Show HN: It's hard to make friends offline, so we built a solution
letsbeamigos.com
letsbeamigos.com
Facebook is the only account that I keep to myself and people who know me. My Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Github and all the other stuff I can't remember, all exist to connect me to people I've never met. I'd way rather use one of those than Facebook.
So yeah, I get you.
To the "lets be amigos" people: stop it please. I might think you had a good idea, had you not followed a path so closely associated with the scum of the internet.
I'm also willing to bet money that, faced with actually filling out a survey, many people otherwise reluctant to sign in with FB will just do it.
1. identity + likes / interests 2. filling out activities as a backup in case they don't have interests on FB
Lastly, for now wanted to dodge anonymous signups. Won't be much fun to set you up with people that are not real. Hope you give it a shot.
You will get more signups if you offer alternatives, vs. trying to convince people you won't abuse the FB privileges. Just something to consider.
You can sign up for free. Almost immediately, you start to get emails, instant messages, flirts, matches, etc. You can see some info from the profiles of the people supposedly trying to make contact with you, but you can't see what they're saying or provide any kind of response unless you subscribe. If you do subscribe, more often than not you'll discover that all of that contact activity was from fake accounts that never respond to anything you send them. By that point the site already has your payment, so it's too late to do anything but cancel before the next automated payment occurs.
I'm not saying your site works like this; I hope it doesn't. I'm just saying that this kind of thing is why users of a site like yours would be concerned about fake accounts on the site.
Being able to trust strangers is nice, but not needing to is even better.
Oftentimes you can deny the post ability. You can't tell until you arrive at the screen, but if you don't click okay, nobody's posting anything on your wall.
That's the real problem here: Facebook has a history of wanting to expose as much personal information as possible, including exposing information that was previously not exposed without warning. I don't necessarily distrust the OP's business today, nor do I necessarily disagree with the permission settings I can set today. What I don't trust is Facebook's future changes to those permission settings, nor what the OP's business is going to do when/if it has more access to my information than it used to have.
If Facebook had a history of strong privacy protection and strict opt-in policy to information sharing, this wouldn't be so bad. But since Facebook has the completely opposite history, including Zuck coming right out and saying that he would prefer all Facebook user info to be shared, I'm not going to trust Facebook to keep whatever I want private private.
Sorry, but even if I were willing to sign up via Facebook, I wouldn't do it just so that you can pretend that you're making sure that only real people are signing up.
I really don't understand the Facebook deepthroating trend. But feel free to ignore the advice that have been repeated here times and times again.
https://www.facebook.com/browse/friends_using_app/?app_id=14...
Oh, I forgot! I DO have a fake one that I use for development. I guess I can just use that...
Well, the only way I would log in with facebook is with a freshly created "anonymous" fb account for this purpose only.
How about supporting https://login.persona.org/ ?
It's too bad since I was at first really excited about the idea of Let's Be Amigos, as it purports to solve a problem I've been having lately, but immediately my attitude did a 180. Facebook is not going to be a good resource to mine interests for people that don't have one.
I don't understand how people even get it into their heads to immediately ask potential users for direct access to my private information?
Seriously, would anyone approach potential clients with that kind of attitude in real life?
"Hand over your wallet with your ID and the pictures of your kids and loved ones, your diary and your address book, or else you can't shop here."
Please, f* off.
Either it's private to you, in which case this service is very likely not going to provide you a great deal of value, which puts you outside their market, or it isn't private, in which case you're in their market.
>Seriously, would anyone approach potential clients with that kind of attitude in real life?
This is real life. I don't like the implication that "it's an internet service" means "it isn't real life." This is a service that's trying to land you with real people, doing real things, in a personal way.
The attitude here is "you're looking to be social, so sign up with your social network." If you don't like that, then I'd warrant that you aren't the type of person this is aimed at.
It'd be nice to have alternatives -- others here have suggested a survey, for example -- but let's be honest: Facebook collates a lot of really useful information that is directly helpful to a service such as this. It's a no-brainer from their point of view.
Why does this service's value depend on Facebook? I use Facebook to communicate with a few friends and family. I don't list my interests on Facebook.
> which puts you outside their market
Then they're unnecessarily making their market smaller. Unless they don't have the time or skill to implement an interest questionnaire, this doesn't seem like a good decision.
Are you trolling, or can you not control your arguments?
I don't think you can classify this as "using it wrong".
It seems obvious that if I or a user like me were to use this service it wouldn't work very well, and would potentially devalue the service for other users (through poor matches).
The developer of the service is artificially limiting their market by only allowing Facebook Connect and they may have problems getting the necessary critical mass for the service to be useful as a result. I don't think it's trolling to make this observation.
When you create a product like this, every decision you make "artificially limits" your market. But often these decisions open up other parts of the market that would be inaccessible otherwise. For example, the time they would have spent on building alternative login options for people like you would probably be better spent adding features for the people who have no problem using Facebook connect, and who list their interests on Facebook.
Facebook was sold to users as a way to connect and communicate with my friends and family. This is how I use it. I don't use it as a tool to pass my personal information in bulk to marketers.
In any case, Facebook has many features. Listing interests is just one of those features (and a peripheral one at that, which many of my friends don't bother with either). If people don't use every feature of a product, they're using it wrong? According to who?
Judging from the comments, there are many others who also feel that forcing users to login via Facebook is undesirable. For those people, it creates unnecessary friction. For me, it was enough that I'm not going to bother spending more time with their product.
> ... then don't get mad when their solution doesn't work for you. Are you trolling, or can you not control your arguments?
I'm certainly not mad. The truth is, they're here pitching their service to me, not the other way around. I took a look, offered a suggestion, and that's that.
A growing number of social networking services promote OAuth logins to the dominant social networks (Facebook, Twitter etc.) as the primary authentication method, over "traditional" email confirmation type processes. Users of such practices include Klout, Kred, Foursquare, and others. The permissions granted typically permit the authorized application to download the entire social data stream belonging to the user, which is stored for data-mining purposes by the application provider. By facilitating such use, OAuth is acting as a component in a social engineering type scam where users of the application probably do not realize the extent of the data they are sharing.
I can understand that you don't agree with the developer's choice to use Facebook connect. But this sort of response isn't productive to the conversation.
Is it really that black & white? I'd imagine there are tradeoffs between product usefulness and the imposing nature of Facebook connect. Shouldn't we talk about how to prioritize these tradeoffs?
> Please, f* off.
Please support productive discourse on HN and avoid comments like this in the future.
> Is it really that black & white? ...
It is a bit troublesome if the only way to try out a new service is to give you access to Facebook data (which likely includes a whole lot of data that is unnecessary for your service); it is asking for a whole lot of trust and my threshold for trying out services that require it is a lot higher than normal.
Of course it may be that many startups actively do not want people unwilling to provide FB data to try out/use their services. In that case we are in total agreement ;)
Right on! Using FB to login to various sites (mainly, commenting for in house or third party systems) has become de facto standard. Though some people will right away see the obvious problem with this approach, majority do not care, and will happily post with their FB profile.
It's a low hanging fruit, and with more than enough willing to give up their privacy, it's good enough for the echo system.
I am happily seating out of it though.
However, in your haste to patronizingly chastise me you're making multiple faulty assumptions.
a) I'm not new to HN. Just this account is.
b)"Please, f... off" was descriptive reflection of the way I would respond to the fictional analogous request which you have so conveniently omitted from this quote.
It was in no way intended to address the developer, but rather as a way to illustrate how I feel developers who use access to my personal information as the entry fee to their product treat me.
I think most people here got that.
I think it's a great idea to use Facebook to connect with other people. So this developer can see my interests and friends and posts....so what? So can all of my friends, and a lot of other people.
Privacy, since when have we had that? Your neighbors can freely watch your comings and goings, see who visits you and usually know what you're doing. Why aren't you more afraid of them?
Since we've had costs to stalk people. Walls, for example, add a reasonably high cost to see and ear what we're doing. We can be reasonably confident that people in general won't care enough to pay the costs of violating our privacy if they're reasonably high.
Your neighbors can freely watch your comings and goings, see who visits you and usually know what you're doing. Why aren't you more afraid of them?
Because the costs are reasonably high and the "profit" is reasonably low. Most of my neighbors can't afford to stay all day looking at the door to see who comes in or out, nor do they profit financially from doing so, unlike these online services.
Why are you assuming, or at least implying, that people who wish you wouldn't exert such an aggressive attitude, really just don't understand you and are stupid?
Before someone says that my comment isn't helping the conversation, there's this great site that you can order popcorn from... . ... ...
So how to do this with some horizon? Maybe it needs to be an open API that many social network sites implement/agree on. [ but one that allows me to share or not share my social graph orthogonally to using a sign-in user handle ]
Complaining about "Facebook connect" doesn't make any sense. What makes sense is complaining when app developers ask for permission to access data they don't need, or they ask for access and abuse it in ways they didn't disclose to the user.
http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platfor...
Outside of our world, signup with Facebook would probably convert a lot more and even improve engagement. It's a worthy tradeoff IMO. Atleast to a business owner.
I do not use Facebook. I won't sign into a service with Facebook.
For professional work, I'd far rather use Github as my auth provider. :-)
That Facebook is "for people who know you" means it's exactly where Let's Be Amigos can find other local, friendly second degree links. Twitter, LinkedIn, etc, with generally global and/or impersonal links, aren't as good source material for the stated goal.
Especially when I can just type in a few tags which signal my interests really well and enable sifting for like-minded people.
eg. "Frisbee bike Newark hacking" or "maker bots liberal coffee valley" or "photography walking s&m boston" :]
What a brilliant community, indeed!
Really though, I think that the target market for ... social people... who want to have social gatherings... would likely be people on Facebook.
Just because HN in large hates Facebook for XYZ reasons, not all of which are unjustified, I really don't think it's fair to shout at the developers for choosing to use it.
So, fuck the haters, Facebook connect is a very low-impact way to get users to sign up to your service, particularly if you assume in the long run that it will be deeply integrated with phones as it is on iOS. Yes, a few nerds will opt-out, but most of them will be pulled in eventually if your service turns out to be useful and trustworthy.
Therefore, the premise that you like baseball and I like baseball, so we should just hang out, will feel kind of pointless. That's why I don't think anyone has really nailed this market.
I think a better take on this would be, you want to publish a comic book, and I want to publish a comic book, so we should work on our projects and hang out. Or you want to run a 5K and I want to run a 5K so lets meetup and practice this together.
You sometimes could have an open ended invite, and sometimes you would have to have both parties agree to meeting before hand, like in the case of restaurant reservations.
But running around the lake is not an open ended activity, because I don't want to wait around for people to show up.
Also add a button, "Leaving for the activity now", or "I'm here at X" would be helpful.
Some people do gain fulfillment primarily through work (especially the entrepreneurial crowd that frequents HN), but we should recognize that this is not universal.
I'm not sure I can agree with this either, though it's hard to come up with universal truth statements when dealing with a concept as abstract as "fulfillment." I acknowledge that labor can be (and often is) fulfilling, but I wonder if other life philosophies (e.g. Buddhism) may approach fulfillment through other means.
One could argue that fulfillment in Eastern philosophies is still attained via the labor of contemplation, but the question then becomes whether the point was the labor or the resulting awareness.
Most people here complaining about Facebook Connect are basically ignorant as to what it actually allows you to do, and are also in the minority of people who have not populated their Facebook profile with interests.
2nd: Videos need HTML5 support.
If the Facebook issue is that you are wanting real people, then maybe you could create a "confidence" score for people to identify their trustworthiness, or maybe some kind of ratings system. Confirming a phone number or school email would also be a good alternative to the facebook requirement.
... on hacker news. And in the rest of the populace? Not so sure.
After building facebook, mobile, and web apps for a long time, I'm extremely cautious about the internet. I recommend to friends and family "don't add or download any apps, don't use IE7, and don't put anything on the internet that you wouldn't want in your biography."
Until you've built a facebook app you'd never think that your friends added apps have extended permissions to your profile.
I think more research is needed.
Why ask for my Facebook if you are then going to ask where I love, and my interests, afterwards?
Do you realise how limiting it seems to ask if I live in:
Palo Alto, CA
San Franciso, CA
Somewhere elseI don't mean to be the "but what about my edge case" guy, but it really does seem like your target audience is going to be denser when you get into cities that don't have thoroughly saturated tech scenes already.
p.s. If there are any HN types in the ABQ/Santa Fe area, please reply and we can grab lunch sometime.
Just because there are lots of similarly-minded people in the same area as you doesn't mean it's easy to make friends with them. A lot of people relocated to the bay area every month, a service like this would be great for them.
Certainly falls under the category of "solving problems of SV 20 somethings" though :P
© Let's Be Amigos 2013
What is Let's Be Amigos? Who is behind? A company or a person? Please give some more details.
It doesn't make any sense to have a site to help people be more social but then only offer it to people who are social...
Or...unfortunately maybe facebook does know my interests but not because I've deliberately divulged them. In any case, it would be much better to ask me directly.
For friend-making through common interests I use meetup.com
Lastly, for now wanted to dodge anonymous signups. Won't be much fun to set you up with people that are not real.
BUT... I am opposed to having only Facebook login, just because it's not an open standard, and it isn't part of the Open Web. I'd argue for supporting, at a minimum, OpenID as an alternative.
Examples: Spontacts, Woofound, Matewire, Activepepper
Hope that helped.
As for wanting to meet people in my area with similar interests, I'll stick to using Meetup.
Additionally, here is some advice from someone who runs their own Meetup group. My coffee and conversation group is over a month old and has over 50 members. Only about 20% sign up for a Meetup and about 75% actually show. These are rough estimates, but from people I talk to that host events, they have similar results. I think you'll find that once you set up these "meets" with 4 people, usually not all 4 will show up. I guess if you had them prepay, they would be more inclined to...
but anyway, good luck!
I like the idea! I hope this is constructive.
I signed up with facebook.
The next page asked me what my location was. I thought that was a bit odd, because what's the point of giving you access to all my FB stuff? So, I drop down the thingy and there are 2 towns, both in California. Well, it's brand new so I kind of expected that. But I have no idea how to enter my location. Do I just put my town name? Or town name, county? Or town name, UK? Or what? So, I guess at town and UK.
The next three boxes ask me for some things I've done recently. Eh, I really don't do much. It might be worth giving people a grid of ideas as suggestions?
Well one issue is that you can work in one city and live in another. That may not be reflected in Facebook. We didn't think about town vs. county vs. city.
Suggestions are a great idea. Thanks.
Thanks our matchmakers and algorithms are hard at work to find the perfect matches for you.
We will email you soon.
..."GET STARTED WITH FACEBOOK" button on the same page.
Do you not see the irony in your tagline?
- I live in Redwood City, CA. Would be nice if this autocompleted.
- Include more suggestions for the types of things to include in things I've done in the last month.
- You should include the "How It Works" info on the landing page after I finish.
- There should be other ways for me to find people, I shouldn't have to rely upon algorithms to do all the work.
I'm lovin the name, it made me laugh so much. Great idea too. I move around a lot so am always looking for ways to build a solid network of new friends.
If you have a vision, pursue it with relentless ambition. Don't let these criticisms put you off.
EDIT: Thanks for the support, this issue was quickly fixed.
letsbeamigos: we got it
letsbeamigos: when we have matches we'll email you
letsbeamigos: with an activity
I'm using Safari 6 on Mac OS 10.8 if that helps.
The project failed. I am quite curious to see how this one goes
Meeting a person solely for the person of selecting him or her sounds very specific to dating.
I think your project is interesting and has a lot of potential — I'm just pointing out that, by downplaying activities, you may be expecting a type of socializing that's unnatural to many people, especially if you hope to differentiate yourself from dating sites.
My level of jokes will probably never increase.
Hopefully she can quit her job and still maintain her friendships - but people also tend to compartmentalize, and without something like a common job, there isn't necessarily a compartment for her anymore.
I am not talking about merely needing to do something together to meet new people. I'm not talking about going down to the court and asking random people to shoot some hoops, and basketball being the pretext. I'm talking about "we need to work together or have met in some context where it was clear that we had stuff to do other than make friends with each other". There might not need to be a pretext after a friendship is established, but you sometimes need to get over that hurdle.
Saying you like hiking and snowboarding on a friend meeting site will never get you anywhere. Go to the mountain. Join the Mountaineers.
I'm from UK and the same is true here. People make friends by doing things together, and spending time together doing similar activities, e.g. working in an office, playing football, going to school/uni together. Finding someone random to be friends with online is just plain wierd. I feel like this kind of 'hook-up' friendship is more acceptable in the US, especially SV.
In British culture we are only just getting over the social stigma of internet dating, and it is starting to become more widespread for people to be proud of meeting their spouses online, but meeting friends online is still a social hurdle, and arguably, less efficient than just turning up to a local football club.
[Scumbag LetsBeAmigos]
PRESUMES THE USER HAS A FACEBOOK ACCOUNT
By refusing to have a Facebook account, you have willingly chosen to avoid a large portion of the web's social layer. Don't complain when you can't use a social product then.
A number of us are programmers and have some sense that the amount of labor being saved by using FB for authentication versus custom code is not significant enough to be the real reason for using FB login, as opposed to a long-term plan for using the integration for other purposes.