Alright great thanks for the tips guys.

Do you have a BGG account (I do ldo)

Yes to both of these. Although BGG's forums have a bunch of UX annoyances of their own.

I had a similar idea for a fun site awhile back, but for a specific game:

http://www.starcitygames.com/article...ard-Blind.html

In a nutshell, it's a deterministic Magic: The Gathering format. It's actually a giant brain-melting headache to adjudicate (I think one matchup took me 20 minutes + pencil and paper to solve). The next step would be to allow users to ask the site for two random (submitted) decks and vote on whether the matchup is interesting or not, and have some kind of front-page feed of matchups people found interesting.

Mine is the same as here, feel free to send me a PM there so I now yours :P

Good lord, the UI at BGG is horrible. Worse even than 2+2 - and that's saying something.

Edit: I don't have a BGG account, but I'm not surprised my idea isn't very original.

TR for interview:

All I had to do was write an object with two properties and a method, and write a jQuery statement to apply some CSS to an element. I studied way too hard...

One question that tripped me up was "explain the box model".

I never heard of the box model before, had to Google it.

Just a heads-up for anyone interested. CS50x on edx.org starts tomorrow!

I'm not sure what I'm getting myself into, but I'm looking forward to the opportunity to have somewhat of a structured learning environment.

I took cs50x last year, it was the best online course I've ever taken. You should sign up for edx's 6.00x too if it's running soon. Lots of valuable info in both courses.

shoe, i would have thought that course was too basic for you. what did you learn that you didnt previously know?

I liked learning about the lower level system details and thinking algorithmically. Almost all of the psets were done in C which I had no prior knowledge of too. You learn just enough C to not be ******ed with it.

I guess prior to taking any of these courses I was just in a rut where I kept repeating crap I already knew. The way I tackled problems was mainly "goto my existing code base, copy/paste/reuse/whatever and move on".

Learning to really break a problem down and knowing how to execute the steps necessary to get a result is really powerful. Since taking those courses I find it much easier to learn new things.

Huh. That was one of the first things I ever learned...

... and I learned something else today. That stupid error message from Sendmail had me confused for more hours than I care to admit. Of course, I'm going to freak out because it thinks that I am trying to send mail from my root user from the server.

The minute I signed up for SES, a dreadful thought occured to me. What if, after seeing that it did work with netstat and manual entry, that Sendmail was working? What if I got all bent out of proportion for no reason?

Do I dare to upload my files and send a test email? Curiosity got the best of me and lo and behold... the email came to my inbox.

So forget about SES. I can send the stupid emails myself and I can set up Dovecot or whatever.

When I saw it I thought to myself "oh, it's that box thing at the bottom of the CSS panel in chrome's dev tools". I never gave it any attention or bothered to learn about it.

How many hours total did it take you to get the email server setup including the time to research how it all works.

The setup took about 30 minutes.

The research about 5 minutes. There really aren't many options and I'm sure it is (somewhat) limited to your framework / plugin and if you want to set up an extra database. I didn't want to set up a database and I don't want to depend on Gmail. That left SendMail, SMTP, or SES. The decision to go with SendMail was mostly arbritrary, just like every other decision I've made with this project (and pretty much ever programming project and learning I've ever done).

It's hard to say how much time I spent on the "bug," since I just got sick of it and turned my brain to other things. Probably 10 to 15 hours spread over a week.

For some reason I just subjected myself to The Internship. Apparently the Google campus is the happiest place on earth. Hurl.

It's not bad if you're an Ingress player.

So I have an app idea (basically a cross between meetup.com and grouper), which would allow you meet cool people in your area in small group settings doing fun activities. But you wouldn't need a group of friends to do it, and there'd be a way to match people based on a yes/no to hanging out again after the night was over. So people that other people liked would get matched up with more popular people, and people that were crappy or whatever would get thrown into the bottom of the queue.

Looking for feedback (it'd be for people say 35 and younger initially).

Also, on the programming side of things: I could write the API/web part of it, and I have a designer that's going to do the design. I think native apps (or at least iphone with a web backup for everyone else) would be ideal given the nature of the idea, but I'm not sure the best way to go about doing this. Isn't there some way to ghetto hack a cross platform solution using HTML5?

I have some money to throw at it if I get enough good feedback, so contracting it out might be ok.

This would be the 3rd time I've seen pretty much this exact idea pitched. How do you plan to create the activities?

Yes you can use phone gap to mostly port and HTML 5 site into a native app. It works ok for very simple apps but will never get the snappiness or performance of native.

I think the activities are kind of secondary to the fact that you're meeting new people. But if you could come up with say, 9 or 10 different venues/basic things to do (most of which would be nightlife activities, or on the weekends things like skiing, hikes, whatever), you might be able to gain some traction. Online dating is essentially drinks every time you meet.

I'm also not pitching this idea because I think it's a huge money maker (likely it would bust), but because nobody has built this out. I'm in a new city, and it's hard to make new friends. It's also why I'm getting feedback in a public setting.

Well coming up with ongoing venues and things to do is some work. It's either a manual process or combining some feeds of stuff like movies with a manual process. Either that or you let your users pick the activities.

This kinda turned into a long ranty post, but w/e

Biggest issue with all of these apps (imo) is making it sticky. 99% of people don't need or want a group of more than 5-10 friends (and those that do often are weird and it isn't their choice when they need to bounce from new friends to new friends). So once someone hits critical mass of social X (4-5 dates on Grouper that it takes to find a gf, 5-10 uses of this app to find friends, etc.) the usage goes to pretty much zero. So what you are left doing is having people meet up with each other that are all at basically the same point. With Grouper, it works well because the common denominator is being single and wanting to meet other singles. Cool that works, but when it works, it also eliminates users because now they have a gf/bf and don't need Grouper.

Your biggest issue is you are trying to match opposites. People that are new to a city with people that are already there and looking for friends. The issue is the second group of people are going to be seriously low % users and honestly, may never be interested in using it. Since they are already established in a location, they have their friends, and only a really low % are ever going to use this to find friends. Instead, you are left with meeting people up who are all new to an area, which is cool, but it sounds like you want it to be much further reaching than that. Also, you face the same problem, where you can only get a person at a single spot in a customer cycle (when they are new to a town without friends) and if your app is successful it eliminates them as a user.

Those are very very difficult types of B2C companies to get off of the ground. It is super ****ing difficult to get users in the first place, not to mention that you are in the business of eliminating your users.

Good post, good points.

Ya, it seems like this is spot on, the more I think about it. It's too bad, because you can do so much if you have a group of people, but getting/keeping that group is very hard.

Thanks

donotwant.jpg

Making friends isn't like dating - we know what we want, we've been doing it our entire life, instead of merely since teenage years in hormone-induced awkwardness. Wouldn't want some autistic social app telling me who to meet, what to do and where to go. And I'm probably your target audience (or at least was before I got married and had a kid), a socially awkward transplant who didn't know many people here.

3 problems you have to solve are: 1) matching algorithm, 2) activity selection/recommendation and 3) seeding. If you get those three right, you have a shot, despite what I say. I have some ideas as to how to solve these and some gimmicky marketing ideas too - pm me if you're interested.

This is the business model though, right? I assume getting the venues to pay for this somehow is what greases the wheel here.

+1

I'm not convinced that this is the dealbreaker though - match.com, eharmony, okcupid, etc are all in the same business and do pretty well. Don't forget that social circles break up, people move, pair up, get married, have kids, divorce, etc.

Another potential group of users may be tourists. That's the only way I could see myself using something like that - while visiting some new city, meet up with either locals or fellow random tourists and explore together.