Show HN: My inherently "viral" experiment: 3Pics.me | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My inherently "viral" experiment: 3Pics.me

15 pointsbryanh13 comments

As you can tell, it's heavily influenced by Mark Bao's threewords.me. The concept is simple, upload three pics and let your friends vote on them. In fact, I think I may have ripped the concept off a post about threewords.me. Anyways...

Basically, I just wanted to build something stripped down to a core functionality and a little different from my usual projects. I've spent a lot of time polishing the flow and trying to make sharing an inherent part of the app.

It's built on Ruby/Padrino/Sinatra, Postgres and uses S3 for image hosting. This is actually my first Ruby project coming from a pure Django/Python background. It was a ton of fun to build and the guys behind Padrino were super helpful.

I'm not really expecting much in the way of adoption, but it will be fun to watch either way. Anyways, let me know what you think of it! Enjoy!

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I really like the idea, and thought the site was aesthetically pleasing. I don't mean to sound like I am complaining, as this is my first post, but I want to help you improve the site. (I am no expert on viral sites, but I assume the better the site the more likely it will go viral.)

There are two things I see possibly going wrong: 1. www.3pics.me should redirect to 3pics.me. I know most techies think this fairly common knowledge, and it is quickly becoming so, but I still have family who think you have to tack www on front of all websites you go to. So my basic thought is if Joe Average can't find the site, it will severely limit your audience.

2. You are using just a cookie to remember if someone has already voted. This is a problem. A small script such as the following could quickly inflate the results.

for i in $( seq 10 ); do wget --no-cookie --post-data='upload%5Bid%5D=34' 3pics.me/1; done

(I tested it to check to see if my suspicion was correct, I only ran with 10 requests with one second intervals between each request to minimize any possible damage. upload[id] =34 has 10 extra votes. Sorry.)

Like I said, I don't want to sound like I am just a grouch, but I wanted to give you a heads up before someone else figures this out and abuses it.

I hope you succeed, pwp

Cool idea!

Some feedback:

- The buttons browse and upload are too far apart. I thought the upload was a seperate button. Why not upload the photo as soon as an image has been selected. Seen it in other places, so it is technically possible

- Loose the C:\fakepath\. I use a Mac so that is rather daft. Just show the filename. And oh yeah, make sure it fits the box and doesn't wrap lines.

- Throw same random numbers in the URL as an identifier. I don't think people will like it if other people outside their social graph can view their picture. Just a precaution..

- Integrate the proper Twitter share button instead of linking to the Twitter site. Much cooler and more handy!

- Make the #1 #2 and #3 result balloons easily recognizable as which one is winning and which one isn't. Now it's just random colours.

Hope this helps!

The fakepath thing is a Chrome thing it seems. Dunno why it is like that.

I thought about extra random numbers, but security through obscurity just never rang true to me.

Thanks for the feedback though! Hoping to get a little more traction and go from there.

I really like the design of the site.

When I visited http://3pics.me/1 my first response was to click on the text that said "Click to vote for pic X!" as opposed to clicking on the pic itself.

Cool!

Ripped concept or not, it looks to me like something that has all the potential to go viral (probably short-term).

I'd suggest the following:

1. Line up some revenue streams (AdSesne /Aff etc.?)

2. Prep up the backend/code/servers etc. for a huge spike (probably lasting a few days)

3. Submit to as many Web 2.0/social media focused destinations as you can (following up on each response)

4. Keep fingers crossed :-)

All the best.

Awesome project bryan! Glad we could be helpful during your first Ruby / Padrino project. Look forward to future projects.

It's been done before, e.g. http://www.okcupid.com/mybestface. Knowing the OKCupid guys, they might have some useful data on their blog...

Clickables: http://3pics.me/ and here's my voting page: http://3pics.me/1

I have t a totally new viral concept like this, will top all others, but need a developer to help. PM me :O)

Sounds interesting. Your email is not in your profile. You can email me (via my profile) - let's see what we can do.

fixed. thanks.

very elegant design man. How did you do the design and create the logo?

From my perspective, i think it could catch on given that it gets to the right people initially. It reminds me of hot or not accept your facing off against yourself.

you should post this on http://reddit.com/r/amiugly

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