I tried reloading and it was indeed a random name. Although, not sure why they did this, people could very easily be turned off from using this because they didn't see the hover text.
In the interests of getting this thing shipped we decided to hide the text with CSS, but replacing it with an SVG is at the top of our priority list :)
I'd think that people would choose the professional connections they trust rather than their stoner roommate from college, but there's only so much hypothesising we can do without real people trying it out!
I'm not a huge fan of Bob Marley either, but I know what you mean. It could be your friend who is, say, a prominent Rubyist tweeting a joke about PHP as you're applying to Facebook. We'll see how that plays out, but I'd think that an 'old school' job reference would have the same risks.
The idea is that you'd share the link privately just with people you really trust, so it's unlikely someone you don't trust would add their recommendation. I agree - you probably need to be able to remove any recommendations that you don't think are appropriate...
The same correlation (or guilt by association) could be made by the people you follow on Twitter or your Facebook friends or the people who endorse you on LinkedIn.
In the case of HireMyFriend we put in Twitter auth as a precursor to building a 'secretly DM your friends' feature that hasn't shipped yet.
That said - with an app based around your anonymity but the social presence of your friends & professional contacts I think this would work well for a developer without a social media presence. We'll consider adding email/password sign up in the coming weeks — I'm sure you appreciate how busy launches are :)
As a complete tangent I'm presently looking for jobs literally on the other side of the world, in a country where I know nobody (so I guess I'm not your target market?). The site used most often there is SEEK. On their own I doubt services like yours would integrate with SEEK or similar smaller international jobs sites. However I'd love to see some kind of social networking standard take off where once you've integrated with say LinkedIn, integrating with someone like SEEK would literally be as simple as swapping a couple of API keys. It'd be even better if the integration could be bidirectional. That is, SEEK could decide to integrate with HMF or vice-versa and whatever features would just "magically" show up on both sites so long as both approved the integration.
Shit, that's kind of like a meta-friend request. "Hey there! My social network wants to be friends with your social network!" Weird.
I obviously can't answer for the author, but in my own endeavors I've used social auth as a quick fix and said "eh, if it takes off I'll go back and do it right." Chances are the subsegment of his market without a social presence is small.
Authentication and marketing are big hairy problems, especially for people embarking upon small side projects. Social auth can help with both with remarkably small effort on the dev's part.
Edit: Also if you'd really like to give it a shot, having a twitter account doesn't require you to use said twitter account.
Edit 2: Changed tone - "whether you like it or not" is way too confrontational of a phrase to use there - I apologize if I sounded like I was attacking.
1: There seems to be a social auth holy war going on. Your comment was respectful, so please don't think I mean you when I say this, but there's too damn many people saying the equivalent of "OHHH you shitbag! I hate the Facebook/Twitter/other! Why would you force me to have that in order to have your service?" The truth is that it wasn't meant as a personal slight - your opinions just fell on the wrong side of an early-stage tradeoff.
What about google?
Very minor concern: I see "Hu" instead of "Hi" in 'Hire', because of the script. I didn't see it on first glance, but when I navigated to the demo profile I did, and now I see the U shape much more strongly than the I or R, and it's bugging me. :)
btw if you're interested in that kinda thing the logo is based on a heavily reworked Candy Script by the amazing Sudtipos http://sudtipos.com/fonts/94
This has been a crazy rush to get the product launched as-is (and there's a whole bunch of hypotheses we want to validate right now anyway), but working more on the employer side is definitely something that we're excited to explore in the very near future :)
Talking out of my arse but could you use the list of "friends" to get a rough idea of who the candidate is? Amongst a given set of friends there may only be one Rubyist with JavaScript and Karate skills...
Selfishly, I've always worked in London/San Francisco where almost everyone I know is either a designer, front-ender, Rubyist, or an awkward mix of the above, and everyone knows each other.
I'm not sure how this would work out in more specialised disciplines, other industries or other locations, but the only way to find out is to see how people use it :)
Maybe next time, though? :)
Don't become LinkedIn's "endorsement" system. I'm not an employer, but I think it has ended up losing it's meaning (people just endorse each other willy nilly or a scratch-my-back-and-I-will-scratch-yours kind of thing) -
I'm thinking one way to escape this whole is finding a way to enforce/emphasize talking up friends that you have personally WORKED with for extended periods of time, to get more honesty
As an employer, I'd love to be able to sign up and have your system DM me any time there's someone in my area looking for a job. Heck I'd even pay a small fee for the service!
