Ripple – Chat with people nearby

by jamztang • 13 years ago

53 49 13 years ago

Falling3• 13 years ago

I often find myself wondering about an application like this. Anyone know if there's something similar for android?

fencepost• 13 years ago

Google has in a vague and useless way attempted something like it in Google+ on mobile - there's a "Nearby" option that at this point appears to be people within the same metro area.

cb060• 13 years ago

having trouble finding on the app store!

jamztang7• 13 years ago

Here's the direct link https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ripple-chat/id787142731?ls=1...

Probably take some time for AppStore to process those keywords, stay tuned :)

taproot2• 13 years ago

Random? Why not all the people?

jamztang7• 13 years ago

Yes you can by inviting people with our per room invitation feature. There will be a need to have chat room concept so people know what to chat on.

taproot2• 13 years ago

Cool, think you can get a lan based room going?

As others have said been keen to do something very similar. Glad someone got off their ass and did it.

I always envisioned it useful at parties and places where the internet may be too congested but the lan/wlan not so much: read conferences

yadongwen• 13 years ago

nice work. great if can read and send contact info like fb/email..

otoburb• 13 years ago

I thought they were related to Ripple Labs (https://ripple.com/) and the Ripple cryptocurrency due to the recent Bitcoin and cryptocurrency craze; however it seems they are unrelated and just happened to hit upon the same name for their chat app.

jamztang7• 13 years ago

Right there's nothing to do with Ripple Labs, we named it through a hackathon before we found it out.

est3• 13 years ago

WeChat (by Tencent) has similar feature, but you must first add people to friend list then chat.

However this raise an interesting topic:

How to securely verify that a device is indeed nearby and not spoofing it?

You can spoof your GPS coordinates easily on Android at least.

joe_the_user2• 13 years ago

Why would that be a problem?

Your location should not be an identifying value but more or less a topic.

Being able to set your parameters to some location somewhere and chat with "random people" there seems like a feature, not a bug.

est3• 13 years ago

Why would that be a problem?

Hmm, the same reason you wanna keep your conversations private?

I can think of few cases, like if you want to giving nearby people coupons, I mean really nearby, not random guy on the other side of the planet trying to re-sell your coupons.

How to use a non-hackish, non-intrusive way to make content exclusive to local users?

Providing an ad-hoc wifi is not the solution because people may need public Internet activities and a device can connect only to one access point at a time.

DigitalTurk2• 13 years ago

It's a problem because of spam.

On WeChat it happens that if you send a message to a 'nearby pretty girl', you get a link to some dodgy website back.

And before you call people who would send a message to a 'nearby pretty girl' naive. WeChat is in fact used a lot for hooking up with strangers.

shousper• 13 years ago

Who cares? If I'm on a train heading home, I don't want my conversation terminated because I get too far away. Just link the rooms to one or more relevant locations so people can find them initially, then let people favourite them or whatever so they can rejoin later without having to be in that location.

Yeah?

EDIT: typo.

jamztang7• 13 years ago

At least for now, it's not meant for private/sensitive messages.

We're more focusing on allowing people to join chatrooms which the location information are to help people easily find them, there's also an invitation feature to let you tweet your room and people can join all over the world.

verystealthy• 13 years ago

As Jeremy Clarkson would say... What can possibly go wrong?

underwater• 13 years ago

"Meet like-minded people". Where like-minded means "uses the same OS as me".

Sorry, couldn't resist. Congratulations on shipping. It looks like a great utility.

jamztang7• 13 years ago

Yes we hope it can be really useful, maybe for conferences and events, never know. We'll see how it goes :)

lelf• 13 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6642100

OafTobark• 13 years ago

I remember seeing this when it was announced but didn't bother using it because I was too lazy to sign up an account. I like that this one doesn't require an account to engage allowing me to try before I sign up

orta• 13 years ago

I've been using the beta since it came out and have loved the way the app has grown. I'm really interested in seeing its potential in conferences or large towns.

It's small and well focused, they've opened some code from it and seem to be doing a good job of being active in chat. Give it a try.

jamztang7• 13 years ago

Thanks Orta you've been resupportive to us :)

mengto3• 13 years ago

It's just fantastic to hear from the Cocoapods team. Ripple wouldn't exist without it!

runn1ng• 13 years ago

If I want to chat with people nearby, I would go up, come to them and start chatting with them. In person.

...just kidding, I am an asocial person, I don't speak with other people.

digitalengineer2• 13 years ago

Exept with us or course. So I take it you'd be someone willing to try the AI as shown in the 'Her' movie? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzV6mXIOVl4

_asciiker_• 13 years ago

ha, I just saw that movie last night, great ideas in there and I like how everything works so seamlessly.

Kind of gets you thinking about the singularity doesn't it?

zanny• 13 years ago

As long as I don't have active reinforcement to remind me you aren't just randomly generated text by a machine somewhere, I'm good.

Which also means I'd prefer my creepy stalker AI to speak in a monotone machine voice. More relatable that way.

glibgil• 13 years ago

Sausage party

notastartup• 13 years ago

how does the chat happen through bluetooth? what are the technical details?

jamztang7• 13 years ago

It's through the internet

mk3• 13 years ago

I'm not sure about the timeline who released first, but there is popcorn chat app which allows to chat with people who are within one mile from you it was featured here a while back. The functionality seems to be the same less or more.

mengto3• 13 years ago

Hmm, popcorn is a single chatroom within a location. Ripple is multiple chatrooms within a location, but based on a topic. There is no signup. That actually creates some really interesting use cases. Hopefully, you'll decide to try it out! :)

MichaelTieso• 13 years ago

Nice work guys. Loved the articles on Medium as well.

mengto3• 13 years ago

Thank you, hopefully our little hackathon experience will inspire others to build their own Apps too! :D

herghost• 13 years ago

is there anyway you can forcibly push the app to the attractive woman that gets on my train?

no? oh ok.

popey• 13 years ago

Reminds me of Trepia which tried a similar thing only on desktops, 10 years ago. It died, unsurprisingly. I had been wondering when someone would revive the idea.

mceoin2• 13 years ago

You guys should check out Yobongo. A similar location-based chat app which has since closed down post-seed round. You might like to see what worked / didn't work for them.

mceoin2• 13 years ago

They were around in 2011.

Globz• 13 years ago

This app makes me think of Popcorn..

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popcorn-messaging/id71841670...

I wonder if more people are using Ripple because so far I haven't had much conversations with Popcorn.

TeeWEE• 13 years ago

I thought about this idea myself. But then I noticed there were tons of good apps doing exactly this. This stopped me from implementing it, because i would not be "first app in the market", because I woudnt have the unfair advantage of being first.

(yobong, palringo, whoshere)

easy_rider• 13 years ago

Yes this. Actually the first time I came across a (variation of) this idea, it was years ago and brought up by a co-worker. I have been tinkering with the idea, and also came to the same conclusion, that virality / marketing in general were probably going to play the part hugely, as like you've stated, this has been done a lot..

Maybe it's something that people do not want.

I could see this having great potential in the dating/flirt sectors obvously ;) But you could also imagine things like "shit I think I left my jacket at x/y, anyone found it? " at a festival. Anonimity would probably be mandatory for success.

Remember how well Latitude faired?

mknits• 13 years ago

When its android app is coming?

martin1b• 13 years ago

Looks nice, but IOS only...

Ripple – Chat with people nearby

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