Hackery, Math & Design

Steven Wittens i

Introducing Facing.me

Introducing Facing.me

A unique way to meet people

We've been sending out whispers for a while now, but it's finally out: a new web site called Facing.me. Coded and designed by Michael Holly, Ross Howard-Jones and myself, it promises a unique way to meet people online. This would be the point where the obvious question is dropped: wait, what… you built a dating site?

Sort of. Let me explain.

Having spent many years in the web world, we'd all gotten a bit complacent. The web has settled into its comfortable rhythms. Sites and applications can be modelled quickly and coded on your framework of choice. And nowadays, Web 2.0 cred comes baked in: clean URLs, semantic HTML, AJAX, data feeds, APIs, etc. Isn't this what we all wanted?

But the web continues to evolve, and giants are roaming the playground. Sites like Facebook and Twitter hold people's attention with surgical precision, while engines like Google answer your queries with lightning speed. Given that we've all slotted such services into our workflows and indeed lives, it seems only natural that 'indie' developers should keep up. We can't pretend that a 2000-era style web-page-with-ajax-sprinkles is the pinnacle of modern interactive design.

So we set out to try something different.

Facing.me website

A Guy Walks into a Bar...

If you've managed to score an invite, the first thing you'll see is the wall of faces that loads and fills the screen. The second thing you'll notice—we hope at least—is the lack of everything else.

The metaphor we kept in mind was the idea of walking into a bar, and looking around. If you see someone you like, you can go up to them and strike up a conversation. So that's exactly what the app lets you do, through video chat. You can pan around to see more people, and just keep going. If you're looking for something specific, you can filter your view with a simple "I'm looking for…" dialog.

As you mouse around, you can see who's online, and flip open their profile. If you want to strike up a video chat, it happens right there too. If the person is online, they'll see your request immediately in a popup and can choose to accept or decline after reviewing your profile. If they're offline, they'll see your request next time they visit.

To avoid missed connections, you can 'like' people you're interested in. You'll see (and hear) a notification pop up the moment they're online. You can keep the app open in a background tab and never miss a thing.

Aside from some minor social glue and a few fun little extras for you to discover, that's it. It's our twist on a minimally viable product if you will. Studies have shown that online matching algorithms are a poor predictor for how well people mesh in person. Until you meet face-to-face, you just don't know. We think direct, spontaneous video chat is a better first step rather than endless profile matching and messaging.

Polishing Bacon

But despite its minimalism, a big aspect of Facing.me is the effort and care we put into it. Our goal was to achieve a level of polish typically reserved for premium iPhone apps and bring it into the browser. We wrapped the whole thing in a crisp design, enhanced with tasteful web fonts. But most importantly, we sought to expose the app's functionality with as little interruption as possible. To do that, we layered on plenty of transitions driven by CSS3 and JavaScript, and stream in data and content as needed.

Based on previous work in custom animations—and bacon—we refined the approach of using jQuery as an animation helper for completely custom transitions. We tell jQuery to animate placeholder properties on orphaned proxy divs, and key off those animations with per-frame code to drive the fancy stuff.

facing.me animation example

As a result, we can have a photo grow a picture frame as you pick it up, and then flip it around to show a person's full profile. This careful choreography involves animating about a dozen CSS properties, including borders, shadows, margins and 3D transforms, all with custom expressions and hand-tuned animation curves. Similar transitions are used for lightbox dialogs.

Throughout all of this, the animations remain eminently manageable. We can interrupt and reverse them at any point, and run multiple copies at the same time, thanks to pervasive use of view controllers. Far from being a useless tech demo, it actually enables us to craft the user experience exactly the way we like it: being able to acknowledge user intentions with intuitive feedback no matter what's going on, and firing off new events and requests without worrying about the internal state. Gone are the fragile jQuery behavior soups of old.

The one downside is that only the newer browsers—i.e. Chrome, Safari and Firefox—get to see everything the way it was intended. And actually the performance in Firefox is still a bit disappointing. IE9 users will have to be satisfied with a crude 2D approximation until IE10 comes out.

Rapid Rails and Real-Time Node

To make all this work effectively on the server-side, we used a dual-mode stack of Rails and Node.js.

The Rails side houses the app's models and controllers, and provides an API for all the client-side JavaScript to do its job. Video chats are handled through Flash and routed through its built-in peer-to-peer functionality.

The node.js component acts as a real-time presence daemon which users connect to over socket.io. It's used to drive the status notifications and to coordinate the video chats. We can exchange any sort of notifications between users with a publish-subscribe model, opening up many interesting avenues for future development.

Overall, this approach has worked out great. Rails' ActiveRecord and the stack around it allowed us to build out functionality quickly and with just the right amount of necessary baggage. We made generous use of Ruby Gems to save time while still maintaining full control.

Node.js's event-driven model adds real-time signalling with no hassle. For the few cases where node.js needs to interface with the Rails database directly, we slot in some manual SQL to take care of that. For everything else, Rails and node.js exchange signed data through the browser.

Come Take it for a Spin

Finally, we also put our heads together and made a promo video, voiced by the lovely Tina Hoang:

Built in our spare time by just 3 guys in a virtual garage, we're pretty proud of the end result. We'd love for you to take it for a spin, so head over to facing.me and grab yourself an invite. There's a feedback form built-in, and any suggestions are welcome.

Discuss on Google Plus.

3D  CSS  JavaScript  Node.js  Rails  Social Media  Usability
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