Show HN: 60 Minutes Chat – Anonymously chat in self-destructing chatrooms nearby | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: 60 Minutes Chat – Anonymously chat in self-destructing chatrooms nearby

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47 pointswellboy35 comments

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Is it anonymous?

Permissions:

Identity Uses one or more of: accounts on the device, profile data

Contacts/Calendar Uses one or more of: calendar, contact information

Location Uses the device's location

Ok, it seems that the update hasn't gone through yet, where it only asks for location now. Should be through soon.

It works for me, only requesting location.

While perhaps an interesting mechanic in larger cities, the core feature of this product will ensure minimal adoption in rural towns like mine. User will install, see there are no active chats, create one, never get a response, and uninstall.

Perhaps add the ability to expand your area?

It might make sense to define the area based on population density rather than just geography.

Do it K-Means-style: group users geographically targeting a particular population in each chat. As a bonus you can make some nice visualisations as a result.

(I'm reminded of a friend of mine trying to use OkCupid from Orkney, finding only four people using it within half a day's travel)

That's an excellent idea, I was thinking about how to fix this problem. I think starting with a radius of 5 miles and increasing it until users can see the chatrooms from the closest 100 people would solve all that.

Yes, but you probably want some cut off. It might be better to see a shorter list of people who are reasonably close rather than 100 people who might not even be in the same country.

Hmm, I see your point, but isn't it better to have content on the app with people a bit farther away instead of "no content of people close-by."

It depends really on what the purpose of your app is. I would normalise your data somehow against a population map, so distance in sparsely populated areas is weighted differently to dense urban areas.

That would actually be interesting to learn about people who have a much more different lifestyle than people in your direct area !

I'm ambivalent on the name, though I do like that the name says what it does without any silly made-up gibbrish name.

Reminds me of "60 Minutes" the long-running television news program. If I didn't know better, I would assume this was an app for discussing recent 60 Minutes stories.

Maybe I'm just old, though.

Maybe that's the hidden motivator in my brain. Now I can't not think of 60 minutes (the program) when I see this name.

I've been using this for around 10 minutes now and it seems fairly buggy, the main ones I've hit are:

* Messages appear in the wrong conversation, then move back to the correct one on close/open. * I get notified about new chats that then don't appear in the list

Thanks, working on it! Didn't expect that to directly take to be honest.

Interested in collabing with you on this. I had the same idea and vision.

any way to contact you

Sure, iOS and possibly also Android developer would be helpful! Shoot me an email, it's in my bio.

Some stats two hours after submission if someone is interested:

- 92 new users

- 88 chatrooms were opened

- 14 users from London, 10 Amsterdam, 8 Berlin, 8 New York, 8 Chicago, 6 Toronto. It seems like because it's so early, mostly Europe has seen it so far.

SF is just waking up so that is probably why you don't see more.

Hasn't this 'chat to people near you' been done to death already? I was thinking of doing an app like this a few years ago, but discovered that there were many similar apps.

In fact, there was Popcorn Messaging, which is anonymous chat within 1 mi radius. I loved the idea and checked the app quite often. However, the chats on there were almost never relevant to me, because there was no curation at all and this way, there was almost no way to communicate with people on there or to get an answer on anything.

So, I thought what if you add topics to the app, so that if I have a specific question, everyone in the area would get alerted by it and I could have my answer within just a few minutes. Giving the chatrooms a self-destruct timer would make them even more ephemeral. This way, the user knows that content on 60 Minutes is relevant and current at all times.

App v1.0.1 keeps asking me turn on the GPS to start a chat. My GPS is on and Google Maps doesn't have an issue with it. Nexus S running 4.4.4

I would use this. I could see it really catching on.

No iOS version in case anybody is curious.

That seems stupid. This is an app that needs all the network effect it can get.

What's stupid about starting with the biggest platform?

I downloaded it on my Galaxy S3 and it kept crashing. Cool idea, but there are definitely some bugs in it.

Stop cloning Yo's UI

It's from the same company.

Edit: oh no it isn't! (thanks!)

The app you see under "more from developer" isn't the original Yo.

Nope, it's not.

Ah no, it's just from an indie-dev :) But I was inspired by how Yo took communication to a whole nother level and thought about ways of how to push further what they started.

Didn't we have this discussion back in Microsoft vs Adobe? I seem to recall that the conclusion was that look and feels were not protected by copyright.

Looks like he's stolen the name ("Yo Messenger") as well as the UI. I'm pretty sure he'll get his ass sued if Yo actually have any money (and if they care).

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