The beauty of the internet is that physical/geographic distance is not the deciding factor any more. Two people far separated by geography can be very close online. So why would an internet-enabled app re-introduce artificial geographic rigidity?
Sometimes artificial limits adds to the fun. Why is soccer only played with feet and not with hands, and why can't I kick a basketball? And why can't I go outside the hockey rink at will.
Well, as I see it, different apps for different purposes. Information that is only relevant in a certain geographic area won't spread beyond that area. Information that is widely relevant will spread widely (if I understand the app correctly, I haven't actually used it).
Also, many communication platforms have "arbitrary" constraints (square photos, 140 characters) that help shape the user experience.
There are times when geographic locality is the thing you want to filter on.
A few weeks ago, I was stuck on a freeway. Completely stopped. After about 10 minutes of no motion I really wished I had been able to do a "search within 1/2 mile of my location" sort of thing to find out what was going on and when it would likely be fixed, so I could decide to tell the friends I was meeting "I'll be a bit late" or "Sorry, guys, go on without me".
>There are times when geographic locality is the thing you want to filter on.
Which has nothing to do with actually being near said locality. I think filtering on geographic locations is great, but even greater is that ability to do so while remote. I can learn about events occurring in and around a specific area without actually being in that area. That's (part of) the beauty of the internet.
I'm way more likely to be interested in stuff happening near where I currently am than in some other arbitrary place.
Sure, sometimes it makes sense to be able to search elsewhere, but that makes things more complicated for marginal gains.
Yelp is a good example. Yes, I've used it to research food in other locations, but it would still be 95% as useful to me if the only thing it did was show me stuff that was nearby, since that's what I almost always use it for.
I was a dedicated Wazer for a while and I eventually had to accept that it just didn't work. I could count on one hand maybe the number of instances where it actually seemed to react to construction or road obstacles in a practical way. I could count on 10-20 hands the number of times it tried to get me to maneuver across several lanes of traffic in order to spend 30 feet on some back road only to get back onto the road I was just on, having to re-maneuver across lanes.
Also, at some point a few months ago they redesigned the ride sharing interface. I'm referring to the feature where you can link a friend so they can see your drive. I used this all the time with my girlfriend when I'd come to visit, so she could see how close I was. Then it completely broke. It became horribly unreliable.
In the end I left Waze for Google Maps because it didn't seem to actually deliver on any of its goals.
I'm surprised that you find Google Maps superior after the Waze acquisition; you'd think both products would be approaching a feature-equilibrium by now.
Yep, they do. I prefer Google Maps simply because it's simpler and I ultimately found that the additional features of Waze weren't worth the complexity.
I believe Google uses the crowdsourced Waze data in various ways, e.g., for their traffic maps, but I'm not sure of a source for that.
I just got (on Android) a Waze push notification saying that I could add Waze integration to my (iOS) notification center.
I was very confused, even despite the handy animation they showed me (I apparently can't recognize the iOS notification center on sight, so thought it was showing me something on Android that I'd never seen before).
Wow. I've had almost the opposite experience in every way.
Waze has saved me a huge amount of time by routing me around the random traffic I have in my area in ways that I'd have never thought of.
And the ride sharing update actually made the feature usable for me whereas before it just seemed to lock the app up as often as not.
It seemed to behave strangely on a long road trip, trying to send me on a very bizarre and obviously wrong path, but aside from that I've got nothing but good things to say about it -- oh, except the bizarre 'lets put up a popup ad in your way when you stop at a light when you will be most likely be looking for direction clarification' thing it has been doing lately.
Oh yes, I forgot about the pop-up ads whenever you're stopped. :)
Waze's routing just did not satisfy me. It tended to prefer highly complex routes, sometimes just for the sake of avoiding a tiny little stretch of road where it thought there was heavy traffic. Half the time, it was wrong about the more complex route being faster. When it was right, though, the added labor of following that route wasn't really worth it, because it would only save me a negligible amount of time.
Waze claims to learn your favorite routes. It never seemed to learn anything at all about my favorite routes. As far as I could tell, this feature didn't exist.
The ride sharing update not only made it much more frustrating to share the ride -- before you had a great link you could just paste or share anywhere, now it's some sort of Waze-specific notification which goes away and gets lost after you click on it -- but it also made the ride sharing maps nearly non-functional. Whenever my girlfriend or I would use it, it would almost never actually update the other person's position on the map. We tried this several times over the course of more than a month and the failure rate was very high.
In my opinion, if there were bugs causing it to crash before (which I never experienced), they should have just fixed those bugs. The interface "improvement" was a huge step back for me.
Maybe all this is fixed now. I hope so. But it wasn't that long ago that I switched away from it -- about a month or two after the ride sharing update.
I guess it depends on the location - for me (Silicon Valley) it works great to avoid traffic. Never tried the sharing part though. Also, seems to drain the battery quite quickly but since I only use it in a car I just need not to forget to plug it in.
How many years ago did you try Waze? I was on waze when it first came to the US and I agreed. It's much better now though - it depends on the number of users in your area.
In my experience Waze is mich more accurate than gmaps in predicting commute times. It's also alerted me to speed traps on multiple occasions. Crowd-sourced "radar detector" was an unexpected bonus.
There are plenty of apps for which geographic vicinity is crucial to the service they provide: meetup, yelp, uber... apps for which the end goal is for the user to interact with, or obtaining information about, something/someone close to him/her.
To be fair, the description of this app it's so vague that it's hard to see how distance would affect its users.
"Already seen too many cats on there for one day though. One is too many."
Well, that's the fatal flaw of this recurring "let's build a local social network!" idea... if you wanted to indiscriminately talk to people all around you in your area, you already would be. By and large, you don't have every neighbor on your Facebook because you don't really want them there.... I still haven't seen a compelling use case that isn't based largely on wishful thinking or nostalgia (often for eras not lived in by the nostalgia-ee that may or may not even have existed...), rather than being based on some sort of witnessed need.
It's perfect for something like a protest, especially if you're worried about a (non-local) adversary flooding the network with irrelevant information.
Along a similar vein, I could see localized information being very useful during an emergency or natural disaster. "Downed power lines on Main Street" means different things depending on the poster's geography.
But you can't take your cell phone to protests anymore - we live in a constant mass-surveillance society now. So unless you don't care that that protest will be added to your personal profile, you leave it at home.
Perhaps it could work as follows:
1) in terms of information sharing you are always sharing what is 'nearby' with others who are 'nearby'; this keeps the information flowing no matter what
2) in terms of information DISPLAY, it defaults to monitoring what is 'nearby' BUT you can also choose to remotely monitor other geographic areas (while 1) is still happening)
Epidemic information distribution was the center piece of the paper "Epidemic information dissemination in distributed systems" and highlighted in Gossip[1].
Marketing words that have a better connotation for this might be 'discovery' or 'enlightment' or 'intuition', even 'gossip', even though it is often a scourge in middle school, has a better reception than 'plague'.
For me, it's like the spiritual, mobile successor to mainpage reddit, i.e., a nice casual way to consume & share neat photos, links, and interesting "what if...?" questions.
So far at least, the community has been very positive, and not overrun with 9gag-style inanity.
An interesting aspect of the dissemination scheme is that even popular cards will only spread to, say, 100 to 1000 people. This keeps the conversations on the cards small enough to still be intimate.
What is the definition of "nearby users" in this context? It seems like someone can start something in Seattle for example, and then only 1 other person has seen it, but they are in France?
They've been tweaking the algorithm as they go along. Initially it was highly local centric, now it appears to bias towards nearby but with a lower probability chance of jumping further away. (Source: Early user, and some comments from the CEO on Plague cards asking the same question.)
This page is totally devoid of content. If it wasn't for the comments in here, I would have absolutely no idea what it's advertising; I would have closed it and forgot about it forever.
But seriously, I am unclear on pretty much every aspect of this. Even the screenshots give very little info. I don't know if I'm going to need to sign up for an account, or whether I'd be receiving "infections" from Portland and Boise or just up the block here in Seattle. And since I'm guessing 90% of these items are going to originate on the wider net to begin with, or be posted there simultaneously, the benefit to me seems dubious at best.
A more limited version that only sends stuff over local wifi or using local wifi as a beacon to make an ad hoc connection between "carriers" would be cool, though. More hyperlocal, you can be sure if the thing has only taken two or three steps, it was someone nearby who made it. Maybe that's how it works; there's no way to know for sure and I don't really plan to find out!
The first thing I thought of was something I saw at a weekend hack event: in a disaster or when no network can be found, it looks for nearby phones over blutooth and propogates messages until the original message eventually finds a phone to send out a communication over data or wifi.
Yeah I love the idea of this kind of robust mesh. I think it'll happen eventually. Alternatively it could propagate until it reaches whoever it's going to on the limited network (your friend in a different neighborhood) and then send out a kill order for the other propagating packets.
The kill order sounds like it could waste as much bandwidth as the duplicated message copies, and be exploitable to suppress messages unless it requires a signature from the message's recipient.
I like that idea, but I'd guess Bluetooth range would limit it. I wonder if you could do something with special packets and wireless cards in promiscuous mode?
Yep, I opened the page and my only thought was "nice pictures, but what this things actually does?" Right, it spreads information. So does www, email, twitter, facebook, tumblr and I could be here all day listing the rest. What is this specific thing?
I'm trying it right now on Android and I think the up/down swipe gestures are too sensitive. I have to be super careful with my finger on the screen to avoid accidentally swiping a card the wrong way.
Other than that, it's an interesting idea. For those who are unclear on how this actually works, it presents cards with information on them that others nearby you have posted (photos, etc.). You can swipe up to "infect" nearby people (send the card to them) or swipe down to do nothing. Also, I didn't have to sign up or create an account to start swiping.
Since the page itself is useless: this is like Tinder for reddit's r/funny subreddit.
No account creation, so it's probably just tied to your device - sort of like Yik Yak, I guess. Things seem to be geographically correlated, though I imagine that the more 'viral' a thing is, presumably the further it can spread.
edit: I guess you can create an account, but it's not required to 'infect' crap.
At least here in NYC, it seems like one user is generating 99% of all content. A third of it is "art", a third of it is gifs of girls twerking, and another third is just celebrity snapshots.
This is kind of reinventing the wheel. If I want to hear things from people in my area, why can't I just walk outside and talk to them instead of using this app?
To some, going outside and talking to people is an inconvenience and uncomfortable. Reinvention affords convenience, why rent a movie from iTunes when I can just walk the thirty minutes to my nearest DVD rental place? Why listen to a song immediately when instead I can wait for a CD to arrive in the post?
Such an odd response. How many people are waiting on your doorstep to inform you of information in your local area?
I don't think this app does information sharing any better than, say, twitter (far worse, imo) - but i find your response puzzling.
Since your issue is not of the quality of content (signal/noise), and instead that of locality.. that you believe you can just walk out of your door and get the same information this app provides - I ask you, can you? Can you walk out your door, and receive similar info to that of this app?
The range on the internet far exceeds most peoples doorstep. Mine for sure, at least.
I really like this. Simple mechanic and has that intimate feel that you get from snapchat but with people nearby. They clearly need some love from a real designer tho.. that logo / loading thing looks like something you'd stomp to death if you ever ran into it.
I just tried it in Toronto and had to swipe down about 50 times to get rid of obvious (and NSFW) spam.
The content is better now, but all coming from the eastern USA.
I tried to comment on something, and got prompted to register. But after I registered, I lost the card I was going to comment on, and there appears to be no way to go back to a previous card.
The geolocation is a little wonky ("Nueva York, Estados Unidos").
I tried in the Halton area (West of Toronto) and had about 40 things from a single individual in Hamilton who continually posted far right conspiracy type things. I suppose this is the issue with the network effect -- right now it looks pretty pathetic in this area.
But the idea is solid. The Internet went global, but really a lot of the activity now is making it local again.
I don't care to see pictures of cats but I do want to be notified of major local events. Allow me to filter out posts that haven't already been spread by X users and you're onto something major here.
There was no news, no actual information. Only a series of random pictures, screenshots of other apps, and vague comments about whatever what on the poster's mind.
Social news will always have a near zero signal to noise ratio.
Seemed interesting; however I uninstalled after a few minutes of use. I think the idea certainly has potential - but the people around me just seem to treat it as a status update or Instagram post.
This would be a great technology to spread important information but I don't know how you'd filter that without defeating the purpose of "infecting" people.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadAlso, many communication platforms have "arbitrary" constraints (square photos, 140 characters) that help shape the user experience.
A few weeks ago, I was stuck on a freeway. Completely stopped. After about 10 minutes of no motion I really wished I had been able to do a "search within 1/2 mile of my location" sort of thing to find out what was going on and when it would likely be fixed, so I could decide to tell the friends I was meeting "I'll be a bit late" or "Sorry, guys, go on without me".
Which has nothing to do with actually being near said locality. I think filtering on geographic locations is great, but even greater is that ability to do so while remote. I can learn about events occurring in and around a specific area without actually being in that area. That's (part of) the beauty of the internet.
I'm way more likely to be interested in stuff happening near where I currently am than in some other arbitrary place.
Sure, sometimes it makes sense to be able to search elsewhere, but that makes things more complicated for marginal gains.
Yelp is a good example. Yes, I've used it to research food in other locations, but it would still be 95% as useful to me if the only thing it did was show me stuff that was nearby, since that's what I almost always use it for.
Also, at some point a few months ago they redesigned the ride sharing interface. I'm referring to the feature where you can link a friend so they can see your drive. I used this all the time with my girlfriend when I'd come to visit, so she could see how close I was. Then it completely broke. It became horribly unreliable.
In the end I left Waze for Google Maps because it didn't seem to actually deliver on any of its goals.
I'm surprised that you find Google Maps superior after the Waze acquisition; you'd think both products would be approaching a feature-equilibrium by now.
[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/google-maps-and-waze-...
I believe Google uses the crowdsourced Waze data in various ways, e.g., for their traffic maps, but I'm not sure of a source for that.
I was very confused, even despite the handy animation they showed me (I apparently can't recognize the iOS notification center on sight, so thought it was showing me something on Android that I'd never seen before).
Waze has saved me a huge amount of time by routing me around the random traffic I have in my area in ways that I'd have never thought of.
And the ride sharing update actually made the feature usable for me whereas before it just seemed to lock the app up as often as not.
It seemed to behave strangely on a long road trip, trying to send me on a very bizarre and obviously wrong path, but aside from that I've got nothing but good things to say about it -- oh, except the bizarre 'lets put up a popup ad in your way when you stop at a light when you will be most likely be looking for direction clarification' thing it has been doing lately.
Waze's routing just did not satisfy me. It tended to prefer highly complex routes, sometimes just for the sake of avoiding a tiny little stretch of road where it thought there was heavy traffic. Half the time, it was wrong about the more complex route being faster. When it was right, though, the added labor of following that route wasn't really worth it, because it would only save me a negligible amount of time.
Waze claims to learn your favorite routes. It never seemed to learn anything at all about my favorite routes. As far as I could tell, this feature didn't exist.
The ride sharing update not only made it much more frustrating to share the ride -- before you had a great link you could just paste or share anywhere, now it's some sort of Waze-specific notification which goes away and gets lost after you click on it -- but it also made the ride sharing maps nearly non-functional. Whenever my girlfriend or I would use it, it would almost never actually update the other person's position on the map. We tried this several times over the course of more than a month and the failure rate was very high.
In my opinion, if there were bugs causing it to crash before (which I never experienced), they should have just fixed those bugs. The interface "improvement" was a huge step back for me.
Maybe all this is fixed now. I hope so. But it wasn't that long ago that I switched away from it -- about a month or two after the ride sharing update.
To be fair, the description of this app it's so vague that it's hard to see how distance would affect its users.
Once they gain traction, you will get too many infections from around the world and may be interesting in what is happening local.
I like how vague it is - it is allowing the the users to define it's purpose. A bit like Facebook.
Already seen too many cats on there for one day though. One is too many.
Well, that's the fatal flaw of this recurring "let's build a local social network!" idea... if you wanted to indiscriminately talk to people all around you in your area, you already would be. By and large, you don't have every neighbor on your Facebook because you don't really want them there.... I still haven't seen a compelling use case that isn't based largely on wishful thinking or nostalgia (often for eras not lived in by the nostalgia-ee that may or may not even have existed...), rather than being based on some sort of witnessed need.
See some of the coverage on the use of FireChat in Hong Kong (http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/16/tech/mobile/tomorrow-transform...).
Along a similar vein, I could see localized information being very useful during an emergency or natural disaster. "Downed power lines on Main Street" means different things depending on the poster's geography.
Epidemic information distribution was the center piece of the paper "Epidemic information dissemination in distributed systems" and highlighted in Gossip[1].
Marketing words that have a better connotation for this might be 'discovery' or 'enlightment' or 'intuition', even 'gossip', even though it is often a scourge in middle school, has a better reception than 'plague'.
[1] http://phdopen.mimuw.edu.pl/lato08/notes-1.pdf
For me, it's like the spiritual, mobile successor to mainpage reddit, i.e., a nice casual way to consume & share neat photos, links, and interesting "what if...?" questions.
So far at least, the community has been very positive, and not overrun with 9gag-style inanity.
An interesting aspect of the dissemination scheme is that even popular cards will only spread to, say, 100 to 1000 people. This keeps the conversations on the cards small enough to still be intimate.
It does seem like a cool idea though.
But seriously, I am unclear on pretty much every aspect of this. Even the screenshots give very little info. I don't know if I'm going to need to sign up for an account, or whether I'd be receiving "infections" from Portland and Boise or just up the block here in Seattle. And since I'm guessing 90% of these items are going to originate on the wider net to begin with, or be posted there simultaneously, the benefit to me seems dubious at best.
A more limited version that only sends stuff over local wifi or using local wifi as a beacon to make an ad hoc connection between "carriers" would be cool, though. More hyperlocal, you can be sure if the thing has only taken two or three steps, it was someone nearby who made it. Maybe that's how it works; there's no way to know for sure and I don't really plan to find out!
Other than that, it's an interesting idea. For those who are unclear on how this actually works, it presents cards with information on them that others nearby you have posted (photos, etc.). You can swipe up to "infect" nearby people (send the card to them) or swipe down to do nothing. Also, I didn't have to sign up or create an account to start swiping.
No account creation, so it's probably just tied to your device - sort of like Yik Yak, I guess. Things seem to be geographically correlated, though I imagine that the more 'viral' a thing is, presumably the further it can spread.
edit: I guess you can create an account, but it's not required to 'infect' crap.
At least here in NYC, it seems like one user is generating 99% of all content. A third of it is "art", a third of it is gifs of girls twerking, and another third is just celebrity snapshots.
I don't think this app does information sharing any better than, say, twitter (far worse, imo) - but i find your response puzzling.
Since your issue is not of the quality of content (signal/noise), and instead that of locality.. that you believe you can just walk out of your door and get the same information this app provides - I ask you, can you? Can you walk out your door, and receive similar info to that of this app?
The range on the internet far exceeds most peoples doorstep. Mine for sure, at least.
I just tried it in Toronto and had to swipe down about 50 times to get rid of obvious (and NSFW) spam.
The content is better now, but all coming from the eastern USA.
I tried to comment on something, and got prompted to register. But after I registered, I lost the card I was going to comment on, and there appears to be no way to go back to a previous card.
The geolocation is a little wonky ("Nueva York, Estados Unidos").
But the idea is solid. The Internet went global, but really a lot of the activity now is making it local again.
There was no news, no actual information. Only a series of random pictures, screenshots of other apps, and vague comments about whatever what on the poster's mind.
Social news will always have a near zero signal to noise ratio.
This would be a great technology to spread important information but I don't know how you'd filter that without defeating the purpose of "infecting" people.