Ripple

@jedmund - good thoughts, Justin. I too used to camp out on AIM at 3:30pm after school and IRC. I now limit the communities and communication tools I use to a select few (MessageMe now being my primary group chat). @Popcorn_Ryan's Popcorn Messaging (http://www.popcornmap.com/, posted here: http://www.producthunt.co/posts/442) is very similar to this. cc @carmeldea

Playing with this right now. First opinions: Excellent product idea, mediocre-to-okay execution. Context: I grew up in the 90s so I love chatrooms, forums, and all of that archaic internet communication technology. I also love geo-enabled stuff. This is perfect for me. Being able to make and find ad-hoc chatrooms around you is great. You can also link to them so you can let your friends who aren't in the area in on the fun. The design, however, is actually kind of tacky (despite having a designer). It's overly blurred, overly bouncy and a lot of the interactions are just one step too far beyond iOS standards. There are some good ideas in a lot of the interactions, but they're either buried, blurry or not polished enough. Still, I'm super impressed by this just being a (multiple) Sunday hackathon project and I'll probably see if I can get some friends using it.

Funny thing about this idea (which I keep seeing crop up) is that Jawed Karim (third co-founder of YouTube) started up Trepia 10+ years ago to do exactly this. We were talking about using our geo IP technology for his app (he had implemented our stuff at PayPal previously). Wisely they dumped this and did YouTube instead. :-)

seems well designed

I really like the idea and want to use it. Unfortunately, both Ripple and Popcorn are not available on my lovely Nexus 4 (only iOS for now) :(

@yuvals I really hate that too. I'm on a Cyanogenmod S3. the minute I see iOS only, I close the tab and don't even bother learning more.