Rate my app: Squeelr - Location based Twitter with a business model | Hacker News Reader

Rate my app: Squeelr - Location based Twitter with a business model

blog.squeelr.com

20 pointssniknam20 comments

The only people I can see using this are advertisers. They would be willing to spend money to get their stuff up in front of an audience. And why would I want an iPhone app that just has tweet-style advertisements?

Imagine it like billboards on the highway. They cost money, lots of money. But it's not like this paid aspect results in good content. Paid placements always attract people who have something to gain from the placement.

And expecting your users to spend money and effort in order to clean up spam is asking a bit much in my opinion.

Agree with Micah. It's great that you are thinking business model already, but I don't think you can indiscriminately charge everyone, especially the folks that will create the community / value that will bring the advertisers. I paid to download the app, and then I paid to add my content to the mix. For what?

You might want to consider making the app free for most users, but you have to pay to drop a link.

Or... what if your credit is refunded if enough people like the post?

Virtual coupon dispenser in your competitor's store.

The intro for this app needs a re-do-- its too self-referential. You are fighting the back button on this one -- you need to prove that you're interesting and useful to someone in 5 seconds flat.

The text on this page is too much about Squeelr origins and not enough about what problem it solves.

Thanks for the feedback. I agree, I linked to the wrong page. Is this one better? http://www.squeelr.com/about.html

Yes, this page makes more sense. Now I understand better. But I am not sure users will like anonymity. The whole idea of microblogging appears to be that it is ephemeral. Who would bother to delete a post. And paying for this type of service appears to be self-defeating. Good luck.

I still had no idea what it was or why I'd want it after the first paragraph. If you have to end the first paragraph with "keep reading", you should rewrite the first paragraph.

Ideally, someone says, "OMFG I want this!" after reading the headline. If I'm two paragraphs in and wondering why I'm investing my attention here... that's bad!

I had an idea for in iPhone app just like this. In my head, I called it "WriteHere". I didn't make it because it seemed like a classic chicken-and-egg problem: the app won't be compelling until it has a lot of quality user generated content and it won't have a lot of quality user generated content until it is compelling.

So I'm baffled about your business model of charging users for the exact thing that adds value to your product. It seems self-defeating. Why not at least give an intro period to get some users on your platform?

If you're going to keep going with this idea here a couple suggestions: - Re-work the pitch. Make it have 30% of the words it currently does. Make it clear what's cool about the idea. - Add a voting system so that users can vote up quality Sqeels. - Make a contest where the first user to find a specific Squeel posted in a specific hidden location wins... something. Not sure what is allowed by Apple's restrictions though.

Hope this help, good luck.

Thanks for the feedback. The idea is that the charge is small enough to not matter for legitimate transactions, but would matter for people who are wishing to bulk-broadcast.

Good tweaks, thanks.

There is a huge barrier between free and 1 cent.

Barrier, yes. But maybe we can use that to our advantage?

Pretend I'm impatient - oh wait, I am impatient and I don't want to read all that text as I have better things to do. You just lost a conversion.. uh oh!

For real, you didn't captivate me and I am captivated by a random butterfly's. (not really, but I think you get what I mean). That's something to work on. On top of being impatient, I am also cheap and I won't pay for this. Something else to reevaluate.

Overall, good concept but it still needs some ironing.

</brutal honesty>

Seems a bit like foursquare but without close ties to existing locations or the game aspects... and of course you charge users to create the very content which makes it valuable to them.

I think there needs to be more incentive for users than cutting down on spam and geolocation to really make it worth the price of participation.

With that said, best of luck.

I'm not sure I understand. As far as I can tell (and yes, I read the entire front page), it's Twitter, except I have to pay to tweet, anonymously. I just don't see an audience for this app.

is this a joke?

not to be too snippy but after spending 2-3 minutes reading copy im not 100% sure if its not sarcastic

It's not a joke, but it is an experiment. It's unclear if this is an idea that has any standing power, but it is interesting enough to me to give it a try.

I don't know about your twitter experience, but mine has been loaded with Spammers of late. What if we used money as a way to get a better signal-to-noise ratio? What does that interaction look like?

Second, what if we eliminated user accounts, making it more like the Citizens Band Radio, and less like Email. Squeelr is a common place to write stuff.

It's true, we already have many other places to write and give our opinions, but Squeelr is a funny mix of existing technologies. It's an iPhone application first, and so integrates with the camera and geolocation abilities of that target. It's a microblogging type service. But it's also completely controlled by the users, like a wiki--if you don't like something, delete it.

Here is an idea.

Why not make this a twitter app - seriously, integrate it with twitter and when people tweet in the particular geographical area via your app it is then attributed to that geographical area. However, much like your application, you can pay to remove a tweet attributed to that geographic area, thusly, generating revenue.

I had plans to integrate with twitter, I think it's a good idea. I was worried that API limits for twitter would be reached, so came up with a way around that, but haven't released it yet...not that api limits would be an issue at the moment.

Why would I open the Squeelr app?

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