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On the surface, it seems like the ride-sharing market is oversaturated. 🚘

There's already category leaders Uber and Lyft, as well as countless others — Gett, Grab, Via, Didi, etc., etc.

The problem: These ride-sharing companies have the potential to create a monopoly, and ultimate raise the price of how much it costs to get you from point A to point B. 🤔

Yesterday, a new app called SoMo launched to combat this — and ultimately give riders some freedom when it comes to getting around.

How it works: SoMo is a “social transport” app that combines all modes of transport that are not a ride-hailing service. It allows people to create free rides (yes, free) through “social circles” around a specific destinations — from sporting events to concerts to the daily commute. It's kind of like Uber meets Google Maps meets your neighborhood carpool.

Some responses from the community today:

“I love the idea of sharing rides with a network that I know” - Tal

“One of those things where you say 'why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?' Great App, great concept and a great solution. I’m hooked.” - Gabby

“My 12-year-old was SUPER excited about this app. And going to tell her friends about it. Which means that me and other moms are going to use it a lot.” - Inna

SoMo will be available in 15 cities to start, including London, Athens, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Brussels, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Nice, Los Angeles, Helsinki, Piraeus, Thessaloniki, Almere Stad, Haarlem, and the Hague. If you don't live in one of those places, don't worry. The app's makers (Here Technologies) plan to launch in 10 new cities every month.

We'll be watching where this goes — but you have to try it out for yourself.

Yesterday, GitHub gave free users the ability to create unlimited private repositories.

Before the announcement, GitHub limited private repositories to paying users, but unlimited private repos were reportedly the top-requested feature from the community.

The news also marks GitHub’s first change since Microsoft bought the company last October. 👀

While this might seem like a small change, this and their recent acquisition of Spectrum illustrates a shift in GitHub’s strategy, optimizing for user growth and engagement over revenue. Prediction: GitHub will acquire another developer focused startup within 2019.

“We often think of coding as a solitary activity, but in fact it’s the world’s largest team sport. All the software we write builds on the work of others, and our job at GitHub is to make that easier for everyone.” - GitHub CEO Nat Friedman

In light of the news, we rounded up a few more GitHub-y projects we think you'll like:

The GitHub + Slack Integration does what you think — it brings your GitHub projects right inside Slack 🙌

Refined GitHub is a browser extension that makes GitHub more powerful 👊

RepoHunt helps you find trending repositories on GitHub 📈

Commit Together lets you add co-authors to your commits 👫

Stellar Tip lets you tip other developers on GitHub with cryptocurrency 🤑

Devo displays GitHub Trending, Hacker News and Product Hunt on every new tab 👍

GitHub Gardener is a tool that makes daily, automated commits that turn your GitHub green ✅

Board for GitHub is a webview-based GitHub project app 👀

Gitweet will tweet from your commit description 🐦

GitHub User Rank is a Chrome extension for ranking GitHub user profiles 🔝

We recently asked the Twitter-verse what their favorite productivity hacks are and got some....creative responses:

“Leave the charger at home” - Adrian

“Sleep after lunchtime for 30 mins” - Sasha

“Mushrooms” - Alex

Many of us spend a lot of time trying to hack, well, time. So might as well be unconventional.

We went down the Product Hunt rabbit hole and rounded up 10 of our favorite products to hack productivity:

Progress Bar OSX shows you the exact percentage of how much the day, month, year and your life has progressed in your OSX menu bar ⏳

“All technology is a time machine. Get your life back by treating it so.” - Chris

Taskr is a dead-simple task manager app that's perfect for small lists (and it's free) 📝

“I really love this app for planning all my work related tasks. It makes my daily planning in the morning so easy, since I can just grab my tasks from the backlog and start working. I think it sliced the time for the daily planning at least by 50%.” - Marius

Focuster ditches the to-list model and schedules your top priorities in your calendar 📆

“Focuster connects to your Google Calendar and helps you easily visualize how much free time you have and make the most of it. It flows around your existing events and is always updating so your most important work always stays top of mind.” - Jordan

Rooster is a Chrome extension that gives you insights on your browsing habits via push-notification when you lose focus 🙇‍

“Great app if you want to introspect your time and become more productive” - Kushagra

Social Pomodoro pairs you with an accountability buddy to keep you working for 25 minutes at a time 👫

“I had no idea having an accountability buddy in a pomodoro timer could be so amazing! I got done with tasks that usually talk me 2 hours withing 2 sessions- ie, 50 minutes” - Ayushi

7 Minute Workout is a scientific workout app from The New York Times that helps you get a realllly fast workout in 💪

“I love this workout. It's a great way to squeeze in exercise even on those busy days.” - Robleh

Thought Train is a menu bar app that keeps a list of your thoughts and tasks 🧠

“If anyone is like me and has a lot of balls flying in the air most days, it's super useful to when the 'wait, what was I working on again' thought pops up in my brain (like all the time) to do a quick glance at the top menu bar and go 'ah, there it was'” - Hrefna

The Most Dangerous Writing App loses your writing if you stop typing 😳

“Pretty good way to start your day. This is good for 'morning pages', without the pressure of writing something that can be 'saved for later'. “ - Sagar

Gone is like the Snapchat of to-do lists: all tasks will disappear 24 hours after adding them ⏰

“One big problem with to-do list apps is that to-dos tend to pile up. I specifically wanted something ephemeral - just for the day. This solves it perfectly.” - Dominic

Play (for Medium) lets you listen to Medium articles as podcasts to save time on reading articles 🎧

“If you write on Medium ... this should interest you.” - Arnie

What would you add to this list? Share it with us on Twitter and we'll RT the most useful, creative, or ridiculous recommendations. 😉

The Swift Life, Taylor’s Swift’s social media app for her fans, is making a swift exit. 🧟

The app is shutting down in February — just one year after it launched. The shutdown may be due to a general over-saturation of social networks. Or the fact that the app didn’t start off on a great note. A week after it launched, the app was only at #793 in the App Store’s overall app rankings. And politics seeped into it’s early days, where fans took to the app to argue about Trump. 😳

But do other celebrity-branded apps have legs? We took a look to see where they are now:

In December, the Kardashian-Jenner sisters announced that they’d also be shutting down their paid apps in 2019. Similarly, 'Katy Perry: Pop' shut down after a year and 'Britney Spears: American Dream' hasn't been updated in two years. 💀

Ellen Degeneres' 'Heads Up!' was (and is) a hit. It launched back in 2013 and remained among Apple's top-paid apps three years after launch. Today, 'Heads Up!' is still relevant — you can play it on Alexa. 🔊

In August, Game of Thrones actress Maisie Williams launched Daisie, a social app for connecting creatives. According to Apptopia, the app saw 4,816 downloads in the last 30 days, with monthly download growth down by ~ 51%.

Three-year-old Tidal, the music streaming app co-owned by Jay Z, Beyoncé, Kanye West and a slew of other musicians, has had trouble competing with services like Spotify and Apple Music. It's subscriber growth has reportedly stalled, and it may have to sell if it wants to continue long-term. 🎧

And let's not forget Hanx Writer, Tom Hanks' app that turns your iPad into a typewriter. It was wonderful and weird, but it also hasn't been updated since 2017. 😢

January is here which means it's time for...The Golden Kitty Awards! 😻

This marks our fourth year hosting the awards, which are a chance for you — our community — to celebrate makers' achievements over the past year. Previous winners range from tech giants like Elon Musk to indie makers like Pieter Levels.

This year is going to be our biggest Golden Kitty Awards yet with 22 (!) categories up for grabs, including 10 brand new categories. The new category additions are:

Audio and Voice — Apps you can hear and talk to 🗣

Diversity and Inclusion — Products making the world more inclusive 🌎

AI and Machine Learning — Projects powered by the robots! 🤖

Health and Fitness App — Things to help us lead a healthier life 💦

Smart Home — Gadgets to transform the home 🏠

Founder Books — Books for makers that we can learn from 📖

Fintech — Disruptive players shaking up finance 💸

Privacy-Focused — Apps and services prioritizing privacy 🔒

Made with Product Hunt API — Rad projects that use our API 😻

Social Impact — Projects that make the world just a little bit better 🙏

You can nominate makers starting TODAY until Tuesday January 8th at 6pm PT. We will announce the finalists for you to vote for on Wednesday January 9th and the final winners will be announced on Wednesday January 16th.

Start nominating your fav projects here!!!

“98% of offers to acquire your company or product don't work out and are merely a time waste (very often by a competitor).” - Pieter Levels

New year, new side project. But how much is your nights and weekends hustle actually worth? This calculator helps you figure it out.

What it takes into account:

💸 Net income (revenue/costs)

⏰ How much time you spend on it per week

📊 Multipliers by industry

📈 Growth rate multipliers

📱 Your users and following (MAUs, social media followers, etc.)

“I dream of this being universally adopted by 'open' makers everywhere so we all can work with standardized side-project profiles like accountants do with profit and loss statements or balance sheets.” - KP

“Love the simplicity! Reminds me of some financial tools I've come across” - Chip

Next step: Sell your side project in 2019.

A sampling of side project marketplaces to peruse in the meantime:

🏷 Transferlot carefully curates side projects for sale

🤑 Flippa is a large marketplace for buying and selling websites (with a 15% success fee)

😍 Borderline lets you sell your app and barter for someone else's that excites you

💰1K Projects is a marketplace of side projects for less than $1K

🔎 SideProjectors is like “the Craigslist of websites”

Dear Product Hunt,

It's me, Product Hunt. Tomorrow’s the first day of 2019. I’m so excited for all the things we have planned over the next year that I can hardly sleep.

As I write this, I know you're already cooking up something new for the podcast in 2019. 🎧

You've also been thinking a lot about how to help the community find the best products on Product Hunt. And how to give makers and startups better tools to acquire users and gather feedback. 🤔

Did you launch the new browser extension yet? I can’t wait to see how makers use it. 😉

Anyways, I hope you had a great 2019!

Love,
Product Hunt

P.S. If you want to write a letter to your 2020 self, use this.

ICYMI, Instagram caused some drama on the Internet yesterday.

The Facebook-owned app briefly switched to a horizontal feed (like the tap-to-advance layout in Stories), but then later confirmed that the rollout was actually bug.

In reaction, phrases like “purely evil” and “end of days” were thrown around. A conspiracy theory also hatched, claiming that Instagram purposefully rolled out the new format to test its reception.

“So did we just find out why the Instagram founders quit?” - Shira

“I’m not even joking this new Instagram UI discriminates against left handed people.” - Nate

“Everyone’s complaining they’ve replaced Instagram’s timeline with a tappy thing, but really this is YOUR fault for not spending enough Quality Engagement Time on the main Facebook app and threatening the company’s advertising revenue.” - Jim

Regardless, it has been previously reported that Instagram is testing a new tap-to-advance feed. The company could be trying to reduce mindless scrolling. Or expand on the success of the format for Stories. Or make more money. 🤷‍

The news comes on the heels of Twitter's new “sparkle button”, so a shakeup to the algorithmic feed may be in store for the 'gram in the near future. 😏

In the meantime, here are 10 tools to play around with on Instagram:

Auto Publish is a sleeek little tool that lets you schedule posts in advance 👏

Instagram.css is a complete set of Instagram filters in pure CSS 👀

Auditor lets marketers check influencers' accounts for fake followers 🔎

Nite Mode for Instagram is exactly what it sounds like 🌚

Maps for Instagram lets you see your pics on a map of the world 🌎

Unfold gives you minimal templates for creating gorgeous Stories

Blockai lets you claim Insta copyrights with a hashtag 💪

Prime helps you calculate the best time to post on Instagram ⏰

Top Nine for Instagram finds your best nine Insta moments from 2018 📸

Buffer Stories Creator helps you create beautiful Stories on Instagram 🙌

Cue the 2018 reflection, it's almost the new year.

But we've decided to run a little experiment ahead of 2019. Instead of evaluating your old routines and habits, recognize the people and products that made a difference to you this year by giving them a shout out! 🎉

“There are too many people to thank! This year I have had the pleasure of connecting with makers from around the world who have helped me build my startup and side-projects, and helped keep me accountable.” - James

“Massive shout-out to all the Maker Mag community of writers and editors. Reading our group chat with its mix of silly jokes and serious brainstorming sessions never fails to put a smile on my face. Excited for 2019! 😻” - Anne-Laure

"As a first-time founder, I am ever grateful for all of the sage advice I received from other founders this past year. Special thanks to @rrhoover @ericbahn @staringispolite @jimmydouglas @vinlin @jasonoliver @jenlufer @thepriyadarshy @travisawakens @fraywing @davidpanzarella @thianhlu @eusden @bebe_chueh @nzxtjohnny for keeping me grounded and focused. Excited for what 2019 has in store! 🙏" - Jonathan

"HUGE shout-out to the entire @ProductHunt team. We accomplished a lot this year, including reaching profitability (in large part thanks to @ems_hodge's leadership)." - Ryan

Add your shout-outs and we'll share some of our favorites on Twitter. 😊

“Not only is Fortnite the new hangout spot, replacing the mall, Starbucks or just loitering in the city, it's become the coveted 'third place' for millions of people around the world” - Owen Williams

2018 was the year of Fortnite. Drake played streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins. The game launched on iOS. And the Switch. And Android. It even partnered with the NFL. 🎮

Since the third-person shooter game officially debuted a year and a half ago, it has turned into a cultural phenomenon that now has over 200 million registered players.

But in the past week, we've read a lot less about the game itself but more about what the game has created — a communal “hangout” spot for players online.

In a nutshell, it's become a place where your friends are — and that sounds a lot like social media. 🤔

“Just speaking for our family, it's still clear to us that Fortnite needs tight rules in our house, but we've shifted to thinking about it less as a video game and more as we might think about a teen talking on the phone for hours.” - Ernie Tedeschi

Fortnite's success as a social network largely stems from that fact that it's really for anyone (even Drake) — it's free to play and available on every device.

This year, we also saw a few Fortnite-focused apps emerge specifically around community:

FortLeague is an iOS app that gives players rankings in the game 👀

Where Should We Drop decides where you and your squad should land on Fortnite 🙌