm getting a lot of people from California, namely Palo Alto. Pretty cool. One of the conversations didn't make it through though. (I'm the guy from Georgia who's up at 2:20 AM).

The Facebook auto-share any time I start a new conversation, text someone (for EVERY TEXT?!), or login to your website is awful. I liked the service but opt-out auto-sharing should be nuked from orbit.

Still not really sure what it is. I tried the help page, but it foisted a login upon me before I could go any further. The about link is hidden from eye, and still doesn't really explain things.

This is awesome! It's like Omegle, except where you only talk to Hacker News readers. Hacker News readers are much more interesting to talk to anyway :-)

Tried to sign up, but it kept refilling the phone number field with the default value. Could just be a Firefox Beta (Android) thing though.

SMSroulette? Hmm...

Pretty much! Except with intelligent recommendations :)

Good stuff man, just signed up. Congrats!

My first conversation: - "Show me your .vimrc and I'll show you mine" - "Ah, I can't I'm married to emacs"

Sounds promising :)

Haha thats amazing! Glad you enjoy it.

Started texting someone... they told me their first name and I was able to easily find their phone number + address from there. :o

Also known as 0800-LOVEMATCH since the 90s.

"15 people use this app"

This is basically chat between hn people. I don't think this is the place to create this kind of user base.

Actually we have hundreds of users chatting, and we're growing fast! Facebook only refreshes its numbers once every 24 hours, so if you check back again later you'll see more updated results.

We've been focusing on several different distribution strategies, and we have a strong user base of college students as well.

Integrate with common chat clients like google and I might've more interested.

We've gotten this request multiple times actually, so expect an integration soon!

I was one of those requests via your chat, just making it here too :)

I've tested it and it's really cool. 1000x better than airtime :)

Support the UK please? It's really easy if you're using Twillio

We'll get on that soon. Stay tuned!

I almost signed up because of the demo chat on the home page.

FYI: there's a typo on the homepage screenshot: "you to to"

Thanks for letting us know! We'll remember to fix that.

I thought that was deliberate! To humanise it.

Thats what I said ;)

Any chance of allowing this to be used internationally?

Its in the works! This is definitely something we're going to do, but we decided to perfect our launch in the US first before we start accommodating international phones. Stay tuned!

Do make that clear. I'm not in the US and that's far from obvious.

Maybe an SMS to Google Talk bridge?

We've gotten this request many times now, so expect an integration soon!

How long did it take to build this? Fun idea!

Friday 7/27/12 morning - thought of the idea, briefly talked about the features and did a basic spec

Friday 7/27/12 evening - started coding the backend text message routing logic and the website front (standard stuff - Node.js, custom MVC framework, Twilio API, MongoDB, Redis, Heroku, etc. - the works)

Tuesday 76/31/12 late night - Feature complete, things are all good to go and working (including edge cases, etc.)

Wednesday 8/1/12 - Built out Open Graph integrations, made minor tweaks, chose the name and bought the domain, some branding stuff (i.e. the chinchilla logo), submitted Open Graph actions to Facebook

Thursday 8/2/12 afternoon - Open Graph is all approved, did a test launch with a small set of users, ironed out a ton of bugs

Thursday 8/2/12 evening - posted on HN, making a huge list of things to do next, getting good feedback, and setting up all our other distribution techniques to be fired off tomorrow

6 days from idea to launch! We tried hard to go as fast as possible on this one (although we overbuilt a couple features that we've retracted for the launch - could've saved us a day of work if we had realized they weren't necessary).

[edited to correct the months on the dates]

Nice, thanks for the play by play! And I'm assuming you mean 7/27/12 morning? =p

Are you guys by any chance from ASU? Been meeting a lot of people from ASU :)

We're from UC Berkeley

You might want to look into using Nexmo, they have a better global reach and they don't charge for inbound SMS (only the number rental, which is cheaper). I've been using them for the last few months and can't praise them enough!

I'm getting spammed. #pause doesn't work...

We fixed it! there was a race condition in the code we hadn't noticed

The telco providers will love you ;).

this looks awesome! tried it and actually met someone cool :) ahah

already signed up. get at me.

thanks for the support!

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