Loca – social heatmaps, beta signup open | Hacker News Reader

Loca – social heatmaps, beta signup open

loca.io

32 pointsmfkp24 comments

This is rad! I tried to implement something similarly but ended up pivoting away. I really hope this works out in much more qualified hands! The key distinction and point you tap into is the idea of anonymous, yet public. Look forward to being a user!

I've actually been working on something quite similar and will be launching soon. Good luck to OP.

Thanks, would love to see your app when it's ready!

Hi there! I was actually going to use the domain itsloca.com for a recent project. Since I'm no longer working on it though, I'd be happy to send it your way if you like. Just let me know.

sure, send me an email and we can chat: hello@loca.io

Author here - will be writing up a blog post soon about building the waitlist / referral system. Any questions/comments appreciated!

What frameworks/techniques did you use making the site? Very appealing!

It's a custom designed site with a rails backend, pretty simple.

I love these "skip ahead w/ referrals" systems, because they're so incredibly easy to cheat - sorry about that!

Am very much looking forward to checking the app out.

Ha - no problem, just happy to get people signed up. Gaming the system is "fair game".

Loca means crazy woman/prostitute in Spanish. :P I can't imagine guys here using this app if it ever reaches this continent.

Who knows, might be even more popular!

Not exactly a bad association: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAhTt60W7qo

edit: english version - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KewfYKJy8YU

I'm moving up to SF this weekend. Very excited to see this in action!

Um.. So how does it work?

You share your age, gender, and location. In return, you can see a filterable heatmap of people around you. Find out where to hang out if you want to meet people.

Have you thought about connecting to foursquare data? https://developer.foursquare.com/start/interact

good idea - might use that for the early stages when there's not a lot of usage. thanks!

I was looking into the API and the gnip api also--- gnip provides anonymized data, but it's not clear to me whether they retain age/gender in their anonymized data.

Using the Foursquare API for this sort of data aggregation service (i.e. for stalking people) has been done many times before. Unsurprisingly, Foursquare didn't like it one bit [0] and ended up changing their API to prevent this sort of usage [1].

[0] http://aboutfoursquare.com/foursquare-api-change-girls-aroun... [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/foursquar...

Cool, it's good to know that foursquare is doing that.

Nevertheless, I think a better way for this app to perform is to wrap around foursquare. I'm already going to be checking-in with foursquare, so now I have to click a second button to check-in using Loca? If mfkp allows users to add their foursquare credentials, then it'll eliminate that extra step.

But I'm also not sure if mfkp is using a "check-in" model or what.

Blitz rapes, and blitz rapes, and blitz rapes.

iOS only?

iOS + android

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