Show HN: A friendship-centric journal

by jacobevelyn • 11 years ago

96 40 11 years ago

jacobevelyn12• 11 years ago

Hi all, creator here. I've been using this program for a year now but it's definitely in its early stages feature-wise. I'd love to hear feedback!

Svenstaro2• 11 years ago

Why does it need its own update command when gem already has one?

jacobevelyn12• 11 years ago

Good question. That command is just a thin wrapper around `gem update`. It's just a personal thing where I prefer it when command-line programs tell me how they update instead of having to remember whether I installed them via npm or rubygems or homebrew or pip or as a downloaded binary, etc.

Are there annoyances with having an update command like this?

quibit• 11 years ago

Is there a way to check individual friend profiles? Also, are you planning on adding more for each friend than just activities?

jacobevelyn12• 11 years ago

Great questions!

I'm not totally sure what you mean by "profiles," but you can see all of the activities you've done with a friend like this: `friends list activities --with 'Grace Hopper'` and you can see a graph of your relationship over time with: `friends graph 'Grace Hopper'`

I suspect by "profile" you really mean what the second question is getting at around storing more information. I haven't committed to anything in particular in that vein and I like how this program is currently very lightweight UX-wise. (I want it to encourage users/me to be social and maintain relationships offline.) That being said, I've been thinking a lot about lightweight ways to intelligently incorporate location data as well, so that (for example) if I'm visiting a city for a weekend I could query for friends in that city to do things with.

Do you have other ideas? I'm very very open to suggestions!

Mark222• 11 years ago

I like the idea behind this, pretty cool. I'm wondering about this though.

friends will automatically figure out which "Grace" and "George" you're referring to, even if you're friends with lots of different Graces and Georges.

How does this work? For example, if I have two equally good friends named "Grace", how can "friends" guess which one I'm talking about?

jacobevelyn12• 11 years ago

Great question. Since the friends.md only stores friend names and activities, we have to be a bit creative in how we figure this out.

Currently, it looks at all of the past activities and in particular how often groups of friends appear together. For instance, if my activity is:

"Grabbed burgers and fries with Grace and George."

It will pick the "Grace" and "George" that appear most often together. In the case of a tie, or when there is only one name to match, it picks the ones who are closer friends (which for our purposes means they've been in more activities).

This works even for large groups, and it will brute-force every combination of all of the names with multiple friend matches to find the set with the highest score (based on pairs of friends, so a group of 10 friends will be matched correctly even if no activity has yet had exactly those 10 friends together). The brute force algorithm hasn't been slow enough to warrant any sort of constraint satisfaction optimization.

I've found this algorithm to work almost every time, because I find I usually refer to people (verbally and mentally) in groups ("Mark, Jane, and Stacy from work," "Jack and Jill's wedding," etc.), or use last names when I have more than one friend with a given first name and the one I'm referring to isn't the one I'm closest with (e.g. "Grace" would refer to my close friend Grace Hopper, while I might say "Grace Kelly" to refer to my acquaintance to clarify that it's not Grace Hopper).

I'm interested in ways to make this smarter still though, and/or better UX to allow the user to correct mistakes. Very interested in suggestions here if you have any!

vmorgulis2• 11 years ago

How many friend do you have?

jacobevelyn12• 11 years ago

I can't tell if this is a serious comment or not but I've used this app as a very lightweight journal for the past year and I've recorded 457 activities (most are just a few words) featuring 165 friends (though many are only acquaintances).

Mostly posting these stats because it was interesting for me to count them and see for myself. :)

sharp112• 11 years ago

This is really neat! I've been thinking about ways to better stay in touch with friends and this might help. Right now it appears to be mostly about activity logging. I did see the "suggest" feature and I think that could be a point of expansion.

jacobevelyn12• 11 years ago

You read my mind :)

Simular to your own thinking, the "suggest" feature is why I built this in the first place, but sadly it has gotten the least amount of love because I had to first build the foundation so it would have friends to suggest in the first place.

If you have any suggestions (heh) for how to improve/expand upon this feature, I'm all ears!

krat0sprakhar• 11 years ago

Love the tagline - Introvert-tested. Extrovert-approved! :D

jacobevelyn12• 11 years ago

Thanks! I grew up on Kix cereal :)

nacs• 11 years ago

Now I just need a "how to get a friend" feature added then I'll be able to use the app.

dhoe• 11 years ago

Add a friend called "stranger" and keep increasing interactions with them.

jacobevelyn12• 11 years ago

Not sure how tongue-in-cheek this comment was (if at all) but your suggestion is actually a really neat way of reframing interactions with strangers.

Thanks for making me rethink how I interact with the world.

zappo2938• 11 years ago

I thought we are not supposed to talk to strangers?

fidz• 11 years ago

I am not a psychologist, but i ever had a consultation. I felt so lonely, so empty, and i didn't know what to do (i was in college at that time). She tried to gather more information from me. Ended up she gave a suggestion to do something like this journal: I had to make an intense communication, with 20 different friends, for two weeks. I also needed to write the gist of activities to be reported to her.

After two weeks, she was disappointed because i failed to reach the goal. I was able to get intense communication to only three of my friends. But i got my problem right: All of these empty feeling was because i didn't have enough interaction with other.

I didn't have adequate evidence that i was that lonely. By writing a journal, i knew that i barely made sufficient interaction with other; far below the threshold.

(Disclaimer: i am an ambivert)

treve• 11 years ago

There's nothing wrong with only having 1 or 2 close friends.

codezero• 11 years ago

I agree, but there is if you feel lonely, and friendship makes you feel less so.

btrask• 11 years ago

This isn't what I expected from the headline (i.e. notetaking software), and it's not something I could ever see myself using, but I really do like the design (and your answers here).

The human-readable (Markdown) database format is clever. The friend identification algorithm is simple and elegant and sounds pretty effective. And the natural language input format.

Every one of these decisions is "bad" in the sense that they aren't perfect or could cause problems down the line, but it seems like they all work just fine for the intended purpose. So let me suggest that more designers and developers consider the scope/scale of their problems and try to choose simpler options (even "hacks") when they make sense.

jacobevelyn12• 11 years ago

Thanks a lot; I really appreciate it.

And re: the post title, thanks for the tip—it seems "journal" has even more meanings than I thought! I wanted to avoid "diary," which in my experience often has childish connotations. Perhaps the awkward-sounding "friendship log" is the best descriptor...

cheez2• 11 years ago

I've actually been thinking of using a CRM to manage my personal relationships........

esfandia• 11 years ago

Conversely, maybe this could be used as an extremely lightweight CRM?

cheez2• 11 years ago

Yeah, but it's command-line.

jagermo• 11 years ago

Build a snappy web-ui, attach it to tinder, sell it to people who juggle several tinder-based relationships.

niels_olson• 11 years ago

I know a former dean who essentially had a system like this custom made for himself 20 years ago. He said it saved his skin several times, and may have saved the school itself on more than one occasion. This is not for tinder kids. This for CEOs.

dsr_• 11 years ago

Or politicians, or anyone who meets lots of people. The original is a "Farley File": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farley_file

These days it should be integrated with an address book or customer relationship management software.

copperx• 11 years ago

This should be part of the Contacts app of every operating system.

curuinor2• 11 years ago

I have implemented and used a similar thing for many years. I think a very great virtue of such a system is that you can run a cronjob pretty easily to email you reminders to contact any friends you haven't poked at much.

curuinor2• 11 years ago

And I have also thought about the process of making friends for many years.

Consider that the complex network which is considered the ego network (a la the sociologists) is really considered a complex network, just like the overall global social network: radical inequality in the degree structure, clustering and triangle formation, radical inequality in eigenvalues of adjacency matrix, critical percolation to a giant component, durability to random insult but not attack, synchronizability.

Therefore, it will seem in low-friendship times that a radical prioritization is needed and that the durability to random insult should be used to deal with deep friends only. However, the global structure of the ego net must be maintained also by weak friendships, and weak relations are of the utmost importance in doing anything (see Granovetter's work).

As for the operation of getting the friends, fifteen or twenty readings of K. Johnstone's Impro should suffice.

jacobevelyn12• 11 years ago

100% agree. If you have any tips on features/interfaces that pair particularly well with cron, I'd love to hear about them!

I'd also be interested in hearing more about how your system works if you're willing to share!

klenwell• 11 years ago

Very cool. I really like the command line interface.

I've been dealing with a lot of recruiters over the past year. I even wrote my own Rails app: https://github.com/klenwell/recruiters-on-rails.

I have found it pretty useful in tracking the ones I deal with more substantively but one use case I have had trouble dealing with is in initial encounters and deciding whether it is even worth the effort of adding a new recruiter to my app. I get enough recruiter spam that the cost of simply filling in the form on my app to add each recruiter could be prohibitive. Nevertheless, I'd like to keep a record with any recruiter I deal with, even if it is just spam or template email.

I currently have a de-facto solution that involves the autocomplete feature in Gmail search and Mailchimp mailing lists. But I can see this solving this problem much more neatly and coherently. And as a Ruby gem, I could imagine even integrating it with my Rails app.

Great work!

jacobevelyn12• 11 years ago

Thanks! I'd love to hear how well/poorly this integrates with your (very cool) app. Do feel free to create GitHub Issues if there are things you think should be changed to allow easier interoperability.

In particular I'd love to hear how this works as a standalone Ruby library (the `Introvert` class should help you more directly than the shell commands), since I tried to separate the internals from the command-line interface (which is in bin/friends) but I think that separation is somewhat blurred at the moment.

lighttower• 11 years ago

Some use cases to consider:

# how to deal with couples

  $ friends add "John and Martha Smith"

# how to deal with people who live far away (can't meet regularly but are important):

  $ friends add Sister  
  $ friends add Brother-in-Law

Activities for future date Store an idea for an activity and remind yourself in the future.

Location sensitive friends - Don't remind me of friends in New York when I live in LA. Similarly, if I am visiting my mom in Toronto, remind me of friends living in Toronto. I know facebook and similar services attempt to do something like this.

jacobevelyn12• 11 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! These are both great things to bring up and also both on my mind. Couples already work fairly well as individuals because of the way "John and Martha" will be matched to "John Smith" and "Martha Smith," but it's definitely worth thinking about whether it makes sense to join them formally somehow.

Locations is one of the next big areas I'd like this to incorporate, but many of my ideas are fuzzy so any thoughts are (as always) appreciated!

Show HN: A friendship-centric journal

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