In December 2010, my good friend Wesley and I realized that we had an excess of interesting ideas, but a lack of techincal skill. Instead of trying to find some poor programmer who would put stuff together for us, we decided to just start making projects in our free time as college freshmen.
Our friend Dan, who we met after he hacked pleasematch.me, helps us out too. And so does Jesse, who just graduated and is the "old wise man" in our little group.
If you'd like to know more or have any advice for us, please shoot me an email!
Here's what we've done so far:
readstream -- a social news reader along the lines of Instapaper and Flipboard. In it's current incarnation, it simply goes through one's twitter feed and presents a focused stream of articles relevant to a twitter user. We hacked this together in a weekend before getting the chance to interview at Y Combinator, and we ended up getting to #1 on Hacker News, attracting a retweet from Fred Wilson, and even getting plugged on Techcrunch in a pretty intense couple of days.
wheremyfriends.be? -- a Google Maps/Facebook API mash-up that immediately got tons of traction (over 55,000 friends "mapped" in the first 20 hours). Try it out for yourself! It creates a sweet little animated map of your Facebook friends all around the world. Made the front page of Hacker News.
UPDATE: We got featured on Mashable, CNN.com, and even interviewed on Seattle's King 5 evening news. Currently at 30,000+ users and 3.25 million friends "mapped." Very exciting.
tasteplug.com -- a simple micro-blogging solution for media. Share and recommend the movies, books, games, etc. you've recently experienced. Pulls from the Amazon and Facebook APIs to create a profile and autopopulate your 'plugs'. Add things that look interesting to your 'list', and 'endorse' your friends' picks.
UPDATE: We massively changed tasteplug, and now it's an SMS-based app that recognizes song keywords and saves songs on an online list, allowing previews and with download links to iTunes and Amazon. Check out our write-up in Twilio's official blog and before/after shots below.
the grim tweeper -- a neat little tool that allows you to clean up your twitter stream by eliminating the twits you'd rather not be following. This one went pretty viral and got written up in Time's Techland blog and a more in-depth profile on Geekwire.
pleasematch.me -- a much more broad remake of our first viral site, PennMatch. PennMatch.com got 2,000 unique users and over 200,000 image hits in the first 24 hours, and this was our attempt to make a fun match-up game for all schools.
favoritething.me -- a Valentine's Day attempt at a viral app. You can set up a simple profile and pass it around to your friends, who can (either anonymously or logged-in) post their 'favorite thing' about you. Inspired by formspring.me and threewords.me. Got to the front page of Hacker News and Mark Bao himself gave us some tips on redesigning it.
aretheychamps.com -- during the Super Bowl, we decided it would be cool to make a little simple app in the vein of isitraining.in. So we coded this in under an hour and it ended up getting tons of hits!
