Graffiti — an idea
a way to get more out of new places you visit
What: An app to view messages left by others or leave your own at specific places.
Why: Add helpful context or tips to a place you’re visiting to improve the experience at that place.
This concept has similarities to Echo. But as you read on, you’ll see how they could justify being two totally separate things.
The basic idea here is to give people that discovered something interesting, have specific uncommon knowledge about a place, or experienced a unique event the tools to share whatever with anyone else that happens upon that place. Sharing would come in the form of a single photo and very limited amount of text tagged with first name and city of residence.
Graffiti users would only be able to leave messages at their precise location, and view messages within a very small radius of their location.
It’s sort of like a photo guest book for everywhere and so much more.
Use Cases:
Situation: Standing in a 30 minute line at that internationally famous pastry place.
Situation: Picnic under that giant oak tree in the park near your house.
Situation: Standing outside La Segrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain, wondering if you should endure the 2 hour line.
Some key features:
• Filtering of photos especially from new users. This would be a challenging problem to solve, but very important. There would need to be a near 100% success rate in catching nudity or vulgarity before it reached the public.
• “Scratching” or basically down-voting unhelpful or low quality posts (or “Tags”) would allow the user base to manage its own content and give more active users another reason to open the app. Similarly, an up-voting mechanic would probably make just as much sense.
• Users can only have one Tag visible at a time in each place. Allowing users to Tag a place more than once would create a lot of noise and degrade the value of the content.
• Users are semi-anonymous with just first name and city of residence pulled from social networks. Complete anonymity would invite abuse. Complete identifiability would violate privacy.
• Notifications when a user is near a Tag would help drive engagement and adoption. You can’t rely on users to open their app and manually check if there are Tags nearby. Notifications would also need to smartly wait for the user to stop moving much faster than walking speed.
• The range from which a Tag can be viewed would need to be small enough that it doesn’t lose context but large enough that people can find them. In fact, it might be smart to alter the range slightly based on the volume of nearby Tags.
• Manually seeding tags in high traffic locations pre-launch would help give early adopters a good experience while the user base grew. The chicken and egg problem is always the most challenging part of launching these sorts of services.
• Choosing which Tags to show in busy areas would become an important problem to solve; taking into account recency, down/up votes and other metrics. The only way this app does well is if users can use it extremely quickly without having to filter through a lot of noise.
• Giving priority to friends’ Tags would help drive engagement. The first basic idea I had for this would be to simply hash (encode in a way it can’t be decoded) the user’s phone number and the phone numbers of all their contacts (if the user allows) to give a sort of ‘unique ID’ that can be used for comparison. Then store the hashed information with every Tag. This would allow for friends to identify one another but not expose any contact information to anyone, not even Graffiti’s servers.
This write-up is intentionally concise and not intended to be a ‘pitch’ for this concept. If you’d like more info or have questions, drop me an email!
technicallyrobert[at]gmail[.]com
About the author:
Robert is an entrepreneur obsessed with invention, 3D printing, and technology. He has founded and scaled companies in social media, and mobile gaming. He is conversational in several programming languages and loves working with truly talented developers and engineers. Robert now spends the majority of his time tinkering on his own projects that he hopes will eventually change the way we interact with technology.
