I support the idea (and your post got my upvote), but for a "Show HN" post it would have been nice to be shown more than an announcement and a waiting list signup.
Thanks for the feedback! We actually agonized over just that, as we didn't want to violate the spirit of the "Show HN" postings.
However, Urban Airship has put their customers (and us) on a very tight schedule. We decided that it would be helpful for SimpleGeo customers to know of a forthcoming alternative before March 30, to help with planning.
The extra lead time will also allow us to take suggestions as to what parts of SimpleGeo mattered to their customers, so that we can get as much of that in as possible before SimpleGeo goes dark. So if that's you, please reach out on Twitter: @GeocodaHQ.
I'm not a SimpleGeo customer, but I can speculate what the number one priority feature would be: a migration path. Even if you haven't launched yet, design it, document it and share the steps for migrating. That would be a great "Show HN" post.
I flagged it. Pissing on SimpleGeo's grave, attempting to draw in unsuspecting customers into an overly ambitious plan, and misuse of the "Show HN" tag? No thanks.
We really didn't mean to do anything negative here. The reality is SimpleGeo is going away, and their customers don't have a good next step. We're working to provide that. (This project is driven by our need. Note that the Urban Airship doc recommends essentially that you build your own version of the Context service.)
That said, we're happy to be as transparent as we can about what we're doing, and definitely not trying to fool any unsuspecting customers. There's definitely code behind the site now, and we are on schedule to provide at least some subset of the SimpleGeo feature set in production in advance of their shutdown. We're posting now to get feedback to direct our prioritization until launch. If Urban Airship had given us more notice of the shutdown, we would have waited until we were live to post this. But they are pretty clear that March 30 SimpleGeo's APIs will start returning 410s, and there's nothing we can do to change that.
Annoying that UrbanAirship cancelled SimpleGeo. Good for you for providing an alternative. I hope the migration path is simple. Do you have any details?
7 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 45.8 ms ] threadHowever, Urban Airship has put their customers (and us) on a very tight schedule. We decided that it would be helpful for SimpleGeo customers to know of a forthcoming alternative before March 30, to help with planning.
The extra lead time will also allow us to take suggestions as to what parts of SimpleGeo mattered to their customers, so that we can get as much of that in as possible before SimpleGeo goes dark. So if that's you, please reach out on Twitter: @GeocodaHQ.
Oh, and Urban Airship has been a class act. They have this document where they suggest migration services, including Parse, which is a direct competitor to them for push notifications. https://support.urbanairship.com/customer/portal/articles/31...
That said, we're happy to be as transparent as we can about what we're doing, and definitely not trying to fool any unsuspecting customers. There's definitely code behind the site now, and we are on schedule to provide at least some subset of the SimpleGeo feature set in production in advance of their shutdown. We're posting now to get feedback to direct our prioritization until launch. If Urban Airship had given us more notice of the shutdown, we would have waited until we were live to post this. But they are pretty clear that March 30 SimpleGeo's APIs will start returning 410s, and there's nothing we can do to change that.
Annoying that UrbanAirship cancelled SimpleGeo. Good for you for providing an alternative. I hope the migration path is simple. Do you have any details?