
Show HN: Textter, Live letter-by-letter messaging for iOS - jfaat
http://textter.com/
======
mmastrac
This both a technically cool project and something that might do well in the
market, but looking for a patent on something that existed on non-mobile for
decades seems like it might be a waste of lawyer fees. Will that hold up to
patent office scrutiny -- I actually hope not.

Putting that aside, I think this is really nifty. Your marketing really should
target the fact that people can respond before you've finished typing. That
can probably save 50% of keystrokes in a lot of cases, which gives your
product a concrete leg up over others.

Nice launch, good luck.

~~~
jfaat
Thanks for the feedback! I will not comment on the patenting process, suffice
it to say I understand your point. I am working on the marketing angle as
well, and will definitely pursue keying on the immediate response.

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skykooler
Your site calls it "The World's First Live Messaging System" and says it "is
changing the way we send messages for the first time in a staggering 21 years"
\- but what about the "talk" command on Unix systems since at least 1983?

~~~
saurik
ICQ, which was much more recent, was designed for cross-host large scale, and
is one of the key brands in this market that people starting such a product
should have intimate knowledge of, also had this feature (though it was
removed, I believe, while merging with AOL).

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djloche
This might be useful for some situations, but I won't use it. I often choose
to communicate by text specifically because it means that I can compose a
message, review, edit, and then send it without someone watching every part of
that process.

How many times have you written something, and then decided not to send it in
favor of something better suited for the situation (or even nothing at all) ?

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neals
Wasn't it a big thing to see the other person type their e-mail when Google
Wave (remember wave?) was first announced? And wasn't one of the things that
people did not particularly like about Google Wave? I'm not sure, it was a
long time ago.

I think the technology behind this is probably pretty cool, but I don't wan't
anybody seeing how big a mess I make when I type. I'm a terrible typist.

[I already edited this post twice, I'm glad nobody got to see me do type this
live]

~~~
foxpc
I thought, it was pretty hilarious of Google Wave to have that "live chat"
function. Maybe, it needed some kind of a "live editing" period after which
you could not just edit/delete your message. But it's hard to say as it was
not a big success. I wonder, what's the influence on bandwidth used on "live
chat".

P.S. I miss Google Wave occasionally :(

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arb99
Not trying to be negative here, the app looks cool, but "The World's First
Live Messaging System" \- no its not.

And patent pending? I remember ICQ, there have been other services mentioned,
and I'm sure 100's if not 1000's of other applications in the past have done
this so called 'live messaging'... so good luck with the patent ;)

There is even a wikipedia page on it [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-
time_text](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_text)

~~~
cstrat
I hope that they aren't seriously trying to patent this.

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untog
_98% of Text Messages are read within minutes of receipt, which means there is
a need for texting in real-time._

Not so sure about that. 98% of text message being read within minutes of
receipt suggests that the existing system works just fine, to me. The page
doesn't really ever seem to address why I would want this.

A less relevant aside:

 _50% of American Teens send 50 text messages or more per day_

Not sure why this is on the home page and not the investors page. Why do I,
prospective user, care?

~~~
thoughtpalette
I'm just blown away at that second statistic. 50% of teens sending 50+
messages a day? That's excessive.

~~~
patrickk
A habit I've gotten into since using fb messages, Viber/WhatsApp/Telegram is
sending lots of messages with less words. So instead of one long text I might
send 4-5 short ones. That will get you to 50 messages easy if you're texting a
lot of friends.

~~~
thoughtpalette
I guess group messages would make the most sense with this stat.

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sisk
Your "what textter's are saying" has an issue. The `hover` pseudo-selector
doesn't apply when on a child element. As a result, that section turns green
when hovering over the containing div but not when hovering over the section
title, for example.

You'll need JS to accomplish what you're trying to accomplish there. You've
already got jQuery on the page so you may as well use the `.hover` method to
toggle a `hover` class on the div and replace the pseudo-selector in your CSS
with that class.

Something like,

    
    
        $('#u3397').hover(function () {
          $(this).addClass('hover');
        }, function () {
          $(this).removeClass('hover');
        });
    

Also, minor point but I believe that shouldn't have an apostrophe. That said,
grammar has never been my strong-suit so might want to double-check on that.

~~~
jfaat
You're right on the grammar. Thanks for the input, and for reading through the
whole page! Thanks for the .hover tip as well ;)

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veesahni
This brings back memories of ICQ and it's built in live chat thing

~~~
michaelmior
I was just about to ask if anyone else had ICQ flashbacks. Nice to see I'm not
the only one :)

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rubyn00bie
I so often have to edit messages before sending I'm not sure I see value in
this-- but I'm also becoming vastly more lame by the day. There's a good
chance I don't get it.

It also seems like it might be problematic to go through a history of messages
as replies may be incomplete due to temporal context which I personally find
hard to remember when just reading plain text.

------
jonheller
When I started college (in 2000) my dad and I used to communicate using this
method via ICQ. It's strange but he still pines for it.

I do see the appeal. There's something very informal and personal about it.

I think the problem nowadays is that people are so used to multitasking they
have ingrained habits to just switch out to another task while waiting for a
reply.

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pla3rhat3r
I think this is great and if the overhead is low it's a great solution (not
that text takes much overhead). The issue I have is that I've actually typed
out a text then deleted it because I thought twice about sending that message.
Not sure where a situation would arise where this type of service would be of
value.

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joesmo
I would not ever use this personally. I prefer to always type and edit
something ahead of time. That's the advantage of typing in the first place. I
get to flesh out and edit my thought into a piece of writing, something that
truly says what I intend, not the first thing that comes to my mind.

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crazychrome
The idea is not new but could be a cool product. I think the problem is there
is no single powerful use case shown in the website why people should give-up
editorship. The flaw is that if people really in urgent wanting to communicate
in real-time, they would probably use phone call directly.

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jack-r-abbit
Other non-mobile IM clients had this. I'm not sure which ones but I recall
using one. It freaked me out when I got an answer for a question I had not
finished typing. I didn't like that feature then and I won't like it now. I
edit too much to have someone watch me as I type.

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corny
I like it. But I would never use it for the same reasons many others have
mentioned - I'm self-conscious and need to edit before I send. I could see
this working well with a mechanism like Snapchat's new messaging feature.
Messages self-destruct unless purposefully saved.

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wildermuthn
I love the idea, but it takes so long to register and find friends. Way too
long for an app that is supposed to cut down on the time it takes for me to
communicate. I'd think about having people login through various services.

~~~
jfaat
Ah yes, we hit the front page of HN and signups slowed a bit. Do you have any
suggestions on where to cut back on signup time? I agree on oAUTH and the
like, and plan to integrate it soon.

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pfui
In case anyone's interested in how this could be done, have a look at rfc4103
& [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-
time_text](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_text).

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rajacombinator
Yea this would be a great example of building something no one wants.

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bitwize
Oh shit, it's talk(1).

WATHC OUT GUYZZZ THIS IS GONNA CHANGE MESSAGINF FOREVAR!!1

~~~
d0m
Yeah, us geeks are very good at dismissing amazing potential businesses. I
mean, why would anyone use Dropbox when there's svn and git!

~~~
Curmudgel
When Dropbox posted what is now usually called a "Show HN", someone did post a
comment like that:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

Although to be fair, it was a good comment and it elicited a good response
from Drew.

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13throwaway
Interesting concept, too bad you overide scrolling. I wanted to check out your
website but it was too annoying on mobile. Can your target customer not afford
browsers that scroll?

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argumentum
"patent pending" = bad sign for a mobile app startup.

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kosei
Cool idea. But I personally hate this. I need time to formulate my thoughts
and the idea of typing while someone else is watching me is a major turn-off
for me.

~~~
jfaat
Great point! Maybe you'd like the option? I do like the idea of giving users
the option (maybe in _some_ cases it makes sense for you) but I didn't want to
debut this app with a "turn our main feature off" option.

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weisser
Didn't someone experiment with a chat system similar to this within the HN
site (as a Chrome extension)?

~~~
wildermuthn
That was me. Still up for fun and giggles at [http://chox.co](http://chox.co).
Best of luck to these folks. I can't stand waiting for people to hit return
before I can read what they're typing. It's not efficient.

~~~
jfaat
Killin' app! Thanks for the encouragement. I'm interested to see how you
created chox.

~~~
wildermuthn
Just AngularJS and Firebase. Firebase is pretty amazing.

------
danecjensen
What about a send text later app. Like Buffer for texting. I needed that
feature today.

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danford
Isn't this why people stopped talking on the phone?

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aabalkan
Seems down now. "Server Hangup"

~~~
jfaat
Sorry! We hit the front page and had our first stress-test. Things seems
smoother now and we're analyzing our weak points.

