
Show HN: HubChilla - Asynchronously Chat With Similar People Using SMS - ritikm
http://www.hubchilla.com
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ghostfish
Facebook login only? This is a disturbing trend I'm noticing with a number of
new websites/services. I don't think I'm alone in saying I don't like allowing
apps access to all of my Facebook data and timeline. I won't use anything that
only takes a Facebook login. Any plans for a stand alone login or is the
Facebook data necessary for matching you up with people to chat with?

~~~
rsamvit
Thanks for your feedback! We use facebook login because its the easiest way
for us to get the basic data to provide intelligent recommendations.

We have plans to roll out a separate stand-alone login soon, where you can
fill out a profile with whatever information you choose to include

~~~
385668
That sounds like a good plan, I'll check back then. I had a facebook back in
high school, but got creeped out by some of their privacy issues and deleted
it, this sounds like kind of a neat idea, though.

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jhuckestein
During the signup, I wouldn't animate the progress bar. I waited for half a
minute expecting something to happen until I realized you were waiting for me
to fill out a form.

Other than that, let's see what happens!

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jhuckestein
And hitting return anywhere in the signup page just reloads the page and
looses the form for me in Chrome Canary.

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rsamvit
Thanks for the feedback! We'll fix that right away.

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ninetax
Could you be more clear about what exactly you will tell these "people I want
to meet" about me?

Also, please clarify some parts of your privacy policy

 _We may collect the following information when your register on or fill out a
form on our site, HubChilla:

3\. Other information relevant to our surveys or offers_

Such as?

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rsamvit
We tell all people three Pieces of Information:

1\. Your Gender

2\. Your Age

3\. Your location (City, State)

Thats all! Everything else is private.

~~~
simantel
So the example on your landing page where the user's school is disclosed is
inaccurate?

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rsamvit
Yes, that was a screenshot from an earlier version. As of right now, only
age/gender/location are used, though we use your education history to train
our model for smarter recommendations.

We are toying with the idea of putting back the school displaying feature back
in if you encounter someone from the same school. It will depend on the data
we gather.

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robbiet480
Uh, this posted to my Facebook timeline without my permission.

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rcavezza
When giving permissions to apps, change the settings of who can see updates
from this app to "Only Me".

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jim_kaiser
Please consider adding a disclaimer, that it is not supported internationally.
That is really not clear from the home page and clicking on help needs me to
login on FB.

Getting the user's to connect on FB before they are made aware that the
application won't work in his country is kind of a dark pattern in my view,
and makes me trust your site less.

~~~
ritikm
Duly noted. Added it to the front page and pushed it live just now. Sorry
about the miscommunication there -- we're going to put up better copy along
with "What is this?", "FAQ", etc. pages (that don't require you to login to
view) soon.

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ritikm
We're sincerely sorry about any problems people have been having with #pause
to make themselves unavailable to chat. There was a tricky race condition that
was making it difficult for the #pause to propogate through, but it's been
fixed now!

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Johngibb
Jesus, I just got like 2 dozen texts all at once before #pause worked. Thanks,
I love paying for my texts.

It should NOT start until you text #play, as it seemed like it would.

~~~
rsamvit
Good Point! We'll definitely be adding that in - Sorry if you got surprised.

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lmm
When I worked in the industry we saw a few people try user-user chat. It
always ended up with users sending threatening/harassing messages to each
other, the service provider needing to hire moderators, and then realising
that paying someone to be the other end of the chat is just as easy as paying
someone to moderate and more effective.

So I guess what I'm saying is I hope you've figured something out to deal with
those kind of users.

~~~
385668
Have a spam filter that directs them to only be able to talk to other
threatening/harassing users and let the problem solve itself?

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dm8
Cool idea. Signed up and talking with someone via texts. Couple of features
that you should add -

1\. Give questions to participants to talk about based on their FB likes or
whatever data mining you could do.

2\. Multiple people chats - SMS is not real-time medium. So not sure whether
other person has read my SMS or not. And I have no idea whether to wait or
not. It would be cool to text multiple people at once

~~~
rsamvit
We agree! We're working on those features and hopefully will be rolling them
out soon.

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melvinmt
Since it doesn't rely on an internet connection, I would love to use this as
an alternative to Omegle (I have crappy 2G) but it should definitely be
anonymous. There's not a chance that I'm going to sign up for this with
Facebook.

~~~
rsamvit
Your name is never disclosed - all the other person sees is your age, gender,
and city.

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Xcelerate
This is intriguing. I'm getting a lot of people from California, namely Palo
Alto. Pretty cool. One of the conversations didn't make it through though.
(I'm the guy from Georgia who's up at 2:20 AM).

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beaugunderson
The Facebook auto-share any time I start a new conversation, text someone (for
EVERY TEXT?!), or login to your website is awful. I liked the service but opt-
out auto-sharing should be nuked from orbit.

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progrock
Still not really sure what it is. I tried the help page, but it foisted a
login upon me before I could go any further. The about link is hidden from
eye, and still doesn't really explain things.

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yuranlu
This is awesome! It's like Omegle, except where you only talk to Hacker News
readers. Hacker News readers are much more interesting to talk to anyway :-)

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petitmiam
Tried to sign up, but it kept refilling the phone number field with the
default value. Could just be a Firefox Beta (Android) thing though.

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jenntoda
SMSroulette? Hmm...

~~~
rsamvit
Pretty much! Except with intelligent recommendations :)

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ardakara
Good stuff man, just signed up. Congrats!

My first conversation: \- "Show me your .vimrc and I'll show you mine" \- "Ah,
I can't I'm married to emacs"

Sounds promising :)

~~~
rsamvit
Haha thats amazing! Glad you enjoy it.

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isharabash
Started texting someone... they told me their first name and I was able to
easily find their phone number + address from there. :o

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ricardobeat
Also known as 0800-LOVEMATCH since the 90s.

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obilgic
"15 people use this app"

This is basically chat between hn people. I don't think this is the place to
create this kind of user base.

~~~
rsamvit
Actually we have hundreds of users chatting, and we're growing fast! Facebook
only refreshes its numbers once every 24 hours, so if you check back again
later you'll see more updated results.

We've been focusing on several different distribution strategies, and we have
a strong user base of college students as well.

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werdnanoslen
Integrate with common chat clients like google and I might've more interested.

~~~
ritikm
We've gotten this request multiple times actually, so expect an integration
soon!

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werdnanoslen
I was one of those requests via your chat, just making it here too :)

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nono13
I've tested it and it's really cool. 1000x better than airtime :)

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nc
Support the UK please? It's really easy if you're using Twillio

~~~
rsamvit
We'll get on that soon. Stay tuned!

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mehulkar
I almost signed up because of the demo chat on the home page.

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ievans
FYI: there's a typo on the homepage screenshot: "you to to"

~~~
rsamvit
Thanks for letting us know! We'll remember to fix that.

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progrock
I thought that was deliberate! To humanise it.

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rsamvit
Thats what I said ;)

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voltagex_
Any chance of allowing this to be used internationally?

~~~
rsamvit
Its in the works! This is definitely something we're going to do, but we
decided to perfect our launch in the US first before we start accommodating
international phones. Stay tuned!

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voltagex_
Maybe an SMS to Google Talk bridge?

~~~
rsamvit
We've gotten this request many times now, so expect an integration soon!

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Axsuul
How long did it take to build this? Fun idea!

~~~
ritikm
Friday 7/27/12 morning - thought of the idea, briefly talked about the
features and did a basic spec

Friday 7/27/12 evening - started coding the backend text message routing logic
and the website front (standard stuff - Node.js, custom MVC framework, Twilio
API, MongoDB, Redis, Heroku, etc. - the works)

Tuesday 76/31/12 late night - Feature complete, things are all good to go and
working (including edge cases, etc.)

Wednesday 8/1/12 - Built out Open Graph integrations, made minor tweaks, chose
the name and bought the domain, some branding stuff (i.e. the chinchilla
logo), submitted Open Graph actions to Facebook

Thursday 8/2/12 afternoon - Open Graph is all approved, did a test launch with
a small set of users, ironed out a ton of bugs

Thursday 8/2/12 evening - posted on HN, making a huge list of things to do
next, getting good feedback, and setting up all our other distribution
techniques to be fired off tomorrow

6 days from idea to launch! We tried hard to go as fast as possible on this
one (although we overbuilt a couple features that we've retracted for the
launch - could've saved us a day of work if we had realized they weren't
necessary).

[edited to correct the months on the dates]

~~~
Axsuul
Nice, thanks for the play by play! And I'm assuming you mean 7/27/12 morning?
=p

Are you guys by any chance from ASU? Been meeting a lot of people from ASU :)

~~~
rsamvit
We're from UC Berkeley

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nono13
I'm getting spammed. #pause doesn't work...

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rsamvit
We fixed it! there was a race condition in the code we hadn't noticed

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DeepDuh
The telco providers will love you ;).

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felixchan
this looks awesome! tried it and actually met someone cool :) ahah

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alexlin
already signed up. get at me.

~~~
rsamvit
thanks for the support!

