Thinking about the origins of apps like this always feel like a chicken and egg situation. Did someone look at the battery level indicator API and ask what they could do with this? Or did they have the app idea first and wondered if there was a device API to make it work?
In my office we use iCloud shared Notes to say terrible things behind the boss' back. Bypasses the company's IT system, so it can't be restricted. And each person erases the previous message, so it can't be recorded like SMS.
Or, similarly, wouldn't it be cool to have a chat app that would detect people in the same geographic location traveling at the same speed. So your contacts would be the other people in the bus or train or plane that you're traveling in.
When I was at TomTom, they ran a contest for employees to come up with fun ways to gamify their internet-connected GPS Personal Navigation Device3s.
Some wise guy came up with the brilliant idea of maintaining a real-time "Top 10 Speeders" leaderboard for every single road on the entire map. Kinda like Foursquare for speeding on local roads. No matter where you were driving in the world, you could instantly see the top ten speeds of other TomTom users who drove down that same stretch of road, and put the pedal to the metal to claim or defend your own spot on the leaderboard!
That one went over like a lead balloon with the legal department.
The only thing worse would be a chat app for texting while driving above the speed limit with other Leaderboard members along the same stretch of road.
They also didn't appreciate my proposal for TomTomagotchi: a simulated personality on your PND that relentlessly begs you to drive it all around town to various interesting places it wants to visit, to improve its mood and satisfy its cravings. (Kind of like having virtual kids!) I'm sure there's a revenue model having drive through Burger Kings and car washes pay for placements.
The timing has to be right, a lot more young people have been raised where communicating through an app is the default way of communication and actually talking to someone is really weird.
I see this as a more general group of apps which connect you with people because of some reason. The main attraction is that you don't need to provide a reason yourself.
This is not necessarily bad, in fact I'd count be my eyes in the same group (an app which receives FaceTime calls from blind folks in order for you to help them out)
Just like #general/#random was often the most active channel on chat networks. Common interests brought everyone to the network, but most people really just wanted an excuse to find some friendship.
God, that gave me a flashback. Does anyone remember what this app was called, back in the iPhone 3G era? I used the hell out of it for a short while back in 2008 or 9.
That also gave me nostalgia for old iPhone games that don't exist anymore - Tap Tap Revenge (RIP), Jelly Car, Tap Defense...
Side note: I had to type the quote out because Android/Firefox refused to pop the paste dialog in that box. No disrespect to the Android team and all they've achieved, but I don't understand how text selection and copy/paste on mobile is still so awful.
...yes. It's pretty common to talk in terms of worst case...
The unicode extensions for SMS only allow 70 UCS-2 code points. So from the perspective of ASCII, SMS can too big to fit into a tweet, and from the perspective of Unicode a tweet can be too big to fit into SMS.
Tweets to me look like a product manager liked the constrained aspect of SMS, but didn't dig hard into the details.
At Remind we operate one of the largest SMS delivery systems out there. We also have a 140 character limit, reserving 20 characters for the handle/class name.
In aggregate, having the limit is a cost decision. We absolutely can and do send messages longer than 140 characters. But we make a best effort to limit it to a single SMS segment. If some are over, oh well.
When Twitter first came out, in the US it was common to pay for receiving SMS not just sending. Multipart messages weren't always handled perfectly before modern smart phones, often they would be delayed or be received in the wrong order.
interestingly Europe was all over SMS messaging in the 00s, but it didn't really become popular in the US until this decade, when carriers starting bundling unlimited SMS in plans.
You own an MVNO? That's amazing. I have a few questions regarding setting one up - if you have time, I'd like to ask you over email. My contact info is in my profile.
Like all “good” tech ideas this isn’t a terribly bad idea on its surface. It has no tech requirements. Running this just sounds like a nightmare. I really don’t want to be adminning griefing and trolling targeted at cancer patients.
Well run moderated communities for the dying are nothing new.
It seems that it wasn't until 280 characters became possible that people started using Twitter like a blog with one post split between 20 or 30 messages. I wonder if that was coincidental, or one thing led to the other.
When it comes to social systems, constraints are really good. Twitter is a prime example within the social network space, but you can generalize further. Sports are fun because of the constraints they place on play.
If you find the right set of constraints, you can create something quite compelling.
Twitter is prime example that if you load tons of money no matter how crappy your product is you can make money out of it. They succeeded into making celebrities use it.
A chat app, which gives you X amount of characters to send. The length of the message is deducted from X when you send a message and you need to move around in the real world at walking/running speeds to replenish the characters.
I think this would actually be better as a forum. Flame wars would get you fit!
Wasn't there something where people were saying Uber or Lyft was increasing rates according to how little battery remained on your phone? Clearly what is needed is a new app to get a ride when your phone is about to die.
What if your phone clocked itself down super low when it was about to die/killing all apps except one. Then it used this simple UI that has cached app processes/requests so it would just make that network request instead of going into the app/starting it...
Ehh nvm makes no difference right? Probably barely any performance gains. Was thinking of that buy now button idea of Amazon. App-less apps
There was a great iOS game back in the day called "One Single Life" or some such. The game had you jump between buildings, and if you ever fell to your death, well then the app stopped working completely. Back then the device id was accessible so you couldn't even reinstall it iirc. It was a great experience to play a game where failure had a real consequence.
Nope; reformatted computers few weeks ago, switched to Firefox permanently, installed auto-cookie clear. Query opens in separate Firefox container from HN. Don't even have Chrome installed anymore.
To confirm, just replicated on my MS Edge which hasn't been fired up ever (welll.... technically, once, on day one, to install Firefox:). Note that I'm not signed in, I haven't used HN on that browser, and there are no cookies.
Not sure what else I can do to get cleaner results? :|
It seems that Google adds this page to my search results when opening it from the home page.
I've tested it with both Chrome (whilst being logged out and removing all cookies) and Firefox and I'm getting the same results in both browsers, whether I'm using incognito mode or not.
Interesting that this doesn't seem to be the case for everyone.
I really like the game Star Traders: Frontiers. I play on Android. One of my favorite and least favorite features is that each game can end quite suddenly in permadeath while performing some bland task.
Reminds me of my favorite chat app with artificial constraints: WhatsApplebee's (http://whatsapplebees.com/)
"Using our iPhone app, you can have anonymous conversations with other Applebee's patrons and brand advocates."
"WhatsApplebee's uses iPhone location services to limit access to those currently inside an Applebee's. We enforce this strictly, unlike other chain restaurant-based messaging services such as T.G.I. Friendster or Olive Grindr."
Is battery life still a thing? I listen to music all day on my phone and still have some large amount of battery left at the end of the day. I know other people are heavier users of their phone, but I feel like the paranoia about battery life kind of went away several years ago.
As someone still rocking an iPhone 6s, I’ve had the battery replaced last year but still usually have to plug it in and charge at some point in the afternoon/evening. Will be almost dead by lunch some days.
154 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadAnd now fatalistic battery level requirements.
I can only wonder what the next iterations will include!
edit: This is the third app I've ever bought (others: Purify and PocketCity). I appreciate the creativity and simplicity.
Some wise guy came up with the brilliant idea of maintaining a real-time "Top 10 Speeders" leaderboard for every single road on the entire map. Kinda like Foursquare for speeding on local roads. No matter where you were driving in the world, you could instantly see the top ten speeds of other TomTom users who drove down that same stretch of road, and put the pedal to the metal to claim or defend your own spot on the leaderboard!
That one went over like a lead balloon with the legal department.
The only thing worse would be a chat app for texting while driving above the speed limit with other Leaderboard members along the same stretch of road.
They also didn't appreciate my proposal for TomTomagotchi: a simulated personality on your PND that relentlessly begs you to drive it all around town to various interesting places it wants to visit, to improve its mood and satisfy its cravings. (Kind of like having virtual kids!) I'm sure there's a revenue model having drive through Burger Kings and car washes pay for placements.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcKHBgZ_QKU
This is not necessarily bad, in fact I'd count be my eyes in the same group (an app which receives FaceTime calls from blind folks in order for you to help them out)
It’s free, and they keep the video streams... and metadata, and place cookies, and tracking pixels, as per their TOS.
It’s another one of those “free app so we can collect all your data” plays.
Too bad. It was such a nice humanitarian idea, and now I have to delete it.
God, that gave me a flashback. Does anyone remember what this app was called, back in the iPhone 3G era? I used the hell out of it for a short while back in 2008 or 9.
That also gave me nostalgia for old iPhone games that don't exist anymore - Tap Tap Revenge (RIP), Jelly Car, Tap Defense...
Side note: I had to type the quote out because Android/Firefox refused to pop the paste dialog in that box. No disrespect to the Android team and all they've achieved, but I don't understand how text selection and copy/paste on mobile is still so awful.
DailyBooth, perhaps?
Maybe we can reserve part of IPv6 for this?
(Desktop with Vivaldi)
The unicode extensions for SMS only allow 70 UCS-2 code points. So from the perspective of ASCII, SMS can too big to fit into a tweet, and from the perspective of Unicode a tweet can be too big to fit into SMS.
Tweets to me look like a product manager liked the constrained aspect of SMS, but didn't dig hard into the details.
In aggregate, having the limit is a cost decision. We absolutely can and do send messages longer than 140 characters. But we make a best effort to limit it to a single SMS segment. If some are over, oh well.
interestingly Europe was all over SMS messaging in the 00s, but it didn't really become popular in the US until this decade, when carriers starting bundling unlimited SMS in plans.
-Edit- Okay, I was wrong. Forgot to think before I posted.
Source : own an MVNO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operato...
For as long as I can remember, Twitter allowed 140 Unicode characters, whereas SMS limits messages to 140 bytes.
(Actually sounds like a good way to connect people with others going through something they're going through.)
Well run moderated communities for the dying are nothing new.
If you find the right set of constraints, you can create something quite compelling.
Why?
Because I want to balance my desire to have social connection to friends overseas with my need to manage compulsive phone-checking behavior.
Because I want the chat to be a conversation with people.
Still more than I need.
'member netsplits?
I think this would actually be better as a forum. Flame wars would get you fit!
https://youtu.be/id2engoWMv8?t=554
I had facepalmed when I learnt it got funding - https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/18/yo-raises-1-5m-in-funding-...
and I just checked - it is still live on the App Store! :)
Take YouTube and allow people to only upload videos of a few seconds: Vine
Create a blogging platform where people can write only 2-3 sentences per blog post: Twitter
The "Yo!" and "Die With Me" apps seem to fit right in.
Makes sense, they can’t wait it out, but could also be a proxy for poor planners or compulsions.
They didn’t say they raised prices based on battery life, but I could see why they could.
What if your phone clocked itself down super low when it was about to die/killing all apps except one. Then it used this simple UI that has cached app processes/requests so it would just make that network request instead of going into the app/starting it...
Ehh nvm makes no difference right? Probably barely any performance gains. Was thinking of that buy now button idea of Amazon. App-less apps
Also expired tokens and what not
Love it, you are paying extra to slightly undo the crippling that’s the USP of this MVP.
1:https://www.google.com/search?q=game+called+one+single+life
To confirm, just replicated on my MS Edge which hasn't been fired up ever (welll.... technically, once, on day one, to install Firefox:). Note that I'm not signed in, I haven't used HN on that browser, and there are no cookies.
Not sure what else I can do to get cleaner results? :|
https://imgur.com/a/5ObkK9v
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tresebroth...
"Using our iPhone app, you can have anonymous conversations with other Applebee's patrons and brand advocates."
"WhatsApplebee's uses iPhone location services to limit access to those currently inside an Applebee's. We enforce this strictly, unlike other chain restaurant-based messaging services such as T.G.I. Friendster or Olive Grindr."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
Depends what I use my phone for each day.