The Oatmeal and Clients From Hell have been mentioned. I'd submit 27bslash6[0] (of "Missing Missy" fame) as a drier take on the meme. Quite entertaining if the email chain is your thing.
https://hypothes.is/ - Maybe relevant to your interests. Very active project. Although IIRC it is scoped to people who use the service and not to your social graph. I follow the project on github and its very active. The volume of problems that they have to solve to make something like this work for users in potentially any environment is pretty astounding.
I'd actually be cool with just a daily ping of Fitbit (spitballing) with my caloric intake for the day and not even attempting to track exercise/burn. I totally get not wanting to track daily calories against exercise calories. It turns into this whole "workout to eat/eat to workout" thing, which is wholly counter productive considering the goals that fitness apps represent.
I do like the idea of a "push to fitbit" - but only at the end of the day, and without the ability to edit. One might track their foods a little differently if they saw they were 10 calories away from going over. ("Well, that sandwich didn't really have all too much of X on it")
I actually hadn't considered using this to track exercise or calorie burn. I like the idea of separating the two, and joining the data later to get (as close as you can get at least) an accurate representation of caloric I/O. Historically, tracking anything more than those two singular ultimate values (or even just one of them) results in a really bloated app that makes tracking way too complicated.
An interesting thing would be an exercise tracking app based on the principles presented here. UX 100% focused on data entry (which is by far the worst part of tracking this kind of data), and very little else. Making exercise tracking as simple as scribbling down onto your notepad on the bench between sets (or whatever your process is).
From there, you can take your calories burned as it relates to your workouts, and your caloric intake, and join them up in a way that makes sense to you. Whether its through a ping to your Fitbit profile or a batch update to MFP or even a blob of workout data over to Fitocracy for your badge fix (again, spitballing).
Taking a look around now - any plans to integrate with fitness trackers? I'd love to have this manage my diet and post my daily caloric intake to Fitbit. Right now I use MyFitnessPal and it submits to Fitbit, but tracking my diet in MFP is fairly cumbersome - although in fairness it is a very difficult problem to solve from the perspectives of design and UX.
Have a look at Code Triage if you haven't already. http://www.codetriage.com/ - I believe I found them here in a thread a while back. You'll get an open issue for projects you'd be interested in contributing to sent to your inbox daily. May be of some interest to you
Nice interview, I always enjoy reading his contributions on StackOverflow. I don't always understand what even the problem at hand is, but it's just a fascinating exercise to read some of his responses and the obscure facts behind them.
Science Fact: Jon Skeet cannot parse HTML using regular expressions [0]
Awesome effort and always great to see Atlanta on HN! Thanks so much for sharing this, can't wait to pick it up and give it a try. The demo was one of the best presentations I've seen in a while.
Minor nit - I went to check who was behind it and the https link in the footer hangs, http://dunktank.co works fine though
Confirming UI behavior in FF 29 on Linux. No audio output in Chromium but both use HTML5 Audio. Might take a crack at the UI bug later. Great demo and thanks so much for sharing!
For anyone who would like to work with Github but prefers svn. I can't personally speak to how well this works but it is available.
(OT: I first found out about svn support from a presentation by Zach Holman, I believe you can find it here: http://zachholman.com/talk/git-github-secrets/ Some interesting bits in there. )
Great experiences on both, clean design and nice user experience from homepage to chat.
One small bug that I noticed: titlebar notifications in Opera didn't fire on new chats (regardless whether tab was background or not), and in iOS, titlebar notification flashed "New!" even after acknowledging and responding to chat. Persisted until logout.
Agreed, I think ideas like these and @pedalpete's hint at making a play commercially lends to packaging this up into a LaaS (ha!) offering and putting a Kickstarter campaign in front of that. Depending on your costs, needs, and some more feedback, you might offer some custom solutions/packages to backers on the higher-end.
+1 on Student associations being restricted. If I'm not mistaken, GSU has these sorts of restrictions [0] - although it couldn't hurt to get some grassroots support that isn't necessarily monetary
0: I did some web development for a student association at GSU and provided some basic tech support for a symposium.
There are plenty of people smarter and more talented than me on here - hoping that your post reaches them because I can see quite a bit of potential here. That said, I'm just a web dev with no marketing experience so, a grain of salt before proceeding.
Got a look at the Pong demo and the way people stopped off for a go at it shows that at the core of it, you've got something interesting that people enjoy (presumably) because they can get their hands on it. The dude going head to head with himself on two thumbsticks seemed to really enjoy himself even without P2. (side note: chomping down a chicken biscuit and heading outside for a game of brickwall pong sounds like a fun way to end a night)
I think the main obstacle would be packaging the idea into something people can get behind. The novelty of it is enough to get people passing by on board for a quick game but I think there's a lot more that could be done with your idea, as pointed out in your list.
Another thing that comes to mind would be providing custom promotional solutions to folks looking to market something. The one thing I can think of right now is Alternate Reality Games - a clue flashed on a building at a specified time and date that must be deciphered by participants, or a countdown that hops from building to building (spanning cities?) leading to an announcement, etc.
I'm not quite sure how you'd package it (LAAS - Lasers as a Service?) so that people could get behind the tech enough to fund its infancy while communicating the bigger picture and potential.
At the end of my comment I suppose I've successfully said nothing you didn't already know, but wanted to lend my support and say that this is something I'd definitely back. Also, great to see local talent.
Best of luck to you and hopefully some of those smarter folks will be able to help out more. Be sure to Show HN if you end up on Kickstarter!
[0] http://27bslash6.com/p2p2.html (I believe this one touches on a similar theme)