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.
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.
Cheers, M
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.
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.
1) plan to never monetize via ads, if you don't want to turn evil.
2) plan to gain traction in universities.
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.
It annoyed me that they were scrapping my Facebook chats for keywords in an attempt to get me to click on their advertisements.
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
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.
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>