Idea

In the summer, leaving home, I could not decide whether to wear sneakers or flip flops? The numbers of the thermometer did not say anything concrete, it was unclear about the window. I thought that you can make a site that would show not only the weather, but also advised what to wear. I suggested an idea to a friend, he liked it and we immediately set to work. Andrei krevetka programmed and administered the server, I installed and painted. The site was made in four months.


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Immediately decided that the project should not be impersonal, you need a key character. Since we focused on the site on the States, we chose the most popular person there - the president. Accordingly, the name was tied to it. There were variants of “meteobama.com” and “obameter.com”, but we decided that the prefix “meteo-” in America is not common, “obameter” is vague, but “ obama-weather.com ” is sonorous and well remembered.

Over time, they added new characters - they tried to make these popular people among non-overlapping audiences. They chose Dr. House, Angelina Jolie and Bender Rodriguez. Subsequently, we received a letter from a certain Andrew Chang from China, he prayed for Bruce Lee, and was ready to draw it himself. We made Bruce Lee, who, however, turned out to be similar to Tsoi. But judging by the reviews, the Chinese were satisfied. It turned out to be some polarization in the style of men's clothing: business style, sporty and casual. A variety of women's wardrobe - in the near future.

Mechanism

The site’s mechanism of operation is as follows: we take weather information from the weather.com service, then our algorithm evaluates the temperature, cloudiness, humidity and wind power and gives the data to the ObamaMama class, which Obama puts on, sticking together a whole JPEG from the PNG layers.

In addition, we translate the dry weather.com data into human language. For example, “am rain” is converted to “rainy morning on monday”. The same is with the wind: little-understood numerical values ​​are transformed into a distinct “moderate wind” or “gentle wind”. Understandable, however, only for those who know English.

The background of the header and the plate with the temperature value change color depending on the value - from cold blue through gray at zero C to hot orange. This wonderful idea, as you understand, we borrowed from Yandex. Weather, which we used before.

We also made a “zen” page, at the entrance to which, using GeoIP, the visitor’s position is determined and, depending on the current weather, the message about it is shown in simple human language: “Now the weather is hot”, or, for example, “Now the weather is almost winter. ” The page is simple, light, well suited as a default. After launching the site, we learned that there is a similar weather service for real men - thefuckingweather.com . In my opinion, it's fucking good.

And the last - night temperature for today. When you hover over it, the image of the current set of clothes changes to night.

Problems

• Drop-down list of cities: sites that take weather from weather.com, send him the first letters of the city entered by the user, and receive in response a list of suitable cities. Therefore, this type of input is slow. To solve the problem, we needed an internal list of correspondences of cities and codes (for example: “Minsk, Belarus, BOXX0005”). The list of weather.com and weather.yahoo.com is the same, and we found it in free access, but without a single US city. Therefore, we had to take a regular list of state cities and set up a script that refers to weather.com - and, if the city is located, keep the corresponding index. A couple of days in the database appeared 50,000 cities.
• We did not have a macbook, so for the writing of the iPhone application, Andrei first used the hakintosh. Moreover, we could not install it on our computers - their configuration was inappropriate. Unfortunately, there were no rentals for MacBooks in Minsk, and we did not have the money to buy. Then we lent Acer with a hackintosh from a friend. And Andrei, like a real ninja programmer, figured out Objective C and XCode in a week, another week later the application was almost ready, although one problem remained unresolved. A few more days - and we realized that this problem is taking place precisely because of the hackintosh, it is not on MacBooks. I had to borrow money and buy a macbook. Which, by the way, pleasantly smelled like Chinese plastic.
• With the rights to use characters, we did not have problems. As The Wall Street Journal wrote, “So far, the White House has not attempted to block Obama-Weather from operating. Requests for comment from the White House were not answered by press time. ” However, when submitting an iPhone application for review in the AppStore, we were aware that we can use real people, but not characters. Therefore, in the version for the iPhone, we took the stick and Vicodin from House - so he became a simple man named Hugh Laurie. And, unfortunately, Bender was removed altogether. However, Apple still refused, referring at length to the fact that we are making fun of public characters. At the same time, there are applications in the AppStore with cartoons of senators, there are games with Chuck Norris and so on. What exactly they did not like was not clear. Sit down, guess. After reading the developer forums for the iPhone, we came to the conclusion that there were no definite laws that Apple would consider a mockery - no. But at the same time it became clear that the Obama image in the AppStore is taboo. As a result, we changed the name of the application to “what2wear”, changed Obama to Ashton Kutcher, and changed the names of the characters to the names of clothing styles. After another 10 days, the application appeared in the AppStore .

Low start

In late October, the site was advertised on the Lepre . We expected a reaction similar to the one that our acquaintances and friends had - two thirds liked it, a third grumbled. On the Lepra, everyone seemed to like everything, which pleasantly surprised us. Immediately went a wave of traffic, but the site kept. For a couple of days, thanks to the leprosy operators, we caught and solved many problems, for which we thank them very much.

A day later, a lot of traffic came from the US, letters, articles were thrown down, the link went on Twitter and Facebook.

Then we received a letter from the producer of CNN with the statement that the site is revolutionary, and in five hours they want to put a two-minute story about him in prime time. Fortunately, it turned out that Andrey's sister is now in NY and lives 10 minutes from CNN - she agreed to be interviewed. That day, by the way, was her birthday.

In general, we gave CNN all the necessary information - the video went , the site fell. Ten minutes later he came to life and barely began to cope with the traffic - there was not enough processor capacity to work with databases. Five hours later, the story was repeated by International CNN and the site again fell into a coma for a few minutes. How many visitors we lost - 50 thousand or half a million - we do not know.

We immediately wrote off with the hosting and bought two additional balls, where we put copies of the site and screw it with the help of round robin. Plus, the bases were taken to a separate server to a friend. Everything worked. Attendance held about 60,000 visitors per day.

Then came a wave of publications in other publications - " The Wall Street Journal ", " NBC Chicago ", " The L Magazine ", " The Gazette ", " Rambler ", "Izvestia", a number of local newspapers. The site was shown on Chinese, German and Belarusian television - in general, people became interested.

A month has passed, and we finally released an application for iPhone . In addition, Valya markoffkin helped to make a widget for an android .



You can use promotional codes to download iPhone apps for free: 6ENY699LTX64, 6WLW39PF6XMK, F6FNTHAP9434, 4M6H97LLA4YA, KNKFW4EFWEN7.

What we have learned

• The seemingly naive way to evaluate the success of a site in our case turned out to be quite accurate. We figured out this way: if 2/3 of our friends find the site interesting and threatening to use it, then 2/3 of the visitors will be interested in the resource and throw the link to their comrades. Strange, but such an assessment worked.
• Evaluating our and other Internet initiatives, one can notice a pattern: basically, those ideas are successful, the essence of which is formulated in one sentence. Will GoogleWave be an exception - very interesting.
• Of course, you have to be prepared for the worst - in order not to get upset with a full bundle, but you also need to be prepared for the better - so that cheap hosting does not fall during the CNN effect.
• It would be nice to do everything to the end and ideally, and only then press the red button. So, having lingered for a month with the release of an iPhone application, we lost a lot of potential buyers.
• When we’ve already weighed everything and got to work, you need to stop listening to criticism. You still won't quit your job, and the only possible effect of criticism is that there will be less enthusiasm.

Further progress

We evaluated three facts:

1. The most popular person on Twitter is Ashton Kutcher . He has 4 million readers.
2. His girlfriend, Demi Moore , made the following video message .
3. In addition, in their general biography there was such a fact .

After processing this information, we made a viral cartoon:



Sit, now, wait, what will come of it.