Show HN: Quote Vote, my Android app combining social voting with 140 characters

http://chuinard.com/social-voting-for-tweets-on-android-introduci

by chuinard • 15 years ago

19 11 15 years ago

chuinard4• 15 years ago

I was hoping for some feedback on the concept. Thoughts?

antrix• 15 years ago

Feedback not on the concept but on your implementation. Since you are saving the UUID to SharedPreferences, you can simply implement a Backup Manager [1] to ensure this is persisted for the user across application installs. It won't be tied to a device but to a user based on their Market identity.

[1] http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/backup.html#S...

joebo• 15 years ago

I don't understand the concept. The post has mostly technical tidbits but not much about the functionality.

chuinard4• 15 years ago

You get 140 characters, and your quote is voted up / down after you post it. The trending ones appear on the popular list. The list wipes itself every so often. It's kind of like HN for tweets.

angryasian• 15 years ago

I don't know what the general percentage is, but for example on reddit, most people are consumers or lurkers, and its a small percentage to get people to participate. So I would possibly implement something for so called karma people, a leader board, or showcase the user name more, to give people the vanity that apps like yours need to provide.

mgaman• 15 years ago

I think this is a great idea. I wish I would have thought of this myself, it is about time that someone came up with a democratic social networking utility. I think that this could be expanded to several other topics. As far as your memcache issue goes, you may want to ask people more familiar with app engine to see if they could be of assistance.

pigbucket• 15 years ago

I like the concept but I think it's missing something to get the user interested in the first place. HN has content I like from people I don't know. Twitter has random soundbites from people I can choose to follow. It looks like your app drops the interesting content part of the social-networking thing and the interesting tweeter part of the twitter soundbite machine so I end up being asked to be interested in completely random soundbites from completely random people. The example of the leaderboard on your post would be an unfortunately accurate prediction of the kind of content I'd expect. You really should try to get more interesting content on your sample leaderboard.

1. Maybe I'd be more interested if I knew or in some way could identify with the people sharing quotes. So what about names being visible. Or:

2. Maybe I'd be more interested still if there was a way to filter by group. Christians might be interested in random quotes from other self-styled Christians. Atheists might be interested in god-debunking soundbites. Technophiles might be interested in "android v. apple" slugfests. And so on.

3. Maybe I'd also be interested if event-specific or news-specific quote voting were possible. E.g., I'm at a baseball game and I can follow people from all over the park sharing observations about players and hotdogs. Or there's an earthquake, and I can follow stuff about that. In this respect, you'd be doing something that makes Twitter interesting rather than just the thing that makes it boring, and the voting would be a real addition.

Caveat: complete novice here, in awe of people who can so readily conceive and execute an idea like this.

chuinard4• 15 years ago

Thanks, this was definitely really good feedback. I am going to mull over on where to go with this. I do agree some sort of user engagement is necessary, being 100% anonymous is not interesting.

zokier• 15 years ago

If you track voting history then you could show quotes that have been upvoted by people that have similar voting history. The actual algorithm probably will end up being rather complex, especially if you want to avoid too strong segmentation. Basically you want to show the users a mix of fresh quotes, "aligned" quotes, and "random" popular quotes.

madamepsychosis• 15 years ago

How did you do user accounts/ authentication? Did you make each user have an account or did you use the phone's ID or something? (Not an Android developer, just curious)

chuinard4• 15 years ago

I create a UUID when the app starts for the first time. I send that UUID back and forth when HTTP requests are made. Basically I let you (the client) tell me who you are.

Show HN: Quote Vote, my Android app combining social voting with 140 characters

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