announcing playdo.pe for NYC + iOS!

I've been kind of quiet lately and that's because I've been working on a new startup called playdo.pe.

We are finally in the app store after months of hard work. What started as a crappy little foursquare experiment has grown to something really unique that I can't wait to show you.

When I first moved to NYC I had launched MeepMe, which was a very low-tech hyperlocal game you could play at bars to anonymously text people. We had stickers, tablets, and projectors and, not to mention, models. The goal was simply to take a nervous habit of ours: constantly checking our phones, and turn it into a game that brought people closer wherever they were. It could not scale.

So I began to teach myself how to code and messed around with a lot of APIs, namely Foursquare's. I thought: what better way to instantly solve the "ghosttown" problem of local social services than to use local public data?  I tried to aggregate strangers off of Foursquare and rate them against each other in a Facemash-like manner. Foursquare then shut off access to non-friends on their API and I started polling public twitter checkins as a proxy. I then realized that sending tweets to strangers saying that someone thought they were hot was not converting well. So I tried games. I used twitter + a crappy little HTML5 sporcle-like trivia game as a means of onboarding nearby people. The goal was to have them interact without having to download an app or sign up for a service (well, the challenger needed it). That didn't work so well either, and Twitter shut off default mobile notifications from accounts like mine that you weren't following. It became clear that there was no easy way to frictionlessly get nearby people interacting with each other online and subsequently offline. I needed my own location platform, chat system, games, and notifications. It was time to pony up and go native.

So here we are. I started building a backend API in December and then linked up with my cofounder Israel Zalmanov to turn it into a reality. What we have is not just a game, it's a social experience that will hopefully spread to many cities soon. playdo.pe runs in the background and without much battery drain, constantly scanning people around you who may be of interest. We send you a notification when you or someone else comes within close range, and you can see this person's carefully curated offline presence that they've created specifically for you to view in this context. In addition, you can see how you might be connected to them through various graphs. We show 2nd-3rd degree Facebook contacts, followers you follow on Twitter, and shared phone contacts of this person. Then comes the fun part. You can flip over this person's profile and find an appropriate trivia game to challenge them to. Afterward, you have 24 hours to chat. We also recommend that the loser buys the winner a drink.

With our small dozen beta testers in NYC, we have been able to play many games at an 800 meter radius, or roughly ~10 NYC blocks. As we onboard users this week the radius will begin to shrink. We're really thrilled to have something that combines social, local, and gaming. Games are a huge tool that we believe will make the world a better place. Our goal in a realtime, anxiety-ridden, digiphrenic society is to connect people in the real world using the devices they already love (and hate). Without ambient technology that works ubiquitously and quietly, we will no doubt live in a dystopian future. Without real offline interactions we will start to look more Orwellian than authentic, existential humans.

We've got just the medicine for you if you so happen to be in the city. Take it. It's dope.

Beer in a fortnight or a mutual unfollow...

Just about two years ago I wrote about how services online are enabling people to easily find others with similar interests. After Facebook's emergence as the dominant graph of real-world friends, asymmetric networks like Quora and Twitter filled a void that Facebook could and would never solve– finding interesting strangers to converse with and learn from.

I think we're at the point where there are enough data points for the average internet user to get a real sense of the people and movements that interest them. The real key now is taking that data, and making something useful of it. On the social front, I think the biggest problem is a lack of real-world connection. It's unhealthy to relegate conversations with people to a screen. It's even more unhealthy to continue to simply ignore the fact that we know a lot about someone before we are introduced to each other in the real world. I think these are the growing pains of social media. It is still in its awkward puberty stage. I have plenty of bizarre anecdotes from friends and personal experience on this front.

Lately I've been working on playdo.pe, a new social game that confronts these problems firsthand and solves them by adding a game layer on top of location-based technologies we have all become fed up with because most lack context. In a few months, there will be a fully native iOS release. In the meantime, check out a hack I made last week: challenge.playdo.pe. It's not mobile. It's starting at the basics by uncovering all the people who you followed on twitter that followed you back in the same metropolitan area as you. It's pretty interesting to see.

The challenge is a bold one. Meet up with these people within two weeks (a fortnight) for beers or coffee, or agree to mutually unfollow each other on twitter. Check it out and let me know what you think. I personally believe it's playful and attempts to solve a wildly interesting social problem.

The Stranger Economy

I live in New York City and as much as NY’ers act like people should F off and leave each other alone, we [people of the world] need each other now more than ever. Whether we want to accept it or not we all share the same planet and therefore, the same responsibilities. 

As the economy tightens, strangers have opened their homes to each other on sites like Airbnb, carpooled using rideshare apps, and have even learned to make a living by fixing each others’ broken cell phone screens at each others’ homes. The combination of strangers with ratings and social data isn’t purely a collaborative consumption revolution, but rather a stranger revolution. People are becoming more at ease dealing 1-on-1 with people as opposed to larger companies to fulfill certain needs.

Think of how many random strangers you encounter on a daily basis at work, on your commute, or just walking around. The delivery man, the coffee shop barista, the doorman, etc. The first wave of the stranger revolution was craigslist. Now, we’re at a point where we can mash up social data (e.g. who we are friends with) with marketplace data (I’m renting my apartment, looking for a roommate, selling last minute tickets etc.) to create seemingly safer transactions amongst people who wouldn’t meet if it weren’t for technology.

Picresized_1229584137_youreadog

Then there’s the dating part. More and more strangers are meeting offline via online platforms for a range of activities from dating and networking to spontaneous sexual encounters. It used to be that on the internet, “nobody knows you’re a dog.” Not so much the case anymore. In the current era, we know you have 5 mutual friends, listen to Beck, and frequent wine bars in the West Village. Combining signals from multiple platforms to paint this full picture will make it increasingly difficult to forge online identity, thus benefitting offline interactions with strangers.

Surely it is extremely disappointing and ridiculous that apps like Skout have enabled rapists to find their prey. But this lack of “cross verification,” the process of overlaying some pre-existing form of identity with a new service, is archaic and leaves a massive opportunity to be captured. 

People talk a lot about reliance on 3rd party platforms being a weakness in business models, but they have never been better at making users feel safer, not to mention solving a chicken-and-egg problem that most two sided marketplaces suffer from. I think we are at a huge turning point where enough real-world data has been mapped to people in the form of interests, location, and connections that a stranger revolution is inevitable.

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The New Business Manifesto - Accountability & Virality

There are huge misallocations of marketing spend in our modern economy, and this is testament to the fact that technology waves create steep adoption curves. It’s halfway through 2012 and we still have the following:
- 3.5X over-allocation of marketing dollars in print media (see Mary Meeker internet trends)
- Direct email marketing/subscription businesses whose sole value-add is curation (e.g. fab, birchbox, beachmint, gilt, and this)
- Demand for display ad inventory that is almost infinite in supply (e.g. social display advertising)
- A $20bn mirage of an opportunity to monetize mobile display ads (claimed by Mary Meeker in her latest internet trends report)
- A stubborn, out-of-touch content industry (see Ari Emmanuel @ D10)

What’s the issue with this? That some companies are not operating efficiently and cannot figure out unit economics in a world where each dollar of operating expenditures can be tracked. More attention will be paid to net margins when public companies can be held more responsible for the effectiveness of marketing spend.
Distribution is cheap and it’s viral too. This is not the era to build a digital company that is the online equivalent of some analog (e.g. the modern day QVC, online catalogues, etc).

How to not get left behind…
General guidelines for successful platform businesses

- The page views generated by social platforms are nearly infinite, ergo the prices for display ads on them will fall to zero. It’s all about sponsored interactions (limited supply). These are interactions surfaced from friends’ endorsements (either via a FB like or a Twitter follow). And guess what? They already work on mobile.
  • Sponsored interactions work in the era of the go-to feed (Foursquare Explore, FB news feed, Twitter feed, Spotify friend feed, Pinterest/Fancy feed). 
  • Example of this is a promoted artist on spotify, FB brand page, or twitter account. Buyers only pay for successful interactions (follows, likes, listens)
- Self serve buying platforms that can support the long-tail of media buyers or local businesses (in the case of Foursquare).
- Attract some sort of intent that can be turned into $$. Google captures purchase intent, Foursquare -> local purchase intent, Twitter -> ??, Facebook -> one of the few mobile/desktop app customer acquisition platforms (see socialcam, viddy, zynga)
Image

Twitter’s new self-serve ad platform.

General rules for goods and services building businesses off of said platforms (music, beer, clothes, apps etc)
- It is solely YOU AND YOUR AGENCY’s responsibility to ensure that your customer lifetime value exceeds acquisition costs
- Create “double viral loops.” This is where one person’s usage spawns more customer acquisitions from their friends, and so on and so forth.
  • Say I buy a pair of Warby Parker glasses, and I am incentivized to click “like” —> ensure that my friends can easily re-create that action of rebroadcasting that action throughout their social graphs.
- Curation is not a product, it is offered for free on major platforms.
  • If your business has buyers, you will be disrupted. Amazon is a platform (anyone can sell), Fab/Gilt are not (they hire people to handpick suppliers).
  • Curation in that case comes via collaborative filtering algorithms (e.g. the netflix recommendations: people who like X also like Y).
  • FB is betting that curation is all friend-driven, replicating age-old word of mouth.

Some basic questions in light of these observations:
Why the hell would you purchase an ad spot on TV when you could be guaranteed that each impression on someone’s Twitter/FB feed has been displayed to a real person?

How many mobile display ads make use of location as a means to target?
Why would anyone pay for content they don’t consume? Why would anyone want to live in a 1984-esque society where everyone is required to sit in front of a TV at a given hour to consume some sort of content?

Why get into the online content business anyway? Demand Media is one of the few real companies that has figured out how to monetize content using Google and is valued at $750mm. In a remix culture, aggregators win (see Buzzfeed).

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the API conundrum

the media is missing the biggest problem with new apps that expose public data. maybe we are oversharing, maybe not. it’s certainly not about poorly worded privacy settings. it’s a simple marketplace issue of what users are intently giving up in exchange for what they view as utility. somewhere along the way, developers will see this exchange as an opportunity to meddle in and create a new experience. 
i check in on foursquare for a myriad of reasons. whatever those reasons may be, i do so because the benefits far outweigh the potential negatives- that is unless the byproduct of that data is repurposed in a predatory manner.

in any case, the most painful thing that seems to be going on right now is that some applications are “connecting the dots” of data in ways that scare us. maybe they scare us most because context is left out, and we can only guess that this data will be abused by stalkers.
it doesn’t have to be black and white. there is a way to recontextualize each person’s digital trail mix, but as I have said over and over again Highlight, Banjo, Glancee, you name it have all failed to market themselves properly.

Twitter_search_-_mm_banjo

before foursquare, there was google latitude, and before latitude there was loopt. the latter two sucked because they were flat, two dimensional real-time representations of data between friends and family. a mere point on the map lacking any context other than the time of day. if you changed loopt’s title to “find my friends,” you’d have an instant improvement in context. even still, these technologies can be used in ways that are unintended, and that is what makes it so interesting. developers are still doing a poor job seeing how people are using their pure technology tools and reincorporating that value proposition back into their product.

it’s a real shame that this issue is so misunderstood by the media and tech pundits . give me a reason to share some personal data, and the world will gladly accept. make it nebulous, and we’ll freak out. it’s very simple.

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Better Late Than Never

So I finally learned how to properly code (backend). I had learned VB and Python before, screwed around with ruby, but never made a real app from scratch. Here’s how/why I learned to use Django (the Python web framework).

Djangofilm

Why?

If you’re building a business on the Internet, you have to not only have an understanding of what’s being built, but you have to get your hands dirty. Not to mention, you can’t have technical people shaking their heads at what comes out of your mouth when you do try to sound like you know what you’re talking about. It’s also nice to not have to say “if only I had someone who could build me this.” Go build the basic prototype yourself, then get it re-done by someone who knows what they’re really doing.

How

I started learning Ruby on Rails over a year ago and it never clicked. That’s because I was putting the cart before the horse by learning the framework without any knowledge of the language. Big mistake. I recommend anyone pick up a book on Python or Ruby before diving into Django or Rails. 

My last semester at Penn I took a class on Python, which ultimately dictated to my decision to learn its web counterpart, Django. I learned by obsessing over the tutorials on djangoproject.com. Before doing either of these things, I highly recommend learning about databases by messing around with MySQL. A good way to learn SQL is on w3schools.com. If you can’t take a class on a good scripting language, then pick up a book like the “Dive Into” series.

Motivation

It really helps to learn at the same time as a friend who can pressure you into actually shipping a product. Thanks to my big homie Boris Silver, I was able to better motivate myself to learn and ship.

It also helps to build using APIs of a service you use a lot, which brings out more passion. Build something you’ve always wanted to see done with that particular service. Be selfish!

The hack

Spotted_breaks-1

I built Samplespotting.com because I found myself always trying to discover the samples used by my favorite producers in their hip hop beats. I was also obsessed with the potential to curate music with Spotify metadata across the web. So, I built an API from scratch that searches The-Breaks.com for samples. After that, I integrated the Spotify API to build my queries and lookup the results The-Breaks.com API I built. I then built the frontend in JQuery with some help from my good friend at General Assembly, Jason Jho.                                                     

This is a big leap towards me becoming more technically proficient. I now have the confidence to try to learn more complex, fancy things if need be. And with that, I leave you this:

http://open.spotify.com/track/22ngk2DRBy7audIugfYDKd           

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Online->Offline: A Tale of Grouper, Grubwithus, and Curation

Disclaimer: this post is long, but if you are interested in the future of how people meet each other, then you gotta read the whole thing.
At a recent online dating summit, I saw a really interesting chart. On one side was “implicit dating” and the other limit was “explicit dating.” The speaker placed logos from well-known online services across the frontier, with Adult Friend Finder on the far side of explicit, and Grubwithus on the other extreme of implicit. This was interesting. When I first heard about Grubwithus, I knew they were playing in an interesting space of meeting new people, but I had absolutely no clue that it was intended for dating. I safely assumed it was for people relocating in new cities who wanted to get to make some friends. I started pondering, and thought to myself- this is the future: sites like How About We and Grubwithus taking dating to the next level by shifting focus away from profiles and towards activities (proposed dates on HAW) and interests (GWU is for “foodies”).

Grubwithus 
I must’ve gotten 50 emails from Grubwithus before I actually went on one. The truth was, I had no incentive to really join these tables if I couldn’t control the ratio of guys to girls in my favor. I eventually settled for a meal with the founders when they were in town for YCNYC. I showed up to the meal super excited. I didn’t know who I was going to meet, but for some reason I thought the people would be interesting and that we’d go around the table and have the most interesting conversation of our lives. Turns out, I was wrong.

The founders were nice guys who seemed interested in everyone, but they were way too shy. None of them gave a toast at the table, gave a “rundown” of how this thing was supposed to work, or provided any context for the meal. Six dudes and two chicks just sat down and ate, thinking of whatever mundane topic to converse with our immediate neighbors. I wasn’t really digging any of these “grubbers,” so I switched into full crack analyst mode. When I asked Eddy, one of the founders, about the notion of his service being for dating he flat out rejected it. I then began to ask him why anyone could join a meal– why no algorithm or some sort of process to place people at tables they will probably have a good experience at? No. They leave it up to serendipity. They just make the meals happen, what happens at the table is up to everyone. Some of the stories of what groups do after seemed fairly routine: like “one time a group of grubbers went bowling afterward” or “one time a group got drinks!”
Pastedgraphic-1

So at this point I’m really frustrated. Here’s a site that has so much potential to mash people together using rich online data, and merely serves as a Groupon for lonely people without any context whatsoever. The only answer I was getting from the founder was that they would open up a whitelabel service for online dating sites to arrange specific offline interactions. I thought to myself, OK, then you’re just a logistics company that hires sales people. Online dating is a $1.3 billion market, imagine the market size for online dating that guarantees an offline interaction. That is powerful.
Grouper

Around this same time, I had heard of another site called Grouper. The idea is simple: pair three guys and three girls up at a trendy speakeasy in NYC based on their Facebook profiles. $20 covers your first drink. Sign me up. I finally got an email weeks later providing two dates for “Groupers” I could attend. I signed up, paid my money and then received another email asking me to invite two friends so my card wouldn’t be charged for all three spots. Kind of an annoying task, but at the end of the day I’m glad I went with people I knew.
Grouper_the_social_club

I arrived at the Chinatown speakeasy “Apotheke” about 10 minutes early. I anxiously pace back and forth on my cell phone outside, waiting for my friends to show up. One of them was unconvinced, even after committing. “I payed. I bet the girls are going to be horrible and this whole thing is going to be a disaster. I hate it already,” he dreaded to me over SMS prior. Eventually, I walk up to the nondescript door of the bar and drop the secret name for the reservation to the bouncer- “Table for 6, Alexandra.” He looks at my ID, nods, and I proceed. I wondered if he knew what was in store. I head to the hostess, who seats me at the table and tells me that I’m the first to arrive. In my mind I’m thinking “who could these other three be, can we just get this over with already?” After seeing that I wasn’t some beastly creature from Where the Wild Things Are, the girls instantly came to the table and introduced themselves. They were pretty normal and cute, which was a relief. They also happened to be roommates. Finally, my second friend joins the table. We’re one short because my third skeptical friend is standing outside texting me: “How are the girls?” to which I replied “HOTTTT.”
The interaction we had was much more fluid and natural than what had occurred the week before at the Grubwithus meal. While at first awkward- “how did you hear about this Grouper thing?”- our conversations evolved into more fun ones surrounding the relationship between online and offline identity. “Don’t tell her my last name,” I urged my friends. “For all we know, she could be writing about this whole thing for Gawker!” (half-kidding). We laughed, we drank, we exchanged contact information, and we parted ways. Amazingly, there was a minimal amount of fighting over which girl each of us could follow up with.

There was one other table with three Korean men and three white women directly adjacent to us. Unlike our table, this group did not seem to be into each other. The girls sat far away from the guys, and constantly checked their phone. After our Grouper was over, I curiously headed to the other table where I was instantly approached by one girl who asked me “were you also on a Grouper?” We chatted for a bit, and agreed that I had the better table. I told her I’m working on an online dating startup, and she mentioned that the other korean guy at her table was too. We exchanged numbers to discuss the whole experience the next day.
What happened the next day was very unusual. I received a call from this girl on my way back to my apartment. We started chatting about Grouper and its promise: “Is it about pairing together people based on interests or looks or what? Is this just supposed to be casual?” I walked into my building, and heard an echo. Wait, no, it couldn’t be. Yes, this girl lived in my building. We chatted for a while about her experience vs. mine. I think we both agreed that no matter how strong Grouper’s algorithm ever got, there’d still be a chance that you could have as awkward an experience as she. We debated on what the promise should be. However nebulous it did seem fared nowhere in comparison to Grubwithus’ tagline: “Eat With Awesome People!”

Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday of atonement, arrives at last. I’m out of commission to go out, as I was fasting. Unbeknownst to me, the same skeptical friend had asked his girl out, who in turn brought her roommate who was supposed to be for me. As it turns out, his little brother from NYU ended up hooking up with her. 
Photo
All in all, the ripple effect that was left from the Grouper was much stronger than that of the Grubwithus. Two hookups, a bunch of text messages, and one awkward encounter thanks to Grouper, and one empty stomach left from Grubwithus. 

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The last mile.

In telecom, the concept of “the last mile” refers to the final link of connectivity between a customer and a communications provider. Each end user (or node) has a direct connection to some local station that has a faster backbone connection to a larger network.
I’ve been focusing a lot of my time thinking about the last mile of mobile communication between a user and a social networking/discovery site like Twitter, Foursquare, Sonar.me, Gatsby, Facebook, etc. These services maintain large, centralized datasets of users, locations, preferences, and shared connections that affect real-world behavior on an individual level. They’re collecting data on where I go, who I’m friends with, and what I’m interested to influence my behavior in the physical world. The last mile occurs at: “hey, you and this nearby person have X number of friends in common”, now what?
Sonarme_hi_-_twitter_search
For instance, Sonar has a birds-eye view of all of my Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook friends to cross reference against the public data trail left by other users. Once my graph is compared against each nearby user, I can publicly @reply any of these nearby people to spark up a conversation. Or maybe I can try and identify them in real life based on their avatars. It’s awkward no matter how you try and approach this. When was the last time you went up to a stranger and said, hey, we both like 5 of the same things on Facebook and oh, don’t you know that we’re both followed by John!?!? You know, John.

I’ve been testing a different approach with Sam Oldak in our startup, MeepMe. We’re starting to see people anonymously text message each other in public spaces as a means of starting a physical, face-to-face conversation. Of course, you could argue we’re different than Sonar in that our app is intended for bars and singles. From what we’ve seen, it’s actually more awkward to tweet out “Hey, @cutechick11113, you look really cute, why don’t you come over to the bar so I can buy you a drink” than to do it on a closed loop like SMS. Services like these need to experiment with all forms of inbound communication at the last mile whether it’s a private direct message, facebook message, or linked-in request. The last mile of interpersonal communication is red hot, and it’s an extremely difficult challenge if you’re starting with the physical realm. Go watch our video and sign up at GetMeep.com to try out our unique social experiment in NYC and be the judge yourself.

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Thank You: My Penn Peeps

The past four years have been quite the journey at Wharton. Pursuing the career I was passionate about would have been quite the challenge if it weren’t for the support and mentorship from certain key individuals. I am extremely lucky to have identified and sought these people out for advice throughout my time in Philadelphia. When people talk about Penn fostering great entrepreneurs, they’re referring to this group. I’d like to publicly thank them for all they’ve done for me and others like myself during my time at Penn. They have always been supportive, but most importantly, they have challenged me more than anyone else in my environment.

We will continue to grow with each other over the years, as this is just the very beginning of our journey. 

Grad

Thank you to…

Suzanne Diamond for teaching me about my strengths and weaknesses. 

Brett Topche for his sensibility when it comes to internet startups and his undying loyalty and enthusiasm towards Penn students like myself. 

Michael Aaronson for showing me that anything is possible with a Penn degree.

Kartik Hosanagar for sharing his startup experiences and inspiring so many peers to go out and start companies.

Kevin Werbach for sharing his perspective on the fundamentals of the internet that are the basis for all innovation. 

Stephen Goodman for the generosity of his valuable time.

Dr. William Hamilton for teaching me that relationships are everything.

Alexey Komissarouk for his belief in a Penn as an eastern hub for tech.

Ayaka Nonaka for her creative genius and willingness to help n00bs.

Roberto Medri for helping build a real community that cares for each other.

Simon Lu for always lending a helping hand.

Cherif Habib for stressing the importance of humor.

Phil Cortes for reinforcing the importance of composure.

Yujin Chung for stressing the significance of analytical rigor.

Meredith Perry & Nora Dweck for the JFDI motto.

Corey Pierson for blazing a trail for me.

Adriano Blaranu for showing me how to be lean.

Rob Do for supplementing the other half of my brain.

Peng Fei for introducing me to China.

Boris Silver for inspiring me to do what I love most right now.

Jon Treble for making me feel smart.

Alex Chernyak for teaching me how to hustle. 

Joe Cohen for making me realize I’m too old.

Justin Meltzer for carrying on my vision for IMG.  

Jacob Schulman for the lowdown on the latest hardware.

Sam Oldak for believing in my crazy ideas.

Bruce Easley (Drexel exception) for a critical eye.

and all the haters, because without you I wouldn’t be doing anything right.

 

 

 

 

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Proximity

One way to understand the proximity layer within the mobile stack is through Spimes. Sci fi author Bruce Sterling defines Spimes as objects that are trackable through space and time. More specifically: “A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities. A universe of Spimes is an informational universe, and it is the use of this information that informs the most exciting part of Sterling’s argument.” In 2011, the closest thing we have to Spimes are smartphones. This data emission allows for the creation of new marketplaces, applications, and services. At this years SXSW, I saw what I would refer to as a proximity-based utopian oasis. Only for this brief period was I able to leverage the efficiency of local, realtime markets like Zaarly and the serendipity of talking other bored nerds on my phone with Yobongo. It all worked at SXSW, but seemed to dissolve as soon as I left Austin. With all the negative feedback on the lack of nearby users on the new Color app, it seemed smart for these apps to lock out the majority of users outside of a geofence.

Photo

But where do we go from here? The real test of the utility of these apps will come when they can sustain themselves across many cities. I myself have been thinking a lot about hyperlocal network effects.
In forming what my friend Boris Bogatin from NearVerse calls “disposable social networks,” I believe there are a number of degrees of proximity. The first is the immediate people in your vicinity. This is the space Color is trying to tackle first. Then you have a broader radius that may cover your apartment or office building. On the outer circle, you have people within a few blocks of each other. This is the realm in which Meet Gatsby and Agora, both SMS-based foursquare mashups, are tackling. These apps look to see if there are two people within a few blocks with each other who should be meeting each other based on an interest graph extrapolated from data such as mutual twitter followers, foursquare checkins, and Facebook interests. Again, the same network effects come into play. You won’t receive any introductions if you nor anyone around you has signed up. In order for these services to work at scale, they have to have enough people using it so that the recommendations are useful.

There’s certainly a hyperlocal funnel. At the top of the funnel you have a global user base. As you make your way down the funnel, these users are separated by location, and then interest. In order to squeeze just one good match out of the funnel, there needs to be a large sample of users within a location. That’s why letting a proximity-based app open to the entire internet at first is risky. It can leave people with a poor first-time experience. If, however, there is a strong enough single player mode that doesn’t rely on any other nearby users, these problems can be more easily overcome. This is what we are thinking about in forming the MeepMe dating experience.

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Proudly Announcing: TweetGrabber

Problem
There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the realtime web and an overabundance of information. Over the past year I’ve also noticed more people relying on asymmetrical networks such as Twitter to filter out timely, relevant news. My Google Reader has gone virtually untouched in the past six months. I stopped using Flipboard on my iPad, and I never believed that RSS was a “really simple” consumer facing tool to subscribe to feeds that interested me. RSS seems to become replaced by Twitter feeds.

People have started to pick up on the major issues of online content curation. Tech savvy people don’t care where an article is from, so long as it’s above a certain threshold of quality. But how does one determine quality, especially when each persons’ definition of quality differs? I would assume that none of these “savvy” individuals are particularly glued to one news source.
Current state of affairs

For one, aggregators like Techmeme, Hacker News, and Bit.ly News (which all use the Reddit API) are all good mechanisms for determining articles to read within their respective certain niche verticals. They all rely on various signals: user-submission, voting, or share count. The one issue I have with these aggregators is that they aren’t tailored to my personal preferences. I almost found a perfect solution in Summify. Its digest aggregates articles that my Twitter friends are sharing and cross references them with feeds I had subscribed to on Google Reader. That gets sent to my inbox about once a day, but I still miss a lot of great content.
I’ll admit that as I rely on Twitter as a primary news source, I see a lot of great stuff multiple times a day but rarely dive too deep to read it. I was able to bring up certain news stories during conversation, but realized I knew little detail about each one. My daily news consumption had turned into snacking on headlines. This is attributed to two factors: a lack of time at a given moment and a lack of a good mobile long-form reading experience linked to that content.

Solution
Last year I met an incredibly talented Ruby on Rails hacker via Twitter named Jordan Glasner. We’ve been going back and forth via email and Basecamp for a while to solve this problem. We had decided on building a server-side app that relied on Twitter favorites (an underrated signal)  and the beautifully simplistic Instapaper interface for storing articles for later. It seemed that some power users on Twitter were already favoriting articles they wanted to view later, so it was a perfect signal to tap into.
So how does it work? We made it so you can favorite any tweet in your stream that seems interesting and have it sent straight to Instapaper (preferably read on an iPad or Kindle). A script would parse the news article link from the tweet and instantly send it to a user’s Instapaper account for later viewing. Then, Jordan came up with a brilliant idea to create a graph of favorites by allowing users to essentially follow each others’ favorited tweets (containing links). What we now have is a distributed trust network for content. It’s crowdsourced daily reading delivered straight to your Instapaper. You don’t have to even spend a dollar a week.

So there it is. We’re finally whitelisted by Twitter so go ahead and test it out. Tell your friends to start favoriting interesting articles on Twitter (for your own selfish reasons) and help us create the next universal bookmarking system for the real time web! As always, feedback welcomed: matt [at] tweetgrabber dot com
I’d like to give a special thanks to the following people who have helped immensely in the process of building this app: Jordan (obviously), Simon Lu, Tom Limongello, Adam Liebman, Roberto Medri, Matt Hunter, Jake Siegal, David Pakman, Stowe Boyd, and Sky Dayton for their help and feedback.

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Stuff Matt Newberg Likes CES Edition!

I had the opportunity to venture to vegas for 23 hours the other day. I think this is my last year at CES (so overwhelming). Here’s the best I found:
Motorola Atrix- The best concept I saw at CES. Smartphone = computer, everything else is just a docking peripheral.

Iomega Superhero - Too many of my intelligent friends do not intelligently sync their phones. When they lose them, they have to create Facebook groups to re-add everyone. A grueling process indeed. They need this.
Boxee iPad App - Nobody at CES understood social better than Boxee. The app enables you to see videos friends shared across your Facebook and Twitter, and there’s even an Instapaper-like view later feature. You can also “sling” media from the app or any network-attached drive straight to your boxee-connected TV.

Notion Ink Adam - A tablet you can sit on the beach and use, in full color. ‘Nuff said.
Switchblade by Razer - Not sure what I think of this gaming concept. You be the judge.

Snapstick - Airplay, but for any content. All rendering done on the box, not your phone/tablet.
Major shoutout goes out to my good friend Jacob Schulman for telling me about half this stuff and tearing it up on Engadget this week. 

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Stuff Matt Newberg Likes Vol. II

As promised, another weekly edition of Stuff Matt Newberg Likes. 
Gtrot - trip planning and social travel recommendations
Dinevore- user-curated lists of restaurants
Graze- something I wish was in the US and delivered to my room daily
Skyara- the “etsy” of unique experiences
Squrl- Instapaper for web video w/ curation
Nuji- just launched @ le web. fancy/svpply clone that I am keeping a close eye on

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Stuff Matt Newberg Likes Vol. 1

People sometimes ask me to tell them what products/services I think are cool. I’m going to start sharing these lists every week.
Fancy - social bookmarking around products
Vol.ly - real-time mobile evites
bitlynews.com - hacker news for normals
Summify- social news filter
CrowdTwist - top-of-stack rewards platform for artists and brands

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Stuff Matt Newberg Likes Vol. 1

People sometimes ask me to tell them what products/services I think are cool. I’m going to start sharing these lists every week.
Fancy - social bookmarking around products
Vol.ly - real-time mobile evites
bitlynews.com - hacker news for normals
Summify- social news filter
CrowdTwist - top-of-stack rewards platform for artists and brands

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Follower -> Friend

Granovetter’s theory on the strength of “weak ties” has been taking shape since the very beginnings of the internet. From interest-based IRC chatrooms to the new “interest graph” being created by Gravity, evidence that your friends aren’t as resourceful as your weaker ties is strengthening over time. In essence, this is the notion that crowdsourced information should come far outside one’s personal network of friends.
While Facebook paved the way for an online graph of real-world connections, a new wave of communities and technologies are emerging to build new relationships amongst individuals with similar tastes and interests. The irony is that these services must currently rely on extremely granular attributes to differentiate between users. For instance, Quora is a human-powered QA engine that seems to mainly attract experts in the tech sector. Because of this, conversations and connections tend to form around long-tail niche topics within the greater tech umbrella. This allows like minded people to connect on an unprecedented level, however, it may lead to more homogenization, as critics suggest. Regardless, it’s a step in the right direction towards creating powerful small-world networks.
Sites like Namesake recognize the complex graph of connections that heavy Internet users posses. They have recognized the distinction between “Industry contact” and “follower,” allowing job posts to circulate a vast network of potentially interested candidates. This is accomplished by iteratively re-routing certain opportunities to weaker follower networks until a wide net has been cast.

Fueled by Twitter’s growth, the emergence of asymmetric networks (followers and followings) has created a new dynamic between individuals. There is no longer a need for individuals to begrudgingly accept friend requests. People who want to be contacted about interesting opportunities in their industry can create presences across multiple networks to make themselves accessible in a secure manner given the context. It’s taking six degrees of separation and reducing it to one for both short bursts and longer periods of time. Those who continually engage the other party are noticed and tend to eventually form a real human connection.
Through these services, I have been able to follow up and sustain relationships with interesting people whom I have seen contribute across the existing web infrastructure. It is not uncommon for me to leave a group of friends to meet up with a connection I have developed purely online. Is it creepy that I do this? I’d argue that in this day in age, no. It’s a gradual transition from follower to friend, but the recent traction of these new multi-tiered networks implies that it is actually happening.

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