Geo-enabled text message service | Hacker News Reader

Geo-enabled text message service

xn--8hh.ws

21 pointskarlarmstrong17 comments

Edit2: Wow, doesn't a one-letter .ws domain cost ~$50,000?

For the curious: It's this Unicode character http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2316/index.htm known as "Position Indicator" and it looks like a reticle. Kind of makes sense for a position-based service, but a bit hard to type :)

edit: Previous discussion about the actual icon for the app: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4285919

OP used Punycode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode) to encode the character, which in ASCII is "xn--8hh.ws"

I don't think so, the link is written as http://⌖.ws And that wouldn't change the fact that ⌖.ws is a single-letter domain name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name

They're very common and cheap; it's a single character domain name, not a single letter or number.

Oh interesting: In the Domain Name System, these domains use an ASCII representation consisting of the prefix xn-- followed by the Punycode translation of the Unicode representation of the language-specific alphabet or script glyphs. For example, the Cyrillic name of Russia's IDN ccTLD is рф. In Punycode representation, this is plai, and its DNS name is xn--plai. I had assumed that domain registrars would be more careful of people buying really short domains that way, since the difference in price is huge. Well I'm off to buy xn--g5g.org (ⅹ.org) :)

One pretty cool use of this is the URL shortening service TinyArrows.

http://tinyarro.ws

Punycode encoding/decoding of hyperlinks is a feature that is implemented by the browser. You'll notice that if you mouse-over it (in Chrome at least) the statusbar displays the "real" ASCII representation (for safety/security reasons).

EDIT: Sorry, when I say "OP used [...]", I mean to say "OP was able to do it because of [...]". Punycode is handled by the browser, not done manually (except when registering the domain -- then you do it manually).

Cool name for a location app, even if only French speakers can get it.

What's with the domain? Why not link directly to http://tehula.com/ ?

Pretty cool, something simple like this built-in to phones would be great. If your friend knows much about the iphone he can go to the maps app and "share location" with you via text or e-mail. Is there something similar in Android?

Works really smoothly, seems very thoughtfully put together.

Only criticism would that the "accept request to share location" action button is labelled "share", which I initially glossed over, assuming that it meant "share to social network".

I'm still waiting for mobile messaging to get sorted out. We've got iMessage, Facebook Messenger, gTalk, WhatsApp, GroupMe... and who knows how many others.

Of course, there isn't a single service that all of my friends use, apart from traditional SMS. Facebook Messenger comes closest, but I message people I am not Facebook friends with, so that's out.

I dream of a service that's like WhatsApp- platform agnostic, available to all- but also totally open with all the API access you'd need. Of course, I would imagine that is extremely difficult to get popular. Oh, and monetise.

And thank god none of them are interoperable. Oh wait, no, that sucks, massively.

I could see myself using this a lot more than Apple's "Find My Friends" app. (since none of my friends have that app). Really like the simple UI, does one thing and does it well.

So if someone stole your phone and you didn't have tracking, you could try emailing them with this as a replyto?

Surprised at this, you can already share your location fairly easily via a text message on the iphone.

Go to maps, press the arrow for current location, click the right arrow and you'll see the 'Share' button. One of the options is 'message'. It sends a google maps link.

a more simple version of glympse...i like

Reply on news.ycombinator.com