Idea

In the summer, leaving home, I could not decide to wear sneakers or flip flops? The numbers on the thermometer did not say anything concrete, it was slurred outside the window. I thought that you can make a site that would show not only the weather, but also advise what to wear. He proposed the idea to a friend, he liked it and we immediately set to work. Andrey krevetka programmed and administered the server, I typeset and draw. The site was completed in four months.





We immediately decided that the project should not be faceless, we need a key character. Since the site we focused on the United 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 considered that the prefix “meteo-” is not widespread in America, “obameter” is slurred, but “ obama-weather.com ” is loud and well remembered.

Over time, new characters were added - they tried to be popular with disjoint audiences. They chose Dr. House, Angelina Jolie and Bender Rodriguez. Subsequently, they received a letter from a certain Andrew Chang from China, he prayed for Bruce Lee, and was ready to draw it with his own hand. We made Bruce Lee, who, however, turned out to be like Tsoi. But, judging by the reviews, the Chinese were satisfied. Itself turned out to be a certain polarization according to the styles of men's clothing: business style, sporty and casual. A variety of women's wardrobe - in the near future.

Mechanism

The mechanism of the site is as follows: we take weather information from the weather.com service, then our algorithm estimates the temperature, cloudiness, humidity and wind power - and sends data to the ObamaMama class, which dresses Obama by gluing whole JPEG from PNG layers.

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

The background of the heading and the plate with the temperature value change color depending on the value - from cold blue through gray at zero Celsius to hot orange. As you understand, we took this wonderful idea from Yandex.Weather, which we used before.

We also made a “zen” page, at the entrance to which the visitor's position is determined using GeoIP and, depending on the current weather, a message about it is displayed 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 default. After the launch of the site, we learned that there is a similar service with the weather for real men - thefuckingweather.com . In my opinion, it's fucking good.

And the last one is the 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 a list of suitable cities in response. Therefore, similar input works slowly. To solve the problem, we needed an internal list of cities and codes matching (for example: “Minsk, Belarus, BOXX0005”). Weather.com and weather.yahoo.com have the same list, and we found it freely available, but without a single US city. Therefore, I had to take the usual list of US cities and set up a script that accesses weather.com - and if the city is located, it saves the corresponding index. After a couple of days, 50,000 cities appeared in the database.
• We didn’t have a macbook, so Andrei first used a hackintosh to write an iPhone application. Moreover, we could not install it on our computers - their configuration was inappropriate. Unfortunately, there were no MacBook rents in Minsk, and we had no money to buy. Then we borrowed Acer with a hackintosh from a friend. And Andrei, as a real ninja-programmer, figured out Objective-C and Xcode in a week, a week later the application was almost ready, though one problem remained unresolved. A few more days - and we realized that this problem occurs precisely because of the hackintosh, it is not on the macbooks. I had to borrow money and buy a macbook. Which, incidentally, smelled nice of Chinese plastic.
• With the rights to use the characters we had no problems. As The Wall Street Journal wrote, “So far, the White House hasn't 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 to the AppStore, we were aware that we can use real people, but no characters. Therefore, in the version for the iPhone, we took a stick and a vicodin from House - so he became a simple man named Hugh Laurie. And, unfortunately, Bender was completely removed. However, Apple still refused, extensively referring to the fact that we ridicule public characters. At the same time, there are applications in the AppStore with cartoons of senators, there are games with Chuck Norris, and more. What exactly they did not like was not clear. Sit, guess. After reading the developer forums for the iPhone, we came to the conclusion that there are no certain patterns in what Apple considers a mockery. But at the same time, it became clear that the image of Obama 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 turned outin the appstore .

Low start

At the end of October, the site was advertised on Leprosy . We expected a reaction similar to the one that our acquaintances and friends had - two thirds liked it, a third grumbled. At Lepre, it seems everyone liked everything, which pleasantly surprised us. Immediately a wave of traffic went, but the site held on. In a couple of days, thanks to leprozers, we caught and solved a lot of problems, for which many thanks to them.

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

Then we received a letter from a CNN producer stating that the site is revolutionary, and five hours later they want to put a two-minute story about it in prime time. Fortunately, it turned out that Andrei’s sister is now in NY and lives 10 minutes from CNN - she agreed to give an interview. 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 it came to life and barely began to cope with traffic - there was not enough processor capacity to work with databases. Five hours later, the plot was repeated on International CNN and the site again fell into a coma for several minutes. How many visitors we lost - 50 thousand or half a million - we do not know.

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

Next wave went 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 passed, and we finally released iPhone apps . In addition, Valya markoffkin helped make a widget for android . You can use promo codes for free iPhone application download: 6ENY699LTX64, 6WLW39PF6XMK, F6FNTHAP9434, 4M6H97LLA4YA, KNKFW4EFWEN7.

What have we learned

• The seemingly naive way of assessing the success of the site in our case turned out to be quite accurate. We wondered this: if 2/3 of our friends consider the site interesting and threaten to use it, then 2/3 of visitors will be interested in the resource and throw a link to comrades. Strange, but that assessment worked.
• Evaluating our and other Internet endeavors, you can notice a pattern: basically those ideas whose essence is formulated in one sentence become successful. Whether GoogleWave will be an exception is very interesting.
• Of course, you need to be prepared for the worst - so as not to be upset with the full fakap, but you also need to be prepared for the best - so that cheap hosting does not fall with the CNN effect.
• It would be nice to do everything to the end and perfectly, and only then press the red button. So, having been late for a month with the release of the iPhone application, we lost a ton of potential buyers.
• When everything is already weighed and set to work - you need to stop listening to criticism. You won’t quit work anyway, and the only possible effect of criticism - enthusiasm will become less.

Further advancement

We appreciated 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, such a fact took place in their general biography .

After processing this information, we made a viral cartoon:



We are sitting, now, we are waiting for what will come of it.