Well you will need to tag your content for preferences. On account creation you do a questionnaire. So that is now in a database. The you tie your app into the location services. That would ping back and everything in "range" would be tagged and made available in the apps offer screen. With a single notification of offers in your area. I would not suggest using another service as your transport as that can get your Data banned. On Jul 30, 2014 12:29 AM, "David Schwartz" wrote: > I realize this is totally OT, but I thought folks might have fun > discussing it, and I'm guessing you'll have some great insights to share. > > Basically, I have an idea for something that is a real-time notification > system that takes advantage of geo-tagged messages that are intended for > people "near-by", meaning within a 10-mile radius or so. > > People will send out short geo-tagged messages using our mobile app, and > if the app is running on your mobile device, then it will pick up the > messages and determine whether to alert you or not based on your location > and some other criteria. > > For something tangible, think of a system where a business would announce, > say, free pizza at their Rural and University location for the next 20 > minutes. (Again, over-simplified, but that's the essence of the messaging, > and how low-bandwidth it would be.) > > It NEEDS to be a dedicated app, not a plugin for something like FB or some > other social media platform. > > How would you approach the messaging for this? Note that if the idea > takes off, we're talking about O(6) to O(8) numbers of apps running, > anywhere in the world. > > One thing that comes to mind for me is to use Twitter as a transport > mechanism and implement a simple messaging protocol on it that uses > hashtags. It could be overkill, and possibly also not consistent with > Twitter's TOS. Just a thought. > > How else might you construct some way to broadcast short messages that are > received by a large number of users in fairly short order? (ie., less than > a minute). > > Also, as I mentioned, there is a "locality" effect that's implicit in this > application, as well as "timeliness". So the further someone is from where > a message originates, the less relevant it is. At some point, say, over 10 > miles, they're likely to be 100% irrelevant and be filtered out. > > (Using the above "free pizza" announcement, if you're at the Scottsdale > Air Park, you really don't care. But a wine-tasting at a bar near the Air > Park would definitely get delivered to you.) > > So we could broadcast each announcement message to everybody (all current > listeners) in real-time (like what Twitter would do) and let the > client-side filter out the irrelevant messages (around 99.99%). > > Or we could reduce that bandwidth by having clients update the server > periodically (eg., every 5 minutes) with their location, then for each > announcement, a server would locate clients within a reasonable radius > based on their last reported position and only notify them directly through > a push notification of some sort; the clients would still do some > filtering, but this would reduce incoming traffic considerably. > > I'm not sure which is worse: a server updating a huge number of clients in > near real-time, or a huge number of clients updating the server with their > geographical location every 5 minutes or so. > > Or, an alternative is for the clients to poll the server every 15-30 > seconds, but this seems even worse in terms of traffic. (Althought this > approach is probably ok if we used an existing platform like Twitter.) > > Any thoughts? > > -David > > > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss >