marram

Have you see http://www.thesponty.com ? (disclaimer: I'm co-founder)

It's has elements of Twitter, but is built specifically for casual social events. Sponty gives users a way to broadcast their social intentions, like "Lunch in Harvard Square", where all their friends are implicitly invited.

In addition, Sponty tries to answer two questions: 1. What are my friends doing today? obviously this doesn't work right away ... you need to have some friends on it first.

2. What are other's doing in Boston/network today? We show you all the public events people have posted in a given network: http://www.thesponty.com/whatsup/#/today/Boston

We're trying to crowd source the answer to this question, because crawling is too hard and too inaccurate. Also, most of the really interesting stuff cannot be crawled.

One more: We categorize events by icons. For example, here are beer related events in Boston today: http://www.thesponty.com/whatsup/#/today/Boston/beer

or music: http://www.thesponty.com/whatsup/#/today/Boston/music

Funny, I just talked to Mike Hirshland thinking he was a fellow hacker. They're sharing office space with the company we rent our office space from!

Why does knowing friends' past events cross a moral boundary?!

Technically, the simplest way to do this is via polling+ajax. In our project we implement this as follows:

Every n minutes, the clients polls for updates. It sends along a marker token. The token is either a timestamp it has previously received from the server, or a serialized/json version of the "client model". A while ago, I posted a quick writeup on why you'd need a serialized model here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/602322/differential-ajax-...

I believe Gmail uses a Comet approach (keep http connections open for a while, and send updates at they happen), but this can be tricky to implement, especially when using something like Google App Engine that places strict deadlines on request handlers.

You guys must not be in North America, because it is 4:25 p.m here.

... and meetup is still alive and kicking.

So we're bootstrapping, also in Boston, and also use GAE.

We've been able to manage to stay afloat by keeping day jobs. One of us works full-time and the other part-time, while working on the startup all nights and all weekends. Obviously, it takes a toll on you, and isn't very sustainable in the long term. But we've also learned to delegate: we hired two excellent interns, and we pay them in munchies and free lunches.

$30-$40 in CPU costs seems very high. I'm not sure if you have a technical background, but there might be room for optimization, especially in datastore entity structures and queries. Just the other day, we refactored the way we were storing a certain entity to be able to compute a list of key_names and then fetch them from memcache or the datastore in parallel rather than seriallly. That resulted in a 16x performance boost (measured by response time and CPU cycles). There are some other tricks, like "relational" index entities to speed up datastore lookups so that you're not doing too much processing in Python code.

I would be happy to chat more about our experience with GAE. mahmoud [at] thesponty

We've had a home-brewed solution for a while. PendingNotification(s) that get processed by a cron task that runs every minute. The PendingNotification has all the data the cron task needs to execute it.

Actually, for a while, GAE didn't even have cron tasks. So we were kicking off stuff using silent ajax calls from clients.

Why don't you hire interns? Or a marketing pro to moonlight in exchange for equity?

For sure.

We tried putting flyers for our website all over campuses in the Boston area.

We also setup tables and had Ferrero Rocher chocolates with our cards and url stock onto them.

The conversion rate from posters was zero. The conversion rate from the chocolates+cards was about 10%, which is surprisingly high. The chocolate+cards were at an MIT fair though, so these kids might be over wired.

Good start. Here is some feedback:

1. What does "Flexible learning environment" mean? I don't think this phrase adds any value.

2. "Learn from people you know and trust": Not sure if the people I currently know possess the best knowledge. I've been out of school for a few years.

You need to iterate over your landing page copy a bit more. Get some help from friends or classmates.

3. The text on the features page (/features) is too verbose. Most people won't read all of it. Make it shorter and to the point. Also, more pictures or screen shots would make it easier to understand.

4. The typography of the word "Cafe" in the logo makes it hard to read. Black on dark blue does not provide enough contrast, and the font is too faint to make the logo memorable. So my advice is to: a. Choose a high contrast color scheme and b. Choose a more prominent font for both words in your logo.

The logo also seems to be inconsistent across the pages. For example, it looks different here: http://www.cafecourses.com/courses/31-integrating-authlogic-...

5. The "Feedback" div on the left occludes some of the text on the features page. I realize that I'm on a small laptop with 1024X768

6. Hmm. Are these courses or tutorials? "Adding CAPTCHA to your site" sounds like a one page tutorial.

7. You need to iterate over the copy in the "About" page. It is hard to follow, and can be structured better. For example: you should encourage people to upmod great content, rather than vote down courses. Especially when most of the content is written by you.

Best of luck.

I like Python on Google App Engine + Prototype.js

I like WebOb+Google App Engine.

Working fulltime at a startup (unpaid), consulting three days a week for another (paid).

At Sponty: Python + Google App Engine + prototype.js at consulting gig: Flex, Java, PHP and some Django.

We've implemented cron on GAE by using silent ajax calls from clients to kick start things. Works pretty well ... as long as at least one page is open in a browser somewhere.

What is html encryption anyways? obfuscation?

I tried it, and the robot called my phone. It came from a +46 number. Sweden? nice.

The robot voice was very hard to understand though. You really should record the voice yourself or get a friend to do it. Also, I needed to press 1 to activate, but to deactivate I must call support? huh? Why can't I just press 2?

The purple logo on the blue background is a bit hard on the eyes. Maybe a softer purple?

We are two cofounders. We both had full time jobs. We worked nights and weekends for a year and got something out the door. Now that it is going well, I made a deal with my employer to switch to part-time. I consolidated my fixed costs (aka sold the car, got rid of cable) to be able to live on a part-time salary. The other cofounder is on an H1-B, so he doesn't have the same options.

We live in Cambridge, MA, so you can get by without a car. Food is cheap, and rent is in the range of $700 a month with roommates. So one should be able to live in Cambridge comfortable on about $1600 a month.

Once we get funding, we will both do it full-time.

Looks pretty cool. Does it hook into Facebook?

Here is another option: Quit your fulltime job and get a part-time gig. Reduce your expenses so that you can scrape by on the part time salary. Crank out the code until you have customers/user base, then go for funding.

This is what we've opted to do to get Sponty rolling. YCombinator would be nice, but we're beyond the initial prototype and one of the cofounder cannot quit his day job just yet.

Sponty uses tumblr.

1. The URL is actually an invitation link. When someone clicks it and signs up, Sponty sends you a friend request; which you can choose to ignore. Hence, this is a mild obfuscation to make invite links less guessable.

2. Thank you for catching this bug. Will do.

Long weekend, so coding on a moonlighting project is inevitable.

Very useful. Thank you sir.

Hi bemmu, Thanks for the feedback!

1. We plan on offering Sponty in many different languages. 2. It also works great on the iPhone (and similar phones) and it doesn't require a time commitment like social networks do. We really want you to be in and out in three seconds. 3. Soon we'll add more authentication options. 4. Sure, SMS works great for one-to-one. However, it really does'nt scale if you'd SMS all your friends to see if any of them are up for grabbing a bite.

Thank you for the heads up. We've actually submitted the application. I will update the graphic.

Sponty has been in closed beta since the fall. We were at the MIT TechFair last week. Here are some of the pitches we used at the Sponty table (we also had chocolates!):

"Hi, we're Sponty and we want you to be hangoutable. You should see your friends more".

"Unlike other social networks that want you to sit in front of the computer to look at photos and comment on rants, we're trying to use the internets to get you off the internets so that you can see your friends more. You know, the old fashioned way where you sit with them and gossip over dinner. That way you'll actually be in those photos"

"We're different. Social networks want you to sit in front of the computer all day. We think that's wrong. You should be spending face time with friends."

"We sure are all busy. But we all have to eat at some point. It is more fun to eat dinner with friends".

Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Very useful. Thank you for writing/posting it.