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A Portable Social Contact Platform Is Needed

April 30, 2011 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

Invite Friends Contact PlatformAs the number of different social web services I use continues to grow, I find myself repeatedly having to choose who to friend or follow on them. These services generally follow a similar process of allowing me to see if my Facebook friends and people I follow on Twitter are using the service, and then I can check my email accounts for friends.

While this process is okay, it’s far from ideal. There are some issues with this such as:

  • The time it takes to manually select people every time on each service.
  • The fact that I often want a different social graph on a particular service. I may want to follow different people in a music application than in a sports application. However, there are some people who I like to connect with on any service no matter what it’s about.
  • The differences in how you friend or invite people between services can lead to mistakes or cause me to do things I didn’t mean to like posting an invite to someone’s Facebook wall when I didn’t intend it.
  • Some services make it so easy to friend others that I find myself following too many people which can lead to a negative experience in the application. Others have spoke of this problem, and I think I’m currently experiencing this on Quora. The quality of my feed has gone down as I’ve followed people that I don’t really know and can’t remember why I followed them in the first place.

Anytime something like connecting to others is occurring on every service it is an opportunity to improve and streamline that process.

It seems as if there is an opportunity for a company to create a portable social contact platform. This would basically be a place where I could store contacts that I connect with on various social services. I’d like to specify a core group that I want to automatically connect to regardless of the service. This also would make it easier on startups who have to build this following process themselves. If there was a nice plugin or API that allowed people to follow and invite others easily it would save time.

There’s also some new ideas such as Color which try and connect you to others implicitly based on your activity opposed to who you specify. This is a really cool approach, but I already have seen flaws in the model thus far with Color although it’s still really early in that area.

Some will probably say that Facebook or Twitter already serves as this central repository of contacts that they like to connect with on social services. This is partially true for me, but there are people I follow on Twitter who I’m not friends with on Facebook, and people on Facebook who aren’t on Twitter.

Another way to approach this would to use people’s mobile phone contact list as that core group of people. While this is likely to include people’s true tightest social circle, I know in my case that this circle would be too tight.

These issues are why I concluded that I don’t think this should be leveraging something that already exists like my Facebook social graph or my phone contact list. Those things were built for specific purposes, and none of those purposes were “these are the people I want to connect with on social web and mobile applications”.

Is anyone working on such a thing?

Filed Under: Social Networks

The Battle Over TweetDeck Isn’t Binary

April 24, 2011 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

TweetDeck imagePopular Twitter client Tweetdeck is reported to be in acquisition talks with both UberMedia as well as Twitter itself. For those unfamiliar, UberMedia is a company founded by Idealab’s Bill Gross that has been snapping up different Twitter clients and is rumored to be thinking about starting it’s own rival network to Twitter.

This is an interesting situation for many reasons and Mike Butcher of TechCrunch Europe analyzed what the players are probably thinking right now.

His conclusion is that this is a binary situation where if Twitter fails to buy TweetDeck they will be potentially losing a lot of future revenue or enabling a rival network. Therefore, Twitter must spend what it takes to buy TweetDeck.

I don’t think this situation is so black and white. There are other options and outcomes here, and it’s fun to think through some of this corporate strategy as an outsider.

Here are some other potential outcomes:

TweetDeck Goes It Alone
While most would think that TweetDeck would have to be crazy to not sell now while they have two acquirers feeling that they are key to their futures, there is the option to go it alone.

Why couldn’t TweetDeck go raise more money, take a little off the table for the founders, and either try and build their own Twitter rival or build a sales team and sell ads on their own? Going the acquisition route can obviously be a nice exit, but it also could see their company vision and dream die inside another company.

UberMedia Buys TweetDeck, Twitter Freezes Them Out
Mike Butcher seems to imply that if UberMedia had TweetDeck and all those influential users they’d be able to start their own network successfully or at least put the screws to Twitter to let them sell ads. Why couldn’t Twitter just say “Screw you, the TweetDeck users are more loyal to Twitter itself than TweetDeck.”

While denying TweetDeck users access to Twitter’s network would be seen as a bad PR move and piss off a lot of people, I have a feeling all those TweetDeck power users would move to an alternative client to get access to Twitter.

UberMedia Buys TweetDeck, Twitter Lets them Start a Rival
Again, I wouldn’t assume that if UberMedia started a competitor that people would be more loyal to their client application than they are to all the users on the Twitter.

This might depend on interoperability, but I know that I would ditch TweetDeck for another client if it was only accessing a much smaller network that lacked all the people I was already following and who followed me on Twitter.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but I don’t think it’s as simple as “whoever buys TweetDeck wins”. It’s an important piece of the puzzle, but I think there are more layers here than instant winning and losing based on who grabs it.

Filed Under: Acquisitions, Twitter

Rough Launch, But Color-full Future

April 20, 2011 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

Color App ScreeniPhone mobile application Color recently had one of the most talked about startup product launches in a long time.

A lot of that was due the fact that they raised $41M prelaunch, have a well-known team, and the mobile photo-sharing space is really hot.

The other reason it was so talked about was because, for a $41M application, the product itself was really ineffective as a first-time user experience. Tech blogger Robert Scoble famously ranted about it, and many others tweeted or blogged about how confused they were by the user interface and the lack of social interaction.

Blowing the first-time user experience is never good, and I also felt like my first usage of Color was not fun or interesting.

However, due to the hype I fortunately knew enough to know that Color was designed for group experiences, so I didn’t write it off immediately and decided to try and use it with others.

I started using Color at a restaurant with GuideMe lead developer Joe Garstka, and later we added a couple of other users at my house.

The pictures and videos we were taking were automatically popping up in our applications and creating group albums based on time and location without us having to create and specify anything. Less work from the user is always good.

There is amazing potential behind implicit social networks and the automatic grouping of people based on location for an application. Also, creating a history of photos and videos at a specific location holds a lot of potential, and made it more likely that I would take a picture to leave it for future people to see when they were near that spot.

I think the key thing though that may make Color work, is that I found myself telling other people to try it with me. For the application to work, I needed others to participate. This is one of the key growth engines for successful network applications, and Color has that going for it.

On the flip side, it means early adopters without early adopter friends probably won’t use Color. People who are living in areas that are sparsely populated will also have a hard time getting that much value out of the application.

That might be okay though if Color can do various things to improve that first-time use while also letting the network effects happen.

There’s also a big opportunity here for Color, or other companies, to do the same type of creation of implicit location-based networks for other applications like gaming, chat, and more.

Color has a bright future, and enough cash in the bank to get over their initial rough launch.

Filed Under: Social Networks, Startups

Join the GuideMe Invite List

April 8, 2011 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

Gramercy TavernAfter initially testing an alpha prototype of our product at our startup GuideMe, we have spent the last month and a half taking what we learned and changing a whole slew of things with the product.

We’re on the verge of starting to let in a small number of users to begin testing, so if you want to be an early bird and get to save and share the places you love and want go to go, head over to our main page and leave your email address. Once you do that you’ll also be able to get a $300 dinner in a raffle drawing for anyone who refers three friends or more to signup for our invite list. Get a nice dinner on us!

Filed Under: GuideMe