

Show HN: Kiwichat – group chat of people who are within 1 mile - tomd3v
http://www.kiwichat.co

======
MartinMcGirk
I feel like there is definitely something in this basic idea. Although I'm not
sure that a rigid 1 mile boundary really makes a whole lot of sense. I'll
explain:

I feel like the experience you get with an app like, say, tinder, which lets a
user chat to attractive people locally, is really quite an incredible
proposition. In tinder's case the hook is that you are chatting to, and then
hopefully meeting with, a slice of the local population that you find
attractive and that also find you attractive. You both find each other
attractive - so you have that in common.

What I find myself hankering after more and more though is a service that lets
you discover a slice of the local population with which you have other things
in common. Not a dating app, but rather an app where I could chat about a
topic I'm interested in (technology, hockey, model trains, tiddlywinks, you
name it) with people who are also interested in that topic and then hopefully
connect and meet up with those people who all happen to live fairly locally.

Hacker News for instance is great for tech chat, but as someone who lives a
long long way from SV I find that it's much tougher to actually MEET people
who share my interest in tech. There are tech events going on around where I
live, but it's still an intimidating prospect showing up to some niche
interest event when you haven't met or chatted to anyone there before.
Technology is big interest of mine, so in the end I did seek out events and
other ways to connect to like-minded people. But I have a much less active
interest in, say, sailing. It wouldn't normally occur to me to go seek out a
sailing club or a sailing meetup of some kind locally, but I might still like
to chat about it. And chatting about it with similarly interested people
nearby might lead me eventually to go along to such an event and meet new
friends and try new experiences.

I feel like Kiwichat goes some way towards implementing that vision, but I
just signed in, and my one mile radius shows no chats nearby. I live in
Edinburgh, in Scotland, which isn't always the first city to bustle with new
technology, but it's maybe 5 or 10 miles in diameter, and I have no way of
knowing if someone else in Edinburgh is using this site, but from a location
only a couple of miles away. Maybe I'm missing out on some new connection, or
experience, all because I couldn't put my radius up to a level that makes
sense for me personally.

I feel like this is close to the app I really want. Closer than anything I've
seen so far, but still sadly quite a way off. It says on your landing page
that it's for "events, meetups, or just chatting with people nearby e.g.
students in your campus". If you're at an event or meetup then you are already
most of the way there and you are probably talking in person. If you're on a
small campus then this might serve the need I'm looking for. But if your
campus is big and spread out (like mine was at university), or you live in a
small city or town and want to chat to people that you could easily meet, then
it's just not serving that need... Yet.

In terms of execution though it looks great, the sign in experience is pretty
much flawless. Congrats on your launch.

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Skywing
I wrote the exact same thing about 3 years ago, according to HN timestamps:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2102790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2102790)

I also had an arbitrary chat radius, initially. After feedback and testing, I
made it so that the radius shrank as more people were online. So, if 1 person
was on the site the radius was non-existent - it'd show the next few people
regardless of location. As enough people opened the website, the radius would
begin to shrink based on your own location to include at least 1 other person
as close to you as possible, down to a minimum of like 20 miles. This way, if
10 people were online in San Francisco, but I was building the thing in
Dallas, then I could at least join in the discussion in San Francisco until
more people in Dallas joined in.

Looking back, to call my old thing a start-up in that post was hilarious. I
also learned that my concept, being real-time location-based ephemeral
anonymous chat (buzzwords jeez), has a severe chicken and egg problem. It's
damn near impossible to reach critical mass for long enough for the chat
radiuses to create any opportunity for local discussion. I also learned that
it really needed to be a native mobile app, instead of a website. Only tech
savvy people really knew what was going on, in regards to enabling location
services in browsers.

In the end, I had wished I just made some sort of non-realtime location-based
tagging service, instead. Instead of real-time chat, just have location-based
notes that you can leave somewhere in a very small precise proximity. That way
there's no need for a critical mass of users all at the same time.

Edit: it looks like by the time I posted it to HN even, I had began changing
to the non-real-time version. it originally was purely real-time chat. the
code is on github:
[https://github.com/ryancole/geohello.com](https://github.com/ryancole/geohello.com)

------
rmc
Tried it for me. No-one online now. Another idea: Chat-room with the nearest
100 people. Scales up and down.

~~~
timje1
This one could have legs. Nearest X number of people gets around the 'this app
is a desert' feeling - even if only 100 people are online globally, you've
still got a full application!

~~~
Goosey
I feel this results in some obvious paradoxes when considering how the room
morphs over time.

One (contrived) paradox: 99 people in the world online in San Francisco and 1
online in London. One more person in San Francisco joins. Do the previous 99
SFers suddenly find they are talking to the new SFer and not the Londoner? Who
does the Londoner see they are talking to?

Another (very contrived) paradox: 100 people are logged in who are all located
on the edge of a perfect circle. One more person logs in who is located
directly at the center of the circle. It's clear who is closest to each of 100
original people (presumably the person on the opposite side of the circle is
'swapped') resulting in each of the 100 original people now talking with the
center person, but the center person can not be talking to all 100 people and
there is no distance-based criteria for determining which of the 100 to not
talk with.

These seem like contrived examples, but as soon as the total user count is
greater than the 'nearest X' count they must be addressed. A solution would be
fascinating, I don't see a clear one!

~~~
freehunter
Yeah that situation brings up the possibility of a user being able to talk to
people who cannot talk back to them. Not idea.

------
rkuykendall-com
Older submission, 34 days ago, 43 comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525066)

If anyone wants to try this with people, type "Columbia University" as the
location. I'll try to stay there all day.

Welcome back, tomd3v! I see you solved the bug where anyone could rooms by
URL. Unfortunately, that bug was also the only feature that let anyone use
this for chat. Instead of fixing it, you should have spent time on some of the
features suggested in that thread. It's already clear you're just going to get
the same feedback again this time.

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__xtrimsky
There is no way someone is using this app a mile around me!

I think 1 mile is too small of a distance, I would make it 5 or 10 miles.

Or do something based on location, if you are in SF or Manhattan, make it 1
mile, otherwise make it 10.

~~~
dyeje
Yeah I agree. Living in a not so dense city, I knew that I wasn't going to
find any matches with just a mile radius.

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maxdarapper
Already been done, Messaging within a 1 mile radius

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popcorn-
messaging/id71841670...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popcorn-
messaging/id718416705?mt=8)

------
fmstephe
I like this idea, the UI is fast and nice to use.

I built something similar. The idea was to be able to play multiplayer games
with people nearby. My motivation was simply to enable face to face two player
games as the easiest option. The trickiest part, which I never coded up, was
to be able to include people who are further away if there is no-one nearby,
otherwise the game became unplayable without a cooperating partner.

I think this family of ideas, connecting to nearby people easily, has real
legs.

Code lives on here.

[https://github.com/fmstephe/location_server](https://github.com/fmstephe/location_server)

Comes with a built in tankwars multiplayer demo. Alas the URL to the demo no
longer works as I shut down the server that was running it. If anyone wants to
try it out I would happily get it running again.

Edit: Are you a New Zealander? I am from NZ myself, always keen to hear from
Kiwi hackers.

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pouzy
15 years too late, Caramail was doing the same in france since 1997
([http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/CaraMail](http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/CaraMail))

This is the type of thing where people will show up, see that their room is
empty (if you're not just searching for "San francisco") and leave,
unfortunately

~~~
cft
I too feel that the market has spoken on this: see
[http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/meetro](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/meetro)
and many others that failed.

------
danford
Cool idea. I started work on something similar, but after some planning I felt
like I was basically writing an IRC chat from the ground up and things like
tinychat can (kind of) already do this. In the end it seemed like a lot of
work for a very iffy project, especially if I wanted it to get popular.

------
bernatfp
Reminds me of Popcorn app. This looks like a very similar idea but for the
web.

------
erokar
Very nice. I did something similar to test out Meteor.js, but it's much less
polished than yours.

[http://mapchat.meteor.com/](http://mapchat.meteor.com/)

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morganherlocker
I see one of these pop up every so often and always get disappointed when
there is no one in my area. I wonder if this sort of thing might work better
if it connected you with the N closest users? Another option would be to
create spatial clusters using something like k-means clustering[1].

[1] [http://scikit-
learn.org/stable/auto_examples/cluster/plot_km...](http://scikit-
learn.org/stable/auto_examples/cluster/plot_kmeans_digits.html)

------
cpwright
I agree that the 1 mile is too rigid. There are only going to be about 3,000
people within a mile radius of me (~1K/sq mile) whereas in Manhattan you would
expect around 210,000 (~70K people/sq mile). To get a similar expectation, I
would need a radius of about 8 miles. Though of course, as I expand the radius
to the south near NYC the population density gets a bit higher, and as I
expand my radius to the north it gets lower and 8 miles is enough to bring
about changes.

~~~
witty_username
Here in Bangalore, I believe 1 mile would be a joke.

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normloman
Love the idea. Wish the radius was wider. There aren't any chats near me, and
I'm in a densely populated area.

Since you're taking people's location, be sure to include a water-tight
privacy policy that keeps 3rd parties from accessing location data.

But since you'd have access to the location, it'd make an easy sell for
targeted advertising. But please, try to think of other ways to make money.
Everyone's sick of ads.

------
thedangler
Well to me a way around this could be to leave user bread crumbs. For example
if its not an extremely populated area when a user leaves the area, a message
could say user "johns" was here 10 mins ago. contact him with a PM or
something.

That way you know that users are in the area using the app and may come back.

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orky56
Without critical mass, this becomes an asynchronous, location-based messaging
tool, similar to what foursquare is kind of about. However you could use this
tool/tech to geotag areas, spontaneously create chats for events like
conferences, or even for emergencies like Mountain View Puma.

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M2Ys4U
Hmm, the name is confusingly similar to Kiwi IRC[0], which was what I was
expecting when I saw this link.

(Full disclosure: I am one of the developers of Kiwi IRC)

[0] [https://kiwiirc.com/](https://kiwiirc.com/)

~~~
bwooce
It's cute that you're both naming your products after New Zealand's national
bird.

Both of your products sound like dating sites dedicated to meeting New
Zealanders. That's....a niche market.

Kiwi != kiwifruit, if you talk if eating a nice juicy kiwi in the rest of the
world you're either salacious, a cannibal, or undertaking some kind of illegal
feast (main course: roast bald eagle perhaps)

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deathhand
Created a room with a buddy and we are unable to see each others messages.
[http://kiwichat.co/chat/64847ffc5a39545ff8748377250b09](http://kiwichat.co/chat/64847ffc5a39545ff8748377250b09)

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jcfrei
Nice execution, but I would add an overview over all currently active chat
locations.

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pfalke
Very well done.

Any background on how this is built? E.g. chat engine etc?

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tunesmith
The people in my 1-mile radius aren't the same people that are in their 1-mile
radius, so everyone would see a fractured group conversation with a bunch of
out-of-context responses.

~~~
nathan_f77
Nope, you just see different chat rooms. Then you can join a chat room, and
everyone sees the same messages. Great solution to the problem, IMO.

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ja27
I've been trying the somewhat similar Yik Yak (mobile app) for about two
weeks. It had flood of college students home for the summer so I assume it's
taken off at colleges.

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eastbayjake
I was hanging out in Oakland for 45 minutes and didn't see another person come
by -- I was expecting the Bay Area would have the densest group of people
trying this out.

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RKearney
Previous Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525066)

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ebbflowgo
In it's current form this doesn't work because chat requires almost immediate
feedback.

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piratebroadcast
Im seeing "database problem" just fyi.

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callesgg
One what?

