

Show HN: Quote Vote, my Android app combining social voting with 140 characters - chuinard
http://chuinard.com/social-voting-for-tweets-on-android-introduci

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pigbucket
I like the concept but I think it's missing something to get the user
interested in the first place. HN has content I like from people I don't know.
Twitter has random soundbites from people I can choose to follow. It looks
like your app drops the interesting content part of the social-networking
thing and the interesting tweeter part of the twitter soundbite machine so I
end up being asked to be interested in completely random soundbites from
completely random people. The example of the leaderboard on your post would be
an unfortunately accurate prediction of the kind of content I'd expect. You
really should try to get more interesting content on your sample leaderboard.

1\. Maybe I'd be more interested if I knew or in some way could identify with
the people sharing quotes. So what about names being visible. Or:

2\. Maybe I'd be more interested still if there was a way to filter by group.
Christians might be interested in random quotes from other self-styled
Christians. Atheists might be interested in god-debunking soundbites.
Technophiles might be interested in "android v. apple" slugfests. And so on.

3\. Maybe I'd also be interested if event-specific or news-specific quote
voting were possible. E.g., I'm at a baseball game and I can follow people
from all over the park sharing observations about players and hotdogs. Or
there's an earthquake, and I can follow stuff about that. In this respect,
you'd be doing something that makes Twitter interesting rather than just the
thing that makes it boring, and the voting would be a real addition.

Caveat: complete novice here, in awe of people who can so readily conceive and
execute an idea like this.

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chuinard
Thanks, this was definitely really good feedback. I am going to mull over on
where to go with this. I do agree some sort of user engagement is necessary,
being 100% anonymous is not interesting.

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zokier
If you track voting history then you could show quotes that have been upvoted
by people that have similar voting history. The actual algorithm probably will
end up being rather complex, especially if you want to avoid too strong
segmentation. Basically you want to show the users a mix of fresh quotes,
"aligned" quotes, and "random" popular quotes.

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mgaman
I think this is a great idea. I wish I would have thought of this myself, it
is about time that someone came up with a democratic social networking
utility. I think that this could be expanded to several other topics. As far
as your memcache issue goes, you may want to ask people more familiar with app
engine to see if they could be of assistance.

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angryasian
I don't know what the general percentage is, but for example on reddit, most
people are consumers or lurkers, and its a small percentage to get people to
participate. So I would possibly implement something for so called karma
people, a leader board, or showcase the user name more, to give people the
vanity that apps like yours need to provide.

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madamepsychosis
How did you do user accounts/ authentication? Did you make each user have an
account or did you use the phone's ID or something? (Not an Android developer,
just curious)

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chuinard
I create a UUID when the app starts for the first time. I send that UUID back
and forth when HTTP requests are made. Basically I let you (the client) tell
me who you are.

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joebo
I don't understand the concept. The post has mostly technical tidbits but not
much about the functionality.

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chuinard
You get 140 characters, and your quote is voted up / down after you post it.
The trending ones appear on the popular list. The list wipes itself every so
often. It's kind of like HN for tweets.

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chuinard
I was hoping for some feedback on the concept. Thoughts?

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antrix
Feedback not on the concept but on your implementation. Since you are saving
the UUID to SharedPreferences, you can simply implement a Backup Manager [1]
to ensure this is persisted for the user across application installs. It won't
be tied to a device but to a user based on their Market identity.

[1]:
[http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/backup.html#S...](http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/backup.html#SharedPreferences)

