

Show HN: Onflood, a location-specific social network - benwerd

I decided to spend part of this weekend exploring short-term, location-specific social networks. Here's what I came up with:<p>http://onflood.com/<p>Onflood grabs your location using the HTML5 geolocation API. It then creates an adhoc messageboard based on the number of messages in your area - the more messages there are near to you, the more closely-focused on your geographic location the system will be. So you shouldn't ever see a blank page. I don't want anyone to feel lonely!<p>Possible use cases include:<p>- Conference back-channels<p>- Communication during protests and demonstrations<p>- Finding out what's going on in a strange town<p>There's a lot more I'd like to do with this (ActivityStreams, its own API, login via OpenID, Facebook, etc), but I thought I'd pour myself a whiskey and open this up for feedback right now. Let me know what you think!
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kongqiu
Just an idea: since the utility of this is so dependent on the number/quality
of the people using it in a certain location, you might want to start with
hyper-focused groups (e.g. conference-goers, college cohorts,
permaculturalists, church members) and then grow from there.

Otherwise, if random person A visits the site and sees posts from other random
people with whom s/he feels no connection, they probably aren't coming back.

Good luck!

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benwerd
Clickable: <http://onflood.com/>

And some hotlinks to different floodboards:

San Francisco: <http://onflood.com/location/manual/?37.7789601,-122.419199>

Austin: <http://onflood.com/location/manual/?30.2674473,-97.7425618>

Edinburgh, UK: <http://onflood.com/location/manual/?55.9483399,-3.1932723>

