If I want to chat with people nearby, I would go up, come to them and start chatting with them. In person.<p>...just kidding, I am an asocial person, I don't speak with other people.
I thought they were related to Ripple Labs (<a href="https://ripple.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ripple.com/</a>) and the Ripple cryptocurrency due to the recent Bitcoin and cryptocurrency craze; however it seems they are unrelated and just happened to hit upon the same name for their chat app.
"Meet like-minded people". Where like-minded means "uses the same OS as me".<p>Sorry, couldn't resist. Congratulations on shipping. It looks like a great utility.
WeChat (by Tencent) has similar feature, but you must first add people to friend list then chat.<p>However this raise an interesting topic:<p>How to securely verify that a device is indeed nearby and not spoofing it?<p>You can spoof your GPS coordinates easily on Android at least.
I thought about this idea myself. But then I noticed there were tons of good apps doing exactly this. This stopped me from implementing it, because i would not be "first app in the market", because I woudnt have the unfair advantage of being first.<p>(yobong, palringo, whoshere)
You guys should check out Yobongo. A similar location-based chat app which has since closed down post-seed round. You might like to see what worked / didn't work for them.
This app makes me think of Popcorn..<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popcorn-messaging/id718416705?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popcorn-messaging/id71841670...</a><p>I wonder if more people are using Ripple because so far I haven't had much conversations with Popcorn.
I've been using the beta since it came out and have loved the way the app has grown. I'm really interested in seeing its potential in conferences or large towns.<p>It's small and well focused, they've opened some code from it and seem to be doing a good job of being active in chat. Give it a try.
I'm not sure about the timeline who released first, but there is popcorn chat app which allows to chat with people who are within one mile from you it was featured here a while back. The functionality seems to be the same less or more.
Reminds me of Trepia which tried a similar thing only on desktops, 10 years ago. It died, unsurprisingly. I had been wondering when someone would revive the idea.