

Ask HN: Please Review WhereMyFriends.Be (Google Maps/Facebook mashup) - wesleyzhao

Hey HN,<p>We are the same students that released FavoriteThing.Me last week and we're back with another creation: http://wheremyfriends.be<p>This started as a very crude mash-up of the Facebook and Google Maps APIs that I put together one night after class. Then @ajaymehta and @dshipper saw it while in my room and we thought it would be a cool weekend project!<p>Basically it allows you to login with your Facebook and see a map with all of your friends on it based on their current location. We are using Google Maps' Latest Javascript API to geocode and place friends that we get from Facebook connect to show people just how worldly they are :)<p>We ran into some Google API rate limits, but fixed it by storing some of the geocoding data locally on our MySQL DB. We will learn MongoDB next.<p>We are also currently asking for permissions to publish to users' walls and are posting as soon as the map has finished loading. What do you guys think about this from a design standpoint? We are trying to balance increasing our virality with friction logging-in and potential user annoyance since we're posting on their wall (only once though).<p>This was meant to be something simple to create but really fun for users to play around with.<p>Any/all feedback would be great, and if you want to see the code we're releasing it on GitHub soon (after we sleep for 2 hrs and go to class).<p>[UPDATE] Our Facebook connect was down for several minutes because somehow our app was deleted from the Facebook developers page. We had to create a new Facebook app and change our config file. Should be up now.  Sorry everyone!
Thanks!
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mbesto
Personally I hate allowing applications to use my facebook account. (not your
issue, just a personal thing) In good spirit, I tried it out and deleted it
quickly after. I have 750 friends. It took about 30-40s to load them all up.
Not a problem, since it did it all in real time, so I wasn't inpatient - good
job on that part of the UX. I have friends all over the world so it's pretty
cool to see those connections, but don't really have a particular use for this
other than a one-time view. My friends who know I'm "worldly" dont need me to
prove it to them :)

Your little team of hackers are on to some cool things. Good luck to you guys,
you're on the right track!

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dshipper
Thanks a lot for your response we appreciate the comments. And thanks for your
thoughts on the UX a lot of time an effort went into making it load in real-
time :)

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mbesto
I think people tend to forget how much "background work" goes into UX. I saw
the pins flying down and I stayed on the page the whole time. If it was simply
a progress bar that said "We are currently loading XYZ, which is X%" I would
have left the page and then came back later (and maybe even forgotten). You
kept my attention, that's important.

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dshipper
Thanks I agree completely. What users don't realize is that a graphical
element that only shows up for a second or two on their screen, something that
they might not even think about consciously but that enhances their overall
perception of the site, was pored over for hours and hours by designers and
programmers trying to figure out the best way to do it. I'm glad we were
(moderately) successful in that.

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mmontalbo
Small things I immediately noticed:

\- When initially loading, my map started out over India and I had to zoom out
a bit to find where my markers were starting to drop. I don't list my current
location on fb, which might explain that, but I do list where I went to
school. Perhaps this could be used as a fallback for the default map center?

\- The tooltip text for the markers have <b></b> markup tags in them that
don't actually get rendered. Not huge, but it was a little distracting.

Other than that, cool toy app. It was fairly easy to use.

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dshipper
Thanks for your comments. I just fixed the <b> </b> issue. We'll definitely
look at having the app fall back on locations other than your current location
- we didn't do it originally just to keep things as simple and clean as
possible. We appreciate the time you took to respond!

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sagacity
FB is not really my thing but I (too) think you guys are doing some cool and
fun stuff. Keep at it and let's see the next killer startup come out of your
dorm!

BTW, if you all need some help with doing the whole geolocation stuff locally
on your own server, let me know; I'll be happy to do whatever I can. (We just
floated this site - a small by-product of a larger project we're working on:
<http://IPLoc.info> )

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dshipper
Thanks a lot we appreciate it and we hope so :). The geolocation is actually
exactly what we were looking for because Google's API has very strict rate
limits. Do you have an API?

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sagacity
Sorry, no API, but I can get my people to build one for you - give me a day to
get back to you on this.

If you have the option to host everything (including geo DB) on your own
server, we can make a self-contained sub-system (PHP + MySQL) and give it to
you (with our compliments :-)).

Let me know.

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dshipper
Wow that sounds awesome my email is dan (at) danshipper.com I would love to
hear from you!

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sagacity
email sent, with Sub: HN Forums : Geolocation

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JBerlinsky
This is actually really cool and would help me quite a bit with my current
project; mind shooting me an e-mail as well (in profile)?

~~~
sagacity
Sent, same subject line.

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ozziegooen
Facebook login isn't working for me.

If you post to my wall, just give me a box so that I can opt out.

Also, please make the header blue or something. The orange hurts my eyes.

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dshipper
We just noticed that somehow the app got deleted from Facebook - we're still
not quite sure exactly what went down but we readded it and everything should
be working fine. Sorry for the downtime.

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dshipper
clickable: <http://wheremyfriends.be>

sample profile: <http://wheremyfriends.be/profile?id=1341720286>

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wesleyzhao
Update: Just made the FB log-in compatible with IE6-8!

