Over the past couple of months or so, me and a friend were working on an idea, and we kept the details of the same mostly to ourselves. It was called “Connr”, a shortened version of “connector”. (Update – we’re using the name for soemthign else now.)
The whole idea was to connect a visitor to another random visitor and let them speak. It was a good idea, and there wasn’t really anybody else who had an idea like this. We were planning to launch early next month on an amazon EC2 server.
Today, I found out about “Omegle“, a service that does exactly what ours does. It received coverage from many major weblogs, including XKCD’s, thus making our product completely redundant even if we do decide to launch it. While our product was more impressive on the backend, and we already figured out how to solve some of the problems that they are facing, they were first – and in this industry that’s all that counts.
While we are terribly disheartened by our idea not making it into the big league, we learnt a lot, and we’re glad that an independent student like us, rather than a faceless corporation got in on this idea.
I would like to wish Leif Brooks, creator of Omegle the best of luck for a successful application.
Not just you. I was working on it as my e-Business course project.
Are your stopping all development on the project? Maybe you could take some time to add a few unique features and then launch it. Yeah, I know that is like a generic suggestion but I believe you must have some ideas in your head that you might want to integrate into Connr.
Naveen: What an idea sir-ji. I told you I was working on this. You could’ve joined us or something and then claimed the work to be your own. On the bright side, if you’d released your product before or after our hypothetical release, I’d beat you up – no fancy way around it.
Anomit: Project’s on hold for endsems. I think I’ll take some time off and build clientside applications on Mono. Client applications rule – no javascript, no CSS, no fucking IE6.
:O
I hope that comment was in light vein. I remember you telling me about it. And taking it up as a course project was not my idea. One of my client worked on such an app for an intern. He just wanted to integrate it into a website.
Err, make that “One of my friends worked on such an app during his intern”
Omegle sucks. Reasons? 1) Stupid frat boys looking for a cheap laugh introduce themselves as 16 f fin or 21 f swe etc etc 2) More often than not you will find yourself talking to a guy who prefers saying ni hao instead of hi. 3) Not very stable 4) Whats the difference between this and some random IRC chatroom or even the older anonymous AOL chatrooms?
Well i agree with Nikhil…. Omeagle dosent really makes any “intellectual” sense to me! Rather it looks kinda very gross and under thought idea.
@Admin can you be more specific about what are the innovations that you want to bring through your application which you deem similar to Omeagle!
teh interwebs is big enough for two similar services. when they can have a google AND a yahoo AND guruji.com AND various others, this is no big deal… do give it a shot. do remember yahoo came before google
Well big or small every application needs the patience an innovativeness of a developer. For cool mobile application keep an eye on the 2009 Calling All Innovators contest (http://www.callingallinnovators.com/).
Do u think perhaps u could make one for the blackberry storm 9530?
Don’t stop. Try to make the one with video chat and publish it to the web.