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Ripple – Chat with people nearby
- otoburb 13y agoI thought they were related to Ripple Labs (https://ripple.com/ https://ripple.com/) and the Ripple cryptocurrency due to the recent Bitcoin and cryptocurrency craze; however it seems they are unrelated and just happened to hit upon the same name for their chat app.
- jamztang 13y agoRight there's nothing to do with Ripple Labs, we named it through a hackathon before we found it out.
- Falling3 13y agoI often find myself wondering about an application like this. Anyone know if there's something similar for android?
- fencepost 13y agoGoogle has in a vague and useless way attempted something like it in Google+ on mobile - there's a "Nearby" option that at this point appears to be people within the same metro area.
- cb060 13y agohaving trouble finding on the app store!
- jamztang 13y agoHere's the direct link https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ripple-chat/id787142731?ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ripple-chat/id787142731?ls=1... Probably take some time for AppStore to process those keywords, stay tuned :)
- taproot 13y agoRandom? Why not all the people?
- jamztang 13y agoYes you can by inviting people with our per room invitation feature. There will be a need to have chat room concept so people know what to chat on.
- taproot 13y agoCool, think you can get a lan based room going? As others have said been keen to do something very similar. Glad someone got off their ass and did it. I always envisioned it useful at parties and places where the internet may be too congested but the lan/wlan not so much: read conferences
- yadongwen 13y agonice work. great if can read and send contact info like fb/email..
- est 13y agoWeChat (by Tencent) has similar feature, but you must first add people to friend list then chat. However this raise an interesting topic: How to securely verify that a device is indeed nearby and not spoofing it? You can spoof your GPS coordinates easily on Android at least.
- joe_the_user 13y agoWhy would that be a problem? Your location should not be an identifying value but more or less a topic. Being able to set your parameters to some location somewhere and chat with "random people" there seems like a feature, not a bug.
- est 13y ago> Why would that be a problem? Hmm, the same reason you wanna keep your conversations private? I can think of few cases, like if you want to giving nearby people coupons, I mean really nearby, not random guy on the other side of the planet trying to re-sell your coupons. How to use a non-hackish, non-intrusive way to make content exclusive to local users? Providing an ad-hoc wifi is not the solution because people may need public Internet activities and a device can connect only to one access point at a time.
- DigitalTurk 13y agoIt's a problem because of spam. On WeChat it happens that if you send a message to a 'nearby pretty girl', you get a link to some dodgy website back. And before you call people who would send a message to a 'nearby pretty girl' naive. WeChat is in fact used a lot for hooking up with strangers.
- verystealthy 13y agoAs Jeremy Clarkson would say... What can possibly go wrong?
- underwater 13y ago"Meet like-minded people". Where like-minded means "uses the same OS as me". Sorry, couldn't resist. Congratulations on shipping. It looks like a great utility.
- jamztang 13y agoYes we hope it can be really useful, maybe for conferences and events, never know. We'll see how it goes :)
- lelf 13y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6642100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6642100
- OafTobark 13y agoI remember seeing this when it was announced but didn't bother using it because I was too lazy to sign up an account. I like that this one doesn't require an account to engage allowing me to try before I sign up
- orta 13y agoI've been using the beta since it came out and have loved the way the app has grown. I'm really interested in seeing its potential in conferences or large towns. It's small and well focused, they've opened some code from it and seem to be doing a good job of being active in chat. Give it a try.
- runn1ng 13y agoIf I want to chat with people nearby, I would go up, come to them and start chatting with them. In person. ...just kidding, I am an asocial person, I don't speak with other people.
- digitalengineer 13y agoExept with us or course. So I take it you'd be someone willing to try the AI as shown in the 'Her' movie? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzV6mXIOVl4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzV6mXIOVl4
- _asciiker_ 13y agoha, I just saw that movie last night, great ideas in there and I like how everything works so seamlessly. Kind of gets you thinking about the singularity doesn't it?
- zanny 13y agoAs long as I don't have active reinforcement to remind me you aren't just randomly generated text by a machine somewhere, I'm good. Which also means I'd prefer my creepy stalker AI to speak in a monotone machine voice. More relatable that way.
- digitalengineer 13y ago...Hello Dave. What are you doing here Dave?"... (Hal)
- glibgil 13y agoSausage party
- notastartup 13y agohow does the chat happen through bluetooth? what are the technical details?
- jamztang 13y agoIt's through the internet
- mk3 13y agoI'm not sure about the timeline who released first, but there is popcorn chat app which allows to chat with people who are within one mile from you it was featured here a while back. The functionality seems to be the same less or more.
- mengto 13y agoHmm, popcorn is a single chatroom within a location. Ripple is multiple chatrooms within a location, but based on a topic. There is no signup. That actually creates some really interesting use cases. Hopefully, you'll decide to try it out! :)
- MichaelTieso 13y agoNice work guys. Loved the articles on Medium as well.
- mengto 13y agoThank you, hopefully our little hackathon experience will inspire others to build their own Apps too! :D
- herghost 13y agois there anyway you can forcibly push the app to the attractive woman that gets on my train? no? oh ok.
- popey 13y agoReminds me of Trepia which tried a similar thing only on desktops, 10 years ago. It died, unsurprisingly. I had been wondering when someone would revive the idea.
- mceoin 13y agoYou guys should check out Yobongo. A similar location-based chat app which has since closed down post-seed round. You might like to see what worked / didn't work for them.
- mceoin 13y agoThey were around in 2011.
- Globz 13y agoThis app makes me think of Popcorn.. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popcorn-messaging/id718416705?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popcorn-messaging/id71841670... I wonder if more people are using Ripple because so far I haven't had much conversations with Popcorn.
- TeeWEE 13y agoI thought about this idea myself. But then I noticed there were tons of good apps doing exactly this. This stopped me from implementing it, because i would not be "first app in the market", because I woudnt have the unfair advantage of being first. (yobong, palringo, whoshere)
- easy_rider 13y agoYes this. Actually the first time I came across a (variation of) this idea, it was years ago and brought up by a co-worker. I have been tinkering with the idea, and also came to the same conclusion, that virality / marketing in general were probably going to play the part hugely, as like you've stated, this has been done a lot.. Maybe it's something that people do not want. I could see this having great potential in the dating/flirt sectors obvously ;) But you could also imagine things like "shit I think I left my jacket at x/y, anyone found it? " at a festival. Anonimity would probably be mandatory for success. Remember how well Latitude faired?
- mknits 13y agoWhen its android app is coming?
- martin1b 13y agoLooks nice, but IOS only...