Show HN: Spiral – A Reddit-inspired local message board app (opens in new tab)

That’s good info on the user experience side. We might be able to implement something that allows people to just select their location, but then we’d be concerned that people just fake their location.

I guess we’re doing a few things that help with the “Hello World” problem: having an adjustable radius, focusing on conversation threads that you can go back to, and we’re also working on launching at local events and working with event managers.

Would be great to some insights on what worked or didn’t work for you?

Honestly this is the first time we hear of PostGIS, as we mainly looked into NoSQL databases, due both to previous experience with MongoDB and the fact that we found some big services that have used it.. Curious, what have you found that PostGIS does better? Is it a preference for SQL vs NoSQL?

PostGIS is a mature and fantastic spatial database (extension), I can highly recommend it.

Thanks for the feedback. These are not easy product tradeoffs we’re trying to think through so we really appreciate the thoughts.

We’re thinking of having our own login in the future. Right now, creating our own login would force users to go through a longer flow. Also we’re considering adding a friends filter, and Facebook’s social feed is probably the best starting point for that.

Is there any sources of login you trust that you have your friends connection on?

Yeah requiring Facebook is a barrier. I'm not going to signup or reactivate my account just to use an app. Having your own registration system or at least some more options like Google or Twitter would be nice.

Thanks for the feedback on the Facebook login.

We don’t really want to use fake accounts, but we could have some admin account that has information that’s interesting and just be a “Spiral News” or “Spiral Events” account? Would that be something that you’d find interesting or is content most interesting if it comes from a user only?

dingdingdang, it's not the first app to use geo-data and we agree the uptake is going to be super important (especially uptake in one geographical area). I do think FB and other companies at it's core care mostly about your social graph vs. we're more concerned about what strangers or friends around you are doing. Facebook has "nearby friends" for example but doesn't give you any info on people who have similar interests around you.

Definitely a point we’re constantly evaluating and feedback is appreciated.

We think that by bringing some identity into the app there can be more useful interactions and bad behavior self-policed. We’re working off an assumption that people are, on the whole, pretty awesome, and we shouldn’t fall back on anonymous as the only way to engage seriously in the public sphere. What do you think? Would you add other social logins? Twitter?

We are using the Java Play framework for the REST API, MongoDB as our DB. MongoDB has geospatial index support that makes geo queries pretty efficient. For iOS, pretty standard Cocoa libraries... glad you think its responsive :) On Android, also pretty standard libraries.

We designed the client to be very light and do as much processing on the server and also are very careful to do as much asynchronous work as possible (networking a must)