That the app is both geofenced and anonymous reminds me of Yik Yak, which was a huge success on my college campus before the company decided to move away from anonymity.
Did you develop this as a side project, or is this something you want to turn into a business?
Does it need to? Did YikYak need to? The death of anonymity was pretty much the death of YikYak.
Letting people talk, harassment and all seems to be the way to go. It's an opt in thing, so if you don't like it just uninstall or ignore a few users. Maybe I'm just a sucker for a good cesspool sometimes.
I have it on good sources that they dropped anonymity not because of harassment, but because of the history of anonymous apps fizzling out. Anonymous apps generally fail to generate sustainable, long-term growth.
It's indeed a side project that I've been working on for a while. It was mainly the development that interested me. Running/marketing a social messaging app is something others would probably enjoy more.
Currently I'm working on a different that, although also a software project, is more closely linked to applications/technologies that I love. It is this project I indeed aim to turn into a viable business.
As described I'm most likely not going to take this project much further on my own. I'll definitely reach out to you if I decide on growing it with a team or maybe as an open-source project.
I agree with your take on newspapers: they try and capture the attention of a layman audience. As such, their work can be simplified to the point of impropriety from time to time.
I'm less inclined to agree with your opinion on academic research, however. Systems of peer review--and softer systems, like those of repute amongst colleagues--are in place for the express purpose of eliminating biases and errors across research works.
In the social sciences, there is a great amount of care that goes into ensuring that:
1. Data is handled properly
2. Future inquiries are sound
Whether or not that care happened in this body of work is up for debate.
As others have said, this feels very similar to Yammer. Microsoft has made a strong pivot to enterprise software over the past couple of years, whereas this feels like Facebook's first foray.
Although I don't doubt Facebook's agility, I give other enterprise software companies the advantage sheerly due to their head start.
The benefit Facebook has is hundreds if not thousands of hours of familiarity with their overall interfaces (per user). When I viewed their demo videos, it all looked extremely familiar to me, having used Facebook since about 2006. Whether or not this is the case, it made the design feel good and pleasing.
When I look at Yammer or other services that are totally fresh, I am not at all familiar. I'm totally willing to learn new interfaces and get familiar, but there are a lot of people that would prefer to stick with what they are familiar with.
How gaudy. I hope that the next generation of naming technologies will choose to interoperate with DNS by filing all this recent TLD pollution to an appropriate home under .icann.
Great work! I'm excited to see what people do with this.
The only thing that concerns me is the ease with which somebody can join a session maliciously. Have you considered adding an additional form of verification for joining sessions?
Well... yes. Teleconsole itself is just a Teleport (http://gravitational.com/teleport) server configured _without_ extra authentication. But Teleport by default has user accounts with 2nd factor auth and integration with Google Apps.
Did you develop this as a side project, or is this something you want to turn into a business?