Show HN: Circular, an open source clone of Buffer | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Circular, an open source clone of Buffer

circular.io

160 pointsjulien_c104 comments

Circular developer here. Ok, so last month I launched an open source clone of Buffer, built on top of Backbone, Bootstrap and MongoDB, and named Tampon.

Many people hated the name... However, the app as well as the open source project have seen some nice early adoption, so I've gone ahead and chosen a less controversial one.

I've also implemented multi-account support, which was by far the #1 feature request from users (As suggested by 37Signals I've discarded every other feature request :)), as well as many many other improvements.

Let me know what you think!

I was thinking this is the same thing as tampon until I saw tampon logo on the homepage and realized that tampon has changed the name. I didn't have much of an issue with the name but the change is sure for the good!

This is the exact reason why I left a small visual cue to the old name :)

Good on you for renaming the project... but why would you chose that name in the first place?

I'm not trying to start a flame war -- just curious because I've been in a similar situation.

After university I named the first C unit test framework I wrote the oh-so-obvious C*NT. At the time I thought I was being funny, but over a decade later and I can see that this is a symptom of the underlying misogyny/"boy's club" that is high tech.

Please, let's not talk about it again – what do you think about the app itself?

Would you consider a project called DICK or COCK to be misogynistic too?

Without wanting to start an argument, your example doesn't strike me as misogynistic; it doesn't seem like it would be any more offputting to women than to men, if we're assuming the same baseline personality.

Second wave feminists decided that that word in particular was bad no matter the context.

And third-wave feminism flirted with post-structuralism..

You guys should stop poking fun at feminism and check your privilege m'kay?

Since feminism is by definition confrontational, "checking the privilege" could be considered paternalistic.

no poking fun intended, merely a historical note that feminism (as a loosely-defined movement) had changing views about language and its use... if someone were to just hear about second-wave feminist stances on the language of oppression, they might have a hard time understanding things like the "slut walk" and other acts of linguistic reclamation.

Kinda glad that my sarcasm went mostly undetected, otherwise it would have been downvoted to oblivion.

It isn't a "bad" word. It's about the implications of using a tool in the workplace that is automatically going to garner giggles and stares at the reactions of the female employees. Imagine having to explain your workflow to your executives or train female social media employees on how to use something with a name like that. It's just awkward and unnecessary.

Whether or not its misogynistic is a distraction from the fact that its childish.

Because it stems a flow of twitter posts?

Isn't that good marketing? And won't most engineers use the code regardless of what its named? Seems like an interesting strategy to me :)

This wasn't an oversight, just a bit of failed translation. Julien mentioned it in the original launch thread, but Tampon in French loosely translates to "buffer." See what happened there? Give the fella a break.

Thanks for the clarification -- I'd never heard of circular/tampon before so I wasn't aware of what had happened, hence my question.

I'm even one of those people who never figured out what buffer app was for despite all their posts on HN.

It actually has both meanings in French. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampon_hygi%C3%A9nique

Similar story here, I thought of writing a testing framework, somehow Testicle seemed as a funny name. Surprisingly it was already taken http://testicles.rubyforge.org/

I wonder how many development tools (and presumably other products) have been less successful than they could have been because their creators picked "clever" or "catchy" names (not necessarily rude.)

For example I would not look forward to explaining to my boss why I had chosen something called "COWSEL", "MUMPS", "SPITBOL" or "ZOPL" for a new project.

Lisp and Subversion were lucky enough to reach critical mass, but I reckon the people who picked those names were taking the same risk.

Git, the stupid content tracker.

I was this " " close to acquiring the domain. Congratulations on the new name.

I love .io domains because as they're slightly more expensive you only buy them when you need to use them.

Very cool - just a few weeks ago, I spent two weekends (8 hours total) building https://www.delayed-tweets.com. Sinatra on Heroku + Stripe along with a bunch of gems to connect up to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It's mainly for my personal use right now, but awesome to see others having simliar needs to schedule and cross post social updates.

[edit] The "big" monthly cost for this project for me is primarily the SSL add-on. Everything else amounts to nothing since I have no long running dynos, even for resque.

Pure awesomesauce! :) Congrats on name pivot, Circular is a great choice.

With regards to Buffer, a potential friction point I pointed out to the team earlier this year, was the inability to select:

Who? (Friends, Public, <custom list>) and

Where? (private message, private group, wall post) a message should go to.

This is standard functionality in the Facebook sharer app, for example. (http://imgur.com/HPsXU)

Of course, Buffer and Circular adds When? (eg temporal dimension) to the mix, but no app I know of, has implemented all three, leaving you with a tradeoff, if all of those are important to your social workflow.

There was a scheduler app for FriendFeed (ffscheduler.com), did all three. It was made by @alpb (ahmetalpbalkan.com).

I'm thinking about forking and adding that features to Circular. Need to add Facebook support to it first though. No promises.

You seriously need auto-link shortening built in.

I think this is great, outside of plastering Buffer's name all over the thing. Seems kinda shitty to do. Open source tweet scheduler? Awesome. Slapping Buffer all over the thing to shimmy into their Google juice (or whatever) to promote it? Not as awesome.

I get your point. It was actually more of a "nod of the head" to them, but I can see why it would look unelegant. I've actually started pitching it as open source tweet scheduler, actually.

I agree. If you truly want to pay homage, perhaps wording like "inspired by Buffer" would work a little better.

Nonetheless, congrats on shipping, can't wait to check it out.

It actually says "Inspired by Buffer" on the homepage, with a link to Buffer :)

I'm curious to see how Joel, Leo, and Tom perceive this open-source version effecting their business.

I'm a long time buffer user, and paying customer, and think that this would actually help the sales pipeline for them. The MVP of Circular is so narrow (given only 1 dev), that it would make me wish for more, and with the attribution Julien gave to Buffer hopefully users will click-through.

Since the Buffer guys have a referral system already in place, maybe you can use Circular to generate some lead gen/affiliate income for you Julien. I would suggest reaching out to them, they are all really cool guys!

Just an idea - best of luck!

Thanks for the kind words Roland, awesome to see you here.

Yep, you're right - I think what Julien is doing is really great. I've been in touch with him via email too, been great to talk a little and looking forward to more conversation :-)

I think it's great that there are multiple offerings out there, to raise awareness of this kind of service is really key right now as we gain traction and as more and more people find that something like Buffer can be super useful for them. We've had quite a few competitors come and go along our journey so far, and I expect to see more and more. I think it's only a good thing.

Good thinking on ways to work together, I think Julien and I will chat for sure :-)

I am divided. As a developer, I think open source is great. As an entrepreneur, having more people release stuff for free devalues my work on the long term. I would say a good middle ground would be that open source should only be used to provide tools to developers, not to release production features.

A few years back, people would buy a software $25, now they complain when your app is over $1 (thanks Apple).

The dream is that we can keep climbing the ladder of abstraction forever and build more complex software (and presumably sell it), by assembling the free and open-source software. Climb a rung, repeat.

The problem is we are bounded by our imagination and hardware. So we just keep making the same stuff in 100 different ways.

This makes for a decent developer analogy for the arguments designers have about services that devalue their time and efforts too. I don't know where the middle ground would be for us, though.

Meh, I can do the same thing and undercut you on price, or offer a "better" freemium model. If being unique is your competitive advantage, enjoy your very brief time in the lime light.

So open source should serve you as a developer, but not those others that are mere users?

If it serves developers it serves users as well. You can produce more, faster, cheaper which is good for users.

Sure, and open source products serve users even better (assuming a certain quality)

If you can't compete you lose. If someone can do it for free rethink your business model.

Why should people not release things simply because other people are unable to compete?

Plus, both of these rely on the free (as in beer) service twitter. twitter has been copied several times (app.net, rstat.us , identi.ca) yet it is still the power house.

FOSS is a wonder of the world. The idea that we can all run this stuff, read the source, and make changes is incredible. There is still plenty of opportunity to make money as a developer. If you have any skill at all, you should not feel threatened by a tweet scheduling app. And there's still software at $25 and up, even in the App Store. Just aim at a market that will pay for quality apps.

In a world where developers at places like Amazon have been putting huge numbers of people out of work, and the tech industry cheers this as high-value disruption of moribund industries, developers who think they should be immune to the same forces are breathtaking in their arrogance.

I buy three software at kiosk for five dollar, good deal?

Don't fall into the same trap as the recording industries did, which is to assume that your market model will stay the same for ever. It won't, and developers don't tend to have the same lobbying power to get new laws to try and cling onto their old model.

Go with the flow and find other ways to monetize your skills.

Just as a fun comparison we currently have 235,600 updates in the queue at Buffer :-)

That sounds like not a great twitter/facebook feed you're managing with buffer, no? Do people care about the feed, if it's generic enough to warrant 200k+ queued posts?

He means across all accounts registered with Buffer, not one individual account.

Thanks for clarifying. Totally missed clicking his username :-)

Yep, across all Buffer accounts.

A little suggestion for the homepage: Take away that circle and move up the feature boxes. That empty space in the middle adds absolutely nothing, and the queue number can be placed elsewhere.

Agreed, that space is wasted.

However 'infinity' is not a number. :P

I didn't remember what Buffer was, so for the first few moments I thought the circle was the feature. Show HN: a nice little CSS loopy thing for Bootstrap.

(Kudos to the team on the real project though - a lot more impressive!)

This is such a small nitpick, but the rotating circle is very confusing to me. The shadow and the highlight rotate too, suggesting that the "light" is rotating with it. Feels really out of place.

My impression was "oh that's what buffer is for". I trust open source software a lot more than closed source. Also their landing page explain what it is better than Buffer.

Congrats on the re-launch (and re-name ;) Looks promising!

I don't think this is a threat to buffer. There are two components to the buffer business:

1) the software: this can be copied or re-implemented fairly easily (see this new project). Happens all the time. Almost every product has an open source clone.

2) the schlep: doing marketing, building a business, keep the servers humming, pay the bills, be available and respond to customers...

The second part cannot be copied easily and takes a lot more effort and commitment than the first. This is what makes a business defensible and viable. And this is what separates companies like Github, Heroku, etc. from "Look-what-I-built-over-the-weekend" projects.

There's also the Buffer ecosystem; they have an iPhone app and they're already built-in as a sharing feature on many iOS & Android apps. It will take a while for Circular to match that. The more I look at what Buffer is doing, the more impressed I am.

I could never figure out how this Buffer thing works. Why is there a multiple time slots and why does it say Posting Schedule "every day"? Does this mean the app will send the same tweet repeatedly on the same time every day? Or how does the app choose which tweet to send at which time?

This may sound like a support question but given that you have cloned a service hence buffer is probably popular already, but I believe there is already a schedule feature in tweetdeck, so why should anyone use these services just to schedule a tweet?

I fill up my buffer with things I want to tweet, then every day at the specified times, it tweets the top item from that list. It doesn't send twice, and it's easier for me than scheduling every tweet.

So is it a one-to-one tweet/time-slot match? I can see a usefulness of filling up the stream and letting the schedule do its work. But this must be a feature most suitable for marketers etc, no? As a casual sharing, I don't tweet a lot anyway so I guess I have no need for scheduling.

But then you could be tweeting old and/or outdated/incorrect news. Why delay your posts?

That's the thing, you don't have to schedule each tweet individually. You just top up your buffer and have posts tweeted automatically.

When you're reading a cool article on the web and want to share it with your various social networks, you simply add it to your Buffer.

You configure your Buffer to post to your various social networks at various times/days (configuration is 100% up to you).

Your content automatically gets shared without you having to think about it at all. When you find something cool, add it to your Buffer. Done.

This is great for folks/brands who like to be sharing useful content consistently throughout the day/week, rather than "as they find it". Obviously, this works much better for evergreen, less timely content.

I can't figure out what your site does (beyond "sharing tweets") by looking at it. I assume that information is hidden behind the login? I'm not going to sign in to a site just to figure out what it does, much less authenticate via another service.

Is this so I can tweet a bunch in a short period, and the service will spread them out over the day? I seriously have no idea.

Sorry if this comes across as rude, I don't intend it to be. I just cannot figure out what the service actually does.

Yes that's it.

I've been using it, and though this is a very simple MVP, the value is very clear and there are some very nice product touches.

All in all, very promising app!

Buffer does the stuff very good actually, I use its free tier and I couldn't even approach to its limit, personally. But having alternatives is always very good and apparently you spent really good time on this project. I'd love to hear a blog address where we can follow your stories about your development of Circular.

Well, one limit you can reach quickly with Buffer's free tier is if you want to use it with multiple accounts on the same platform (say, multiple Twitter accounts).

Thanks for the kind words, I'll think about writing something about the app's dev!

Just to hop in on the discussion, I have just launched a similar (hosted!) service similar to circular(/tampon)/buffer/hootsuite except it's completely white label and self brandable: http://sashboard.com

This is interesting, though it's probably more relevant for Facebook posting than for Twitter, as Twitter doesn't display the app name anymore (and it's a shame!).

True, but it's still in the meta and many 3rd party apps and services still display it, it's even shown in tweetdeck for example (I tried to swap the twitter picture for a tweetdeck screen shot but tweetdeck just keeps crashing (maybe not that many people see it after all ;)).

Why does it have to be such a blatant steal of the Buffer design?

Being 'inspired' to produce a similar (but open) service is a fairly noble goal, but slavishly imitating the UI is bad form, surely? You should have called it 'Blue Buffer'.

I used to use Timely, does this replace that service? Seems to...

My main concern is that if this is free as in both speech _and_ beer, how will the service be supported? I don't want to allow access to YATC and see it die.

Hey. I definitely encourage you to try Circular. If you want to try Buffer too, then if it helps then I'm happy to let you know we're funded and profitable, 7 in the team. Let me know if you have any other questions! :-)

Congrats.

I missed your first show HN so I'm going to give it a go now.

Looks great, you could add an animated logo, on mouse hover... something that will make it spin ;) here's the CSS

http://pastie.org/5143946

Nice! Wrong direction though, right?

yep, you got it right now. looks nice

Committed and deployed! :)

https://github.com/julien-c/Circular/commit/f6af7e4144ca3a59...

At least it's not Tampon anymore. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4484526

Cool side project. I wish there was a features page listing exactly what's included in the app and what it looks like once setup.

You can check out the screenshots in the Chrome Web app's listing: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/circular/kagidkiei...

Needs more info for people who don't twitter. Perhaps a ussage case that is phrased without reference to twitter.

It's a tool to schedule tweets and easily view your tweet analytics, this app doesn't exist without Twitter.

Great!!! I really like it... Only thing I need now is to easily do this via Android.

You should auto shorten urls

+1 if connected to one's Bitly account/vanity URL

Awesome app I like the way you show real-time stat on the homepage

oh, and the new color for the navigation bar is great, too

Fantastic new UI. The service is still as useful as it was!

Love the UI and the auto-quotes on empty posts :)

What was the old domain when it was still tampon?

tamponapp.com

I don't have a twitter account to log in.

Then the app would probably be of little use to you anyways :)

True I signed up for Buffer but never used as I am not into social networking.

Any plans for mobile apps in the pipes?

Better name!

Shame it's written in PHP

Why is it a shame?

Because it's not what the cool kids are using.

I was at a conference where pud spoke. As for using a "startup" worthy language versus what you feel most comfortable in, he said (more or less a quote), "98% of all web sites fail, and yours probably will too, so might as use the language you want and are most productive in"

Indeed. You wouldn't want to risk compromising your fractal of failure by throwing a successful technical decision into the mix.

http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

I'm sorry... it was just too, too easy.

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