Comment by manuelflara | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manuelflara | Hacker News Reader

Whoa! I feel like I've just been slapped in the face. Don't get me wrong, the design is beautifully, and the app is great. The thing is.. I've been working on something like this myself! And yours looks way more complete and polished.

Here's mine: http://www.fiestastic.com

NOTE: It's now in private beta, but if you (this goes both to the Crowdspottr team as well as anyone reading this :P) would like to give it a try, just sent me an email to manuel@fiestastic.com with a link to your Facebook profile and I'll add it to the list of "allowed users".

I've taken more of a regular website approach while you guys are doing first a mobile app/site, which makes more sense, but I'm not very skilled in native iPhone/Android development.

I'm not sure if I should be depressed (someone else is doing what I'm doing, and so far, looks better!) or happy (someone else is doing what I'm doing, so must be something worth doing!), but anyway, good luck with Crowdspottr! I'll be keeping an eye on you ;-)

Fiestastic is cool! Clean, simple and just works. I don't care about beautiful design, I just want to find out cool stuff to do with my friends.

I guess you will soon add events other than just for today. It would also be nice to see the names of my friends who are going (right now you only show a thumbnail of their profile pic).

Getting traction for this app (and for Crowdspottr) might be nearly impossible though. Facebook already shows me what you're showing (on the left side menu, under Events, there's Friends' events). Plus the chances of me remembering to come back to your site when I want to go out next time are pretty low.

The only way you could do better than Facebook is if you aggregated events from other sites and made your own recommendations based on my past events. I think that's one thing which most sites seem to miss. If you know the bands, festivals, parties I've been to you should be able to tell me about other similar ones. Hook into other APIs like Foursquare, Songkick, Timeout etc and you will always have an edge over any single big player.

Thanks! And yes, showing events for future days will be done soon.

As of "Facebook already does it", it may be true, but they don't show you all your friends events. For today I see only two, for example. I guess they show me only the most relevant.

The thing is, once you get some traction (and that's a big IF), you can do things like showing the most popular events in your city, even if none of your friends (nor you) has been invited. And with more volume of events, you can also create better recommendation algorithms.

Another use, which Crowdspottr already has and Fiestastic doesn't (nor Facebook, at least not "easily"), is seeing what events someone else has RSVPd to, which is cool to see where you friends are gonna go or what are they interested in. Someone could say this is great for stalkers, but I digress :P

Even if Facebook does some things with events, the good news (for Crowdspottr and me) is that for them events is just a part of their graph, and I don't see them putting a lot more effort or functionality on top of what they already have, when SO much can be done with all that data.

And yes, using other APIs as well like Foursquare is a good idea (Crowdspottr does it AFAIK) but I know personally I'd be kind of lazy to put in log in details for more than one service. That, and also Foursquare is way less ubiquitous than Facebook.

once you get some traction (and that's a big IF), you can do things like showing the most popular events in your city

I think it might work better the other way around. You might need to show events outside my friends' knowledge to get any traction, because if my friends are already going to those events then I probably already know about them.

I agree that Facebook won't put as much effort into one feature as you could, but the fact is that people's time is limited and they are all on Facebook. So, you need to use FB to get traction. As a simple example, I don't even see a Like button on Fiestastic or Crowdspottr!! The first rule of social is sharing.

Good point. There was a Like button on the previous design of Fiestastic, but I ended up getting rid of it. I also have other ideas to make Fiestastic more viral / shareable and to make users come back to the site, but first I want to focus on making the core experience as great as possible. "Too many things and too little time" :)

The fiestastic web design looks really good and its always nice to know that other people think there is potential in the idea. I feel its a good strategy to have an iPhone app before a website or other native apps 1) I have never said "check out this cool website" but I have said "checkout this cool app" like a million time 2) Its cost effective (for a start up) Running a server requires time, cost and energy where as distributing an app is easy. 3) You are just supporting 2 phones with 2 screen resolutions. It helps in delivering a good experience. You wont have a lot of users saying it does not work on my Sony Ericsson E10i Xperia Mini. These are just my views and they should not mean anything :P. I am definitely not an expert.

I agree it makes a lot more sense to start with an iPhone (and Android) app, but being a web developer myself, Fiestastic so far has been an effort of a few weeks, while developing an iPhone app would take a lot more time for me.

First I wanted to see if it was a good idea, and what people liked and didn't like before putting a lot more effort into it (like learning to develop native apps). Also, while native apps really are the best option, it wouldn't be difficult for me to create a mobile version of the site optimized for smartphones, so people can access the service on the go, even if not having the best experience.

definitely don't be depressed, take the lessons learned and apply it to everything else you'll ever do ..

and ask them for a job!

really impressed by this app by the way - my only issue with most new apps like this is that they usually don't work so well in europe, due to low rate of adoption, and lack of focus by entrepreneurs on non-US markets ...

Well, the good thing about both Crowdspottr and Fiestastic is that, unlike classic social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc), even if only 1 user uses the service, it's already useful for him/her, as all data (events and friends) comes from Facebook.

Of course, being widely used (at least in a specific area) would bring extra benefits and more possible features, but I like that it's useful even to the very first user.

the company behind this app is actually http://www.pangalaktik.com/ which is based out of Hungary and other european countries :P

and the people behind it are from 7 countries like Russia, Estonia ... check out http://blog.campus.carnationgroup.com/ for the complete story

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