
Geo-enabled text message service - karlarmstrong
http://⌖.ws
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sp332
Edit2: Wow, doesn't a one-letter .ws domain cost ~$50,000?

For the curious: It's this Unicode character
<http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2316/index.htm> known as
"Position Indicator" and it looks like a reticle. Kind of makes sense for a
position-based service, but a bit hard to type :)

edit: Previous discussion about the actual icon for the app:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4285919>

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shawnz
OP used Punycode (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode>) to encode the
character, which in ASCII is "xn--8hh.ws"

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sp332
I don't think so, the link is written as <http://⌖.ws> And that wouldn't
change the fact that ⌖.ws is a single-letter domain name.

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citricsquid
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name>

They're very common and cheap; it's a single character domain name, not a
single letter or number.

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sp332
Oh interesting: _In the Domain Name System, these domains use an ASCII
representation consisting of the prefix xn-- followed by the Punycode
translation of the Unicode representation of the language-specific alphabet or
script glyphs. For example, the Cyrillic name of Russia's IDN ccTLD is рф. In
Punycode representation, this is plai, and its DNS name is xn--plai._ I had
assumed that domain registrars would be more careful of people buying really
short domains that way, since the difference in price is huge. Well I'm off to
buy xn--g5g.org (ⅹ.org) :)

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conradev
One pretty cool use of this is the URL shortening service TinyArrows.

<http://tinyarro.ws>

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chevreuil
Cool name for a location app, even if only French speakers can get it.

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icebraining
What's with the domain? Why not link directly to <http://tehula.com/> ?

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rm999
Pretty cool, something simple like this built-in to phones would be great. If
your friend knows much about the iphone he can go to the maps app and "share
location" with you via text or e-mail. Is there something similar in Android?

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jln
Works really smoothly, seems very thoughtfully put together.

Only criticism would that the "accept request to share location" action button
is labelled "share", which I initially glossed over, assuming that it meant
"share to social network".

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untog
I'm still waiting for mobile messaging to get sorted out. We've got iMessage,
Facebook Messenger, gTalk, WhatsApp, GroupMe... and who knows how many others.

Of course, there isn't a single service that all of my friends use, apart from
traditional SMS. Facebook Messenger comes closest, but I message people I am
not Facebook friends with, so that's out.

I dream of a service that's like WhatsApp- platform agnostic, available to
all- but also totally open with all the API access you'd need. Of course, I
would imagine that is extremely difficult to get popular. Oh, and monetise.

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drivebyacct2
And thank god none of them are interoperable. Oh wait, no, that sucks,
massively.

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cjrp
I could see myself using this a lot more than Apple's "Find My Friends" app.
(since none of my friends have that app). Really like the simple UI, does one
thing and does it well.

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ck2
So if someone stole your phone and you didn't have tracking, you could try
emailing them with this as a replyto?

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bazzargh
Surprised at this, you can already share your location fairly easily via a
text message on the iphone.

Go to maps, press the arrow for current location, click the right arrow and
you'll see the 'Share' button. One of the options is 'message'. It sends a
google maps link.

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livestyle
a more simple version of glympse...i like

