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Ripple – Chat with people nearby (ripplechat.io)
53 points by jamztang on Jan 15, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 49 comments



If 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.


Exept 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


As 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.


...Hello Dave. What are you doing here Dave?"... (Hal)


ha, 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?


I thought they were related to Ripple Labs (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.


Right there's nothing to do with Ripple Labs, we named it through a hackathon before we found it out.


"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.


Yes we hope it can be really useful, maybe for conferences and events, never know. We'll see how it goes :)


WeChat (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.


Why 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.


It'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.


I don't get it.

I would expect people hooking up nearby would identify themselves a little specifically - I'd be "the guy in the tux with the red carnation". A spammer from across the globe isn't going identify themselves with a description fitting the woman in the table over. I mean, she would be "blue and white scarf" rather than "nearby pretty girl" (unless it's a spammer, yeah).


Well, 'nearby pretty girl' would not describer herself as such, but would have a plausible looking profile picture. :) Also the distances are a bit bigger than the bar you're sitting in (up to a few kilometers).


> 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.


The edge cases just aren't worth doing any extra work for.


All innovations come from edge cases. Cheers :)


At least for now, it's not meant for private/sensitive messages.

We're more focusing on allowing people to join chatrooms which the location information are to help people easily find them, there's also an invitation feature to let you tweet your room and people can join all over the world.


Who cares? If I'm on a train heading home, I don't want my conversation terminated because I get too far away. Just link the rooms to one or more relevant locations so people can find them initially, then let people favourite them or whatever so they can rejoin later without having to be in that location.

Yeah?

EDIT: typo.



I 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


I 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)


Yes 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?


You 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.


They were around in 2011.


I often find myself wondering about an application like this. Anyone know if there's something similar for android?


Google 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.


This app makes me think of Popcorn..

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.


I'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.


It's just fantastic to hear from the Cocoapods team. Ripple wouldn't exist without it!


Thanks Orta you've been resupportive to us :)


I'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.


Hmm, 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! :)


Reminds 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.


When its android app is coming?


As Jeremy Clarkson would say... What can possibly go wrong?


Nice work guys. Loved the articles on Medium as well.


Thank you, hopefully our little hackathon experience will inspire others to build their own Apps too! :D


Random? Why not all the people?


Yes 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.


Cool, 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


Looks nice, but IOS only...


nice work. great if can read and send contact info like fb/email..


having trouble finding on the app store!


Here's the direct link https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ripple-chat/id787142731?ls=1...

Probably take some time for AppStore to process those keywords, stay tuned :)


Sausage party


is there anyway you can forcibly push the app to the attractive woman that gets on my train?

no? oh ok.


how does the chat happen through bluetooth? what are the technical details?


It's through the internet




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