Ask YC: Try our Local Chat Demo at Startup School

[mwmanning]

We have an alpha version of our new app up at http://www.imoverhere.net.

I thought that Startup School would be a great opportunity to test it, since we'll have hundreds of people in the same place talking about the same thing. Put your map marker on Kresge Auditorium at Stanford if you want to talk about Startup School.

I want to stress that this is an early, limited-time alpha version. It is not feature-complete, and it may fall flat on its face, but we couldn't miss this opportunity to get feedback from hundreds of smart people. We'll close down after this weekend and hopefully have a much better beta to launch in a couple of months.

Thanks for your help.

[as]

I really like this idea, but one problem I see is in building a user base. What are the chances there's going to be someone local to respond the first time a user tries your service? It helps that once they've added you to their friend's list, that'll remind them to try again every once in awhile, but needing them to have the patience to try several times would seem to dampen user acquisition.

It'll be neat when it has a large following, but kind of useless in the beginning.

[mwmanning → as]

Good point. I think heavy adoption would be around events where a lot of people are co-located and don't know each other. Here are a few examples off the top of my head:

-college freshmen moving into dorms -natural disasters -concerts -sporting events -political rallies -seminars like startup school

[dinosmart]

If your Google Talk bot is popular, then your bot will hit one or more of the per account limits enforced by Google. The best way to implement a bot on the XMPP network is to run your own server. See Twitter and FriendFeed for examples of how to do this.

[mwmanning → dinosmart]

I wasn't aware of quotas. Thanks for the info.

[davidw]

The competition:

irc.freenode.net #startups

[Prrometheus → davidw]

Only if you want to include thirteen-year-olds in Finland in your conversation. The whole point of local chat is that it's local. If you have a good chat, you can pick up your laptop, walk a few feet, and have a real conversation.

This might not be the best implementation of the idea, but it's a start. Imagine a coffee shop with a chat room just for that coffee shop. You could post an away message of what you're reading, and if someone was interested they'd send you a message. You could meet one or two people every single time you went there. Technology would finally bring people together instead of driving them apart.

Or imagine if your neighborhood had a chat room or bulletin board. I don't know any of the other people in my neighborhood. It would be great if I could let them know when we are cooking, so they could come and hang out and have a bite with me and my roommates. However, how do I find them? Where can I post that information where 15-year-old Singaporans aren't also in the conversation? I want to communicate only with a narrow, local subset of humanity here.

The only people today that are doing local social software are Craigslist and dating sites. Both of them bring real people together in real life. However, there is room for more applications in the space.

[davidw → Prrometheus]

Good description of cool applications of the idea, but as a 32 year old in Austria, I'd still be curious to follow the chat at the startup school, so I think IRC would make perfect sense.

[Prrometheus → davidw]

True, it might not be the best application for this occasion. However, chat and local chat are not always substitutes for each other.

If someone wanted to see who wanted to join him for a bite to eat at a break, local chat would be much better than IRC, for example.

[jamiequint → davidw]

or http://www.chatterous.com/landing/ss08/ss08/

[as]

Clicking 'Put Me In Center' when trying to set my location doesn't do anything.

[Sam_Odio → as]

Same here.

[collision]

The demo screencast is just a big grey box for me.

[mwmanning → collision]

It's supposed to be. We haven't made it yet :)

This isn't a launch; it's a demo.

[as → collision]

Same here.

[rksprst]

So I changed my radius to cover the entire US and Canada, and I still get "no users in your location".

[mwmanning → rksprst]

This would only work if someone else made their radius cover the entire US and Canada. The way it works is that both parties have to be inside each others' radius. This prevents spamming and assures that if you're only interested in a very local scope, you only receive messages from people close to you.

We'll try to make that more clear when we launch the beta. The screencast will help too.

[attack]

Your bots don't want to talk to me...

tried aim+gchat.

[mwmanning → attack]

Sorry. The chatserver is unstable. It runs ok on our staging server but there seems to be a problem on our new host. I have an Internet connection at Stanford now, so I'll keep an eye on it. Thanks for your patience.