Show HN: Rooster - An SMS service that messages you the forecast every morning | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Rooster - An SMS service that messages you the forecast every morning

roosterapp.co

10 pointshartleybrody23 comments

This is do-able with IFTTT. Maybe best to market outside of the tech community, to people who don't know about or aren't interested in setting up their own IFTTT.

Edit: Good on you for actually doing it though!

That's a great point, and I think it'd be especially useful to people with dumb phones who otherwise wouldn't have access to weather info on the go. Figured I'd start it here and then see if I can market it to those crowds.

This is super cool, and I'm very tempted to sign up... but how else will my cell number be used? Even without getting all legal, I'd love a brief note in your FAQ about your privacy policy.

The only plan is to send weather texts. If the costs of hosting become a burden, I might add a donation feature to the site. But I definitely don't plan on renting/selling/sharing/etc any of this info.

I'm guessing location refers to US zip codes. I'm living outside of the US, is there anyway to specify decimal lat long coordinates?

Location data is run through Google's geocoding API to return latitude/longitude. If you include something that uniquely identifies your location, it should work fine.

This is great!

Thanks so much for sharing the code, it's extremely helpful.

I've thought about making something similar (notifications for certain events via SMS) and I'm wondering if you know if Twilio can charge a fee to the end-user for every text? i.e. if for example I say "Subscribe to get an SMS every time there is a tornado in your area, for 50c per SMS" (I made that up, BTW)

That's a great question and was something I looked into for this but ultimately went without. Being able to charge money directly to a user's phone bill is known as "premium" messaging[1], but unfortunately, it doesn't seem like Twilio supports that yet[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_SMS#Premium-rated_short...

[2] http://www.twilio.com/help/faq/sms/can-i-send-money-through-...

I think it'll be hard to charge for weather alerts via SMS when so many people are already offering that for free -- like me (http://www.WeatherWatcherAlerts.com).

Agree. My plan is not for weather alerts.

Out of curiosity, I signed up for a daily weather text from a Show HN a couple months ago. I love their imaginative texts.

But I want a friend to sign up and have no recollection of what service it is. I'm guessing not this one as this says it doesn't get sent on weekends. Ideas?

Hmm, don't know the service you're referring to. Curious what you mean by "imaginative texts" though. Do they spice up the forecast language?

Coincidentally, today their update had a short URL in it. So after three months, I know what the service is. :-)

http://poncho.is/register/

Yes, they have imaginative updates. Signed up on 25 April, and so far, no two have sounded alike.

Also noticed once every couple weeks they seem to have a sort of "localized product placement" type update along the lines of "Sunny and 75 degrees, perfect for an outdoor table at Susie's Diner." At least I assume that's what it is.

Ah, very cool! I'll see if I can reach out to them. Thanks for the tip :)

Very cool, thanks for sharing the source, too! What's future plans with this app, if at all any?

At this point, it's just a simple way to experiment with new ways to deliver an app instead of the usual web or mobile app context.

I've seen similar "morning update" apps that send you all sorts of information, but I'd rather stick to the "do one thing and do it well" ideal.

I think it'd be really cool if I could market this to areas where smart phone penetration isn't as strong. I'm imagining farmers or laborers in poorer areas would really benefit from a daily forecast, but might not have easy access to one. I just have to figure out how to get this in front of those people.

Can we have a relative weather service? I'd like to know how today will be compared to yesterday. It's insane that this doesn't exist given that is how most of us end up gauging what action we need to take for the weather.

Check out poncho.is which launched recently from betaworks. They do this (It's warmer than yesterday) and it's been really helpful for the confused nyc seasons we're getting.

I'm in NYC area and love this service. Signed up in April, have been wanting to recommend it to friends, but until this morning's update with a URL in it, I couldn't remember what service it was and the SMS "HELP" didn't tell me.

If Poncho is reading this, update your HELP to mention poncho.is!

This is great thanks!! Ever since google shut down sms search I've been wanting something like this!

I implemented something like this as a Python script last year. It was fun to do.

How is it free ?

Farenheit. Lol.

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