priley

Yes, very cool, except as far as it seems, it does not enable moving tracking (driving) and is instead stagnant like others. Also, no shortened link.

I said pretend you were driving.

Agreed, but way easier and done without >$10M of funding like Glympse. Try it. Just like how Instagram stripped down other apps and made a better experience, I think the short mo.by links make sharing location easier.

Great suggestion! This is why the HN community is so valuable for young developers like these guys.

Great point. I can how it may evolve there.

Not sure why it was changed. This app was coded by Berkeley freshman as their first app in honor of a professor that passed away this year who wanted this app when getting picked up by others to visit the hospital often. You can read it in the Apple Store notes of the app:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/moby-simple-location-sharing...

"This application was made in honor of Professor Yale Braunstein (1945 - 2012)."

Try using FMF and share with me (Android user) and the HN audience here with a link your location for an hour. I'm also hoping these kids come out with Android soon. Moby guys.. can you promise the HN audience an Android version soon?

And there were photosharing apps with filters before Instagram. Sometimes solid UX, strong brand, and focusing on what users want can mean the difference. I think these kids are on the right track.

Ok, pretend you are picking me up. Share with me a link where you are right now... even if you are driving.

As far as I gather, these kids have been doing it as a hobby because other apps for quickly sharing a real-time location suck. The short link makes it ideal for sharing via SMS/Twitter, etc.

But great point, they should have a quick demo video, even if they are just a few young hackers. That's probably coming next.

Great point. The short-link makes it sort of like Bit.ly for location and easily shared in SMS, Tweets, etc. I also like the temporal aspect that you can control how long you will be sharing the link (ex: I pick someone up at the airport, so I share my location for a few hours to that person).

Hmm.. I think Phil was (rightfully) being sarcastic about the critizism over a short 4-letter domain. Airbnb was originally Airbedandbreakfast.com. Great launch guys! I'll certainly use it for my summer cabin.

So impressive. You guys execute like a freight train. Keep it up.

I'm sorry you think we are overly ambitious. Zuck was very demonstratively inspired and confident (see below), and we are all better off that we was.

Why do you guys think that? I received this email in 2004 from TheFacebook.com founders encouraging me to join their team.

" - Thefacebook.com is one of the hottest new websites.

- Our numbers are some of the best on the Internet: 1.5-2 billion page views per month, 2.3 million registered users, and 60%+ of the user base comes back every day

"

If you are starting your own company, you should be 120% sure you are building something huge that people want. It's also much harder now to attract engineers then it was back then, which is essentially the main reason you even talk about a round.

Thanks! But we feel like we are only 1% done. Our team has confidence in what we can accomplish... now it's just a matter of execution and having smart hackers on the team.

We were just messing with you guys (Causes). ;) You can have your 4sq mayorship back. We initially were trying to enable people to connect based on similar charity interests. It's still available and people still use it. We just broadened the focus.

I can certainly see it both ways. Thanks for the link and discussion guys. It's valuable for those just starting to make these kinds of decisions.

Absolutely correct. We are using the Graph API. The magic comes with you do link analysis and cluster it with other public data.

It was a little of both. ;) Hey... everyone... I just wanted to thank you for all your comments about our new search engine! This community has such great insight and I just really appreciate the support with Ark. It has been an exhausting 45 days of coding and designing, but encouragement like this makes it all worth while.

:) Ha.

I agree.. but again, it starts with a "name" input field. Many of the interesting searches are where you know qualities of people, but no idea about their name. It's x10 more powerful than pipl.

Pretty fancy detective work there. :) Our beta users felt more "confident" with this design, data layout, probably because they were used to a similar mental model with FB.

Great point! Just as Google first thought they were badass with "1 million pages" indexed, we realize we are just getting started. We'll add more social networks in the future. :)

I think what he means which of your friends are single AND live in New York AND like Radiohead.

Search only gets interesting when you learn how to power search, and Ark is that power people search.

Great question. So, there are two parts of Ark:

1) Massive index that spans across all the world's social networks. This publicly accessible data is normalized, cleansed, etc.

2) You can make a "private" index of just your friends. This never goes outside of your own private index. That data remains there and is not added to the massive index. It is incrementally updated, so if people are no longer your friends (bummer!) they are no longer in your private index.

No one gets full access. Otherwise we lose all our integrity. I hope that helps.. and thanks again for the question.

True.. but they all use public records. Use one of these services and find all your friends and old classmates that live in New York. And their UI makes you start by typing a name... we reimagined and redesigned what people search could be.

Greplin is awesome and Daniel's team is super impressive. But they focus and index on all your private data like messages, emails, etc. We are trying to improve the 30% of internet searches online that are people-related. I love how you say Facebook's search has been nerfed.. I may borrow that for the Demo Day preso. :)

The story is actually a great one, and will be told someday. I'll save it for the book that is turned into a movie about how I made Ark just because I wanted to be as cool as a crew guy.

Great point. We'd love to completely open up and allow you to search without authenticating, but part of the app allows you to setup a private index of all the private data of your Facebook friends. We need to scale that out a little. But you are right.