Well, I was thinking of spending more time with Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer, and going back to email and text messaging but if you've got something planned I'd love to hear about it.
I'm currently working with another HN member to develop a startup based around doing things in real life with your real life friends. It is planned to be exact opposite of Facebook. Whereas Facebook is about playing Farmville, and other virtual distractions, our startup is aimed at helping you coordinate real life offline activities and events with your real life friends. Where Facebook harvests your info and violates your privacy, our startup will allow you to have complete privacy, and choose which info you want to share with your friends and which you want to share with the rest of the world.
The code is only about 25% percent done (I'm working on this in my spare time around college classes and freelance web design work) but I hope to get it done within about a months time. I'll definitely be posting it here on HN for you and others to review and join if you desire.
Our original idea was exactly what you describe: organize casual events with friends. But that didn't gain traction.
What we've empirically verified, is that this is not a big enough pain point to get people to ditch the default position. The default position being:
1. SMS
or
2. Facebook status updates. Not even structured events, even though Facebook just made creating the latter much easier.
So we pivoted. The new incarnation was:
Discover events through taste makers.
This -we thought- allowed us to short circuit the "I don't have enough friends on the service" argument. So now you can follow people who share your cultural interests and discover events through them so that you can drag your friends along.
This newest incarnation is too hard to distribute. By distribution I mean: user acquisition. We had/have an awesome website, a native iPhone app, cool graphics and even a gaming element.
You need to convince enough people to post events, and then convince others to follow them and like/attend those events.
So my 2.0 cents:
1. Think about distribution: How are you going to get users?
2. Is this a big enough pain point to convince people to ditch the default? (I don't believe so, and I brought a similar product to market).
EDIT: Sponty is still running and we do have users. But we've moved on and are now working on social games.
I had the idea to explore a similar concept, based on shared events instead of a friend list. The objective was avoiding the degradation I had seen on other social networks. Hi5 and Orkut were the experiences where I based this reasoning. This was 3-4 years ago, I still hadn't used facebook.
One of my ideas was to give users access to sponsored SMS's. They could send a SMS and would have to choose some sponsor to that SMS, in the bottom of the SMS it would be included a slogan of the sponsor (20-40 characters). This could also work as user acquisition by sponsoring the platform itself. <evil> The friends contact information could also be used somehow </user>
The strong points for this idea was that the profiles of users would have been richer to the advertisers allowing better targeting. Consumer brands are strongly tied to events, and I suppose this would facilitate getting advertisers. It would also enable to give brands opportunities to sponsor smaller events (long tail on the event advertising market).
Ads targeting is in a whole new level nowadays and I don't believe it would be a real competitive advantage, but maybe it could be sold as so. The success of this idea also depends a lot on how much people value free SMS's. Here in Portugal SMS's are free inside the same operator but I see younger people doing big gimmicks to get free SMS's to other operators. The effort people are willing to put to achieve that is crucial, I don't know how well that applies in other contexts.
Could we see something similar on Twitter? Instead of a sponsored SMS, a sponsored Tweet? If they give me the possibility of tweeting from my cell phone for free in exchange of a few characters and ads noise I would do it.
One feature I've pondered is some kind of location based phone thing.
IE you tell it things like "I like to go down the pub with this group of people", and it'll automatically suggest that as an activity to you all if you're in a suitably small area and have the time free on your calendar.
I often wonder how well ads work for social networks in general.
I don't have problem with ads like facebook,twitter uses - promoting the apps on their platform.
Yeah, but if someone intends to monetize using ads, which are out of context or just plain annoying, probably just to get better CPI, that seems evil enough for me not to use the website.
Even if they are creepily relevant most users ignore them. I got some ads for something that was only mentioned in my Facebook chat with another person, not posted on a wall or anywhere public.
It annoyed me that they were scrapping my Facebook chats for keywords in an attempt to get me to click on their advertisements.
Get in touch with the guys who were working on imthere.com. Similar idea, the site was very nice. It seems to be on hiatus, though. You might want to find out why.
Peuplade is a site in France for organizing social activities around your geographical location. It's great to meet people in your neighborhood! I found it an excellent opposite to Facebook, which keeps you in touch with people far away (that was my original perception, at least).
I find the "neighborhood" approach much more interesting for a social site than "real-life friends". Another interesting use of social networks is http://www.couchsurfing.com
We don't want to give away our entire idea plan before we even release the first version, but I'll explain some of the details. ;)
The startup is based on the idea of events. It is designed so that extended groups of people who know each other in real life can post event or activity suggestions, either visible just to their friends, or visible to the general public. These events could be anything from a party, where numerous people are invited, to a date, where one person is invited, to a business meet up. For events where multiple people are invited and required to bring something (for example for a party) it will help coordinate people bringing items, by providing a check list that each person can volunteer to fulfill items from.
There are other ideas that we are tying in one at a time, some planned for future releases as well, but that is our basic model, a social network which allows traditional digital association, but heavily encourages offline interaction.
Awesome. I have been working on a very similar product and have been looking for people to bounce ideas off and possibly work with. I think there is a big opportunity to provide an easy way to discover and organize events nearby. It solves a real problem (what's going on around me?). Drop me a note if you want to chat.
It doesn't look like your profile has any way to contact you. If you want to contact me then stop by http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com and use the contact form.
I was in a team that actually built something similar at a startup weekend last year, but decided not to follow-up when plancast launched a week later. I've picked up a few relevant domains at the time which are unused now, so if you're still looking for a domain feel free to ping me.
<a href="http://www.peuplade.fr>; Peuplade</a> is a site in France for organizing social activities around your geographical location. It's great to meet people in your neighborhood! I found it an excellent opposite to Facebook, which keeps you in touch with people far away (that was my original perception, at least).
I find the "neighborhood" approach much more interesting for a social site than "real-life friends". Another interesting use of social networks is <a href="http://www.couchsurfing.com>CouchSurfing</a>;
If Divvyshot had held out another couple months, I feel like there would have been a major opportunity to expand their services into a more private style FB. The opportunity would have been ripe in these past couple months of FB announcements/changes/infringements. I personally use FB mainly to see photos of my close friends. I might occasionally send a message or write a wall-post, but for the most part, I use gchat, email, texting, and phone as my main methods of communication. Granted, I'm not a FB power user, but I also think these last couple months have made even the power users reexamine how they use FB.
