I like the concept but I think it's missing something to get the user interested in the first place. HN has content I like from people I don't know. Twitter has random soundbites from people I can choose to follow. It looks like your app drops the interesting content part of the social-networking thing and the interesting tweeter part of the twitter soundbite machine so I end up being asked to be interested in completely random soundbites from completely random people. The example of the leaderboard on your post would be an unfortunately accurate prediction of the kind of content I'd expect. You really should try to get more interesting content on your sample leaderboard.<p>1. Maybe I'd be more interested if I knew or in some way could identify with the people sharing quotes. So what about names being visible. Or:<p>2. Maybe I'd be more interested still if there was a way to filter by group. Christians might be interested in random quotes from other self-styled Christians. Atheists might be interested in god-debunking soundbites. Technophiles might be interested in "android v. apple" slugfests. And so on.<p>3. Maybe I'd also be interested if event-specific or news-specific quote voting were possible. E.g., I'm at a baseball game and I can follow people from all over the park sharing observations about players and hotdogs. Or there's an earthquake, and I can follow stuff about that. In this respect, you'd be doing something that makes Twitter interesting rather than just the thing that makes it boring, and the voting would be a real addition.<p>Caveat: complete novice here, in awe of people who can so readily conceive and execute an idea like this.
I think this is a great idea. I wish I would have thought of this myself, it is about time that someone came up with a democratic social networking utility. I think that this could be expanded to several other topics. As far as your memcache issue goes, you may want to ask people more familiar with app engine to see if they could be of assistance.
I don't know what the general percentage is, but for example on reddit, most people are consumers or lurkers, and its a small percentage to get people to participate. So I would possibly implement something for so called karma people, a leader board, or showcase the user name more, to give people the vanity that apps like yours need to provide.
How did you do user accounts/ authentication? Did you make each user have an account or did you use the phone's ID or something? (Not an Android developer, just curious)