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:

http://onflood.com/

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!

Possible use cases include:

- Conference back-channels

- Communication during protests and demonstrations

- Finding out what's going on in a strange town

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!

[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!

[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