
Outsourcing Birthdays and Flirting - matznerd
http://matznerd.com/outsourcing-birthdays-and-flirting/
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ckdarby
I outsourced my dating life at one point.

I would hire people to go through a bunch of online dating sites, filter
through the results, attempt to initiate conversation and upon a reply I would
take over.

This has since been changed to a parsing bot I wrote that utilizes the sites
search feature & a bunch of full text searching for keywords.

~~~
benjaminwootton
And who says Romance is dead!

~~~
simonsarris
In the "romantic era" (pick one really) people were paid to write very long
and detailed and more-or-less made up love letters, either because the buyer
could not write or because they did not have such a way with words.

I would gander that romantic letters are _probably_ the most ghost-written of
any category of letter, for all periods in all of time.

~~~
Mz
That seems a little sad to me. I tend to value genuineness. I married a
socially awkward introvert who wrote me incredibly _bad_ poetry during our
courtship. I found it endearing that such an intelligent well-read person (who
scored higher than me on the verbal portion of the SAT) was willing to
regularly look like an idiot to try to sincerely express his feelings for me.

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Timothee
I found the videos amusing, but I was expecting the post to go in a different
direction.

More specifically, I had thoughts at some point of a Twilio app that you could
set up to send some SMS on your behalf now and then. (similar to
<http://bufferapp.com/> seen through another post, but for SMS) A (sad surely)
example would be to set up a few variations of "I love you", "thinking of you"
to be sent to your significant other during the day. :)

Another thing that I'd actually really like, though I'm not sure how
viable/expensive it would be, would be to automate your birthday card sending
by having a service that sends you physical birthday cards for you to fill or
sign and send to the recipient. I.e. the service has the list of all the
people you want to send a card to with their birthdays and address (and
more…), and when a birthday approaches, send you a card appropriate for the
age with a pre-filled, pre-stamped envelop.

Though, these are more on the automation side, rather than outsourcing.

~~~
matznerd
I've thought about the buffer for texting and the problem is that you can't
send a message from your real number, it would have to be from a separate
number, thereby kind of defeating the purpose...

~~~
Timothee
Oh wow, you're right! I've always thought you could use a verified phone
number as the "From" number, but it turns out that's true only for phone
calls, not SMS.

From <http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/sending-sms>:

    
    
        Parameter	Description
        From	A Twilio phone number enabled for SMS. Only phone numbers or short codes purchased from Twilio work here; you cannot (for example) spoof SMS messages from your own cell phone number. If you haven't purchased a Twilio number yet you can use the Sandbox Number to send SMS to verified numbers.
    

I've built many PoCs with Twilio but it seems that I've never tried to send an
SMS on behalf of somebody. Good to know, very good to know.

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antifuchs
Wow, this bus yelling thing is pretty creepy behavior.

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Mz
The only thing I really, really need help with and can't seem to figure out on
my own is an online income adequate to support myself (or a sudden windfall of
at least $50k). I wish I knew how to outsource that for $5.* :-/

* There is evidence I could get _some_ money rolling in if I could get sufficient traffic for my websites. But for the umpteenth time, just this morning someone was telling _me_ how wonderful one of my websites is. Geez, don't tell _me_. Please tell 500 _other people_ via your twitter account or something. I don't need pats on the head. I need _traffic_. Why oh why does everyone react that way to me? Can I get this curse removed? Augh.

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mercuryrising
Ah sweet, now I can pay to have someone else to show the people I care for how
much I care for them.

There's really nothing that beats a crappy looking home made card with an
actual message in it. It takes less time, money, and has more impact if you
make your own cards. Instead of driving the store, clustering around everyone
trying to find 'the perfect card', and paying money for an overpriced piece of
paper, why not take an 8.5x11 sheet of paper, print/draw something on it, and
write a nice message in it?

We outsource the things that should matter most, short of spending time with
our loved ones. But when we can outsource that, I'm sure many people will.

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sp332
Maren Kate Donovan (maren here on HN) founded <http://Zirtual.com> a startup
that lets you outsource assignments to personal assistants in 15, 30, or 60
minute blocks.

~~~
stfu
Not really sure in how far this is a competitive advantage. At least I can not
point at a single outsourcing/personal assistant site, that doesn't offer the
option to pay by the hour/minute.

~~~
sp332
True, I was just trying to summarize it. This page is probably better:
<http://zirtual.com/how-it-works/>

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jessedhillon
This confirms something I learned from many birthday parties as a child:
Indian people cannot sing Happy Birthday, for some reason. Anyone who knows
the "chicken dance" meme from Arrested Development, where everyone in the
family has a different-yet-wrong impression of a chicken -- that's how it is
when many Indians get together to try and sing this song.

Also, I think it's a stretch to refer to hiring a stranger to yell a woman's
name as "seduction"

~~~
vishaldpatel
There's a school right behind our home in India. It's pretty big and it's
someone's birthday everyday.

School starts at seven in the morning. After prayers in three different
religions and the singing of the national anthem, at least one class wishes
someone a happy birthday by screaming out the birthday song.

I woke up with a smile everyday =).

~~~
dr42
Amazing even in this modern era how much of culture revolves around mythology
and provincialism. If we skipped the flag waving and the mod365 business, not
to mention the time wasted bothering the deities (in triplicate) we might
actually emerge from this age of mythology with some real progress.

~~~
pdx
I bet I can guess your age. I'd say you're about 19 or 20, maybe as old as 22.
How did I do? That's the age I was when I felt as you do.

Now, I realize that rituals are important and useful. I also realize that, any
system that puts the good of others above the good of self, when needed, is
what gives us much of our progress as a species. It doesn't matter so much,
what that system is, but it does matter that such a system exists.

The larger the definition of "others" is, the better. We see this daily, where
countries where tribalism trumps nationalism are always at a disadvantage.
When you go beyond nationalism, to religion, you have a force that can move
mountains.

The perfect world you envision, of no nationalism (I assume because of one
world government) and no religion, seems like a recipe for decline and decay.
Also, by human nature, I think, if nationalism and religion were taken off the
table, we'd revert to tribalism within that framework.

~~~
AlexFromBelgium
".. if nationalism and religion were taken off the table, we'd revert to
tribalism within that framework."

It's all tribalism really. Just on a larger scale. We never evolved beyond any
of it.

I think dr42 was talking about moving to a radically different perception of
the world. Not just bigger or smaller..

~~~
vishaldpatel
Either I'm a terrible story teller, or you guys have some seriously large
chips on your shoulders. I'll take responsibility for this one guys, I'm
sorry. I just wanted to share about the time when a school full of kids,
singing horribly out of sync woke me up laughing on a regular basis.

The rest of it was just context.

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toumhi
On a related note, I've started toying with the idea of providing better
project management tools to handle projects on odesk (and related websites).

If you outsource work on oDesk, and you feel like the process could use some
improvements, I'd love to hear your opinion about this (also, email in my
profile).

~~~
matznerd
oDesk could definitely use some improvement in their tracking software, it can
be a pain to use and does not give enough details...

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scribu
So you paid the gold price... <http://i.imgur.com/wLu8T.jpg>

