Show HN: My weekend project, Flair -- Like a friendly reverse Pinterest thingy

9 points by akaalias 14 years ago | 6 comments

Hey all, just wanted to invite you to take a spin on this project I've been working on recently.

To give you a bit of context, I'm a Pinterest/Tumblr/Svpply user but found that it's all still sub-optimal. The experience of these, I guess 'social' things, is still always about "me, me, me": Pin things I like, post items I like, I want this and that etc. My point is, in my experience, this got boring relatively quickly. Plus, when I log in to Pinterest for example, it's this wall of sound of relatively (albeit nice looking) yet random things.

Anyways, a few weeks back, my roommate happened to have a bunch of her close friends over for a clothing-swap. Basically, everyone brings a bunch of clothes she doesn't wear any(more) and swaps it with someone in the room.

This is how it went down: One would pull out, say a skirt, and show it to the group. Within seconds - and I found this remarkable - the groupmind decided who should try it on. In 9 out of 10 cases this was an accurate assessment and the item was swapped, tried on and (with some Madonna playing in the background) presented to the group. All smiles all around :)

So, this got me thinking how important friends are for filtering out the noise and how strong their recommendation is. It's that moment, when a friend sees something in a store and says `This is so you!'.

Based on these two observations, I came up with what would become Flair. A game where friends find great things FOR each other.

What's there now is a bare-bones site ready for (in)validation. Note, that overall, this game is targeted towards women who are already using Pinterest, but I figured I'd show it to you anyways.

Here's what I invite you to do:

1. Think of a close friend and what you like doing/thinking/talking about together

2. Hop over to http://letsflair.com, check out the site

3. Unless you're averse to it, log in through Facebook (if you are, please don't bother commenting on it)

4. Start your Spree with your friend

5. Go and find awesome stuff for them!

There is a bookmarklet I highly recommend installing, it makes the process of adding stuff super simple.

tldr; Got bored with Pinterest, saw how friends are really good at recommending things to each other, built a game called Flair (http://letsflair.com) that mixes the two (and is actually a lot of fun)

sidcool 14 years ago |

TLDR; Hop over to http://letsflair.com

Do as directed.

akaalias 14 years ago | |

Thanks!

debacle 14 years ago |

I do a lot of the clothes shopping for my wife, so this could be a very useful tool.

Seems potentially very interesting. I have no interest in pinterest, but the inversion concept here seems very unique and could potentially be a lot of fun.

akaalias 14 years ago | |

Hi debacle, it makes sense, if you already do select clothes for your wife. Of course, you can always also just aggregate links in an email, but the game mechanics at Flair do make it fun indeed :)

bkyan 14 years ago |

You built this in a single weekend?

akaalias 14 years ago | |

Well, it was two weekends but, yeah, pretty much! Not to forget the giants on whose shoulders I stand on to make it: Rails, Heroku, gems like Paperclip, S3, Bootstrap. The list goes on and on and on...