My family has had so much fun sharing Wordle scores together. We are a competitive group when it comes to games and trivia.

So, a few weekends ago I made a fun app where we could challenge each other with a different word each day.

The app is built on trusty ol’ Ruby on Rails, uses Twilio for authentication and notifications, and deployed on Heroku (still the GOAT for weekend projects).

You are welcome to join and even play our/my words (my profile is here wordgame.wtf/innonate) but really it’s most fun just to assemble your own crew (family/friends) and get to challenging each other!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30817514

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

And as for the recommendation accept payment for the S3 service, it's something we've considered – likely a choose your own dollar amount thing. In the meantime, feel free to send any money you want to nate@picturelife.com :)

As for using other storage options – at this point we don't feel like we can provide as high quality a service using other storage systems. S3 works well because our architecture is oriented around it, and housed within the same network, allowing us to process, serve, and analyze photos efficiently. Using Dropbox, for instance, would introduce huge amounts of latency and instability in this process.

Custom S3 buckets are great for us because they don't cost us a lot to support, not many people ever want them (relative to the general public), but it allows us to do something awesome for the people who do want them.

I'm curious about your experience about supporting other storage options as well – we only do S3 because we know we can give a really high quality experience with them and it fits in nicely with all our processing steps. Complexity aside, I'd be concerned that something like Dropbox, for instance, woudl have high latency with their API and then make Picturelife seem slow.

As a standalone product they can focus on making the best product for photos vs fitting photos into a failed social platform.

Anyway, you all did an amazing job and I'm glad you shared this post. Never saw it back when you first posted it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8005396

Points: 11

# Comments: 2

As for what's "So easily," it's not just about money. What I mean is this... if something's not working, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. What you'll see from Picturelife in the next few months is us hustling like crazy, putting out major releases and taking risks. "So easily" to me is trying one thing, seeing that it's not working, and then taking someone's offer to make the pain go away. It's like watching someone get dunked underwater and not fight to get free. If someone wants to get free, you could tell, because you'd see a lot of splashing and fighting to survive.

So "so easily" to me means fighting. And that's what we're doing, and that's what you're going to see us do a lot of from now and into the future.

We support Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. And then imports from Dropbox, Facebook, Smugmug, Flickr, Instagram, Foursquare, and a few more...

It's a bit more complicated than that, though, and management always has the most control. For instance, it's because of this mentality we're not just shopping ourselves around for little exits -- and so offers like these never have to be decided on. We also chose Spark as a VC because we knew they wouldn't want a small outcome either. They invested in Twitter, Tumblr, and more. We, and they, are looking to build something big and meaningful. A VC like Spark is going to have a lot more patience than some other VCs -- and so it increases our chances of staying independent.

As for the OMGPOP question, I was never a part of it. My co-founder Charles Forman founded it and left the company a year before its sale... so he could start Picturelife with me and Jacob. As it turns out, 3 of our core team members were also at OMGPOP and later joined us at Picturelife, after the company sold to Zynga.

Like I said, as we take another look at pricing (we are in the middle of it now) we will think about what to do on a more formal level.

Thanks for the feedback.