Social location should be solved in five major problems

At the recent SXSW Interactive conference, none of the friends found application to be an obvious winner. Robert Scoble, a well-known tech blogger, said highlight appeared to be the most Robert Scober application, with about 5% of SXSW attendees using highlight. Still, all of these services have fallen below expectations and have become an industry consensus. Why, then, do we ask why these applications have not been successful? As an area, what should be the focus of "friend Discovery"? The following are some of the views expressed by Philip Cortes, co-founder of Meeteor, a friend Discovery service: Philippe Cortes

1 lack of single player mode

What benefits will the first user of your service derive from using it? If you have not solved the problem, it is difficult to overcome the thorny "network effect" (receptacle multiplying) in this field.

Foursquare to solve the problem by awarding medals and "landlord" titles. Even if you're the only one who uses Foursquare in Chicago, you'll still get a reward for check-in. And you can also post your medals on Twitter and graffiti walls. Also, every time you go to a restaurant, you sign in front of your friends stating that you are using the service, and using Foursquare can be a topic for easy conversation. I can't remember how many times I used this method.

The way LinkedIn overcame this problem was to be the first online resume database.

2 did not capture the intent

Two years ago, we introduced the first version of meeteor.com. At the time, Meeteor's goal was to make them randomly meet interesting new friends based on the free schedule and social overlap (social overlap) on their calendars (now Glancee and highlight use the same algorithm type). Feedback from users is consistent: "It's good, but when I woke up in the morning of Monday, I had no urge to go with the opportunity to the people around me-just because we had the same interest." "Then the user would say some of their imaginary ways of using meeteor.com:" Why don't you sell it to the school and have the school use it to assign roommates or "Why don't I tell you clearly what I'm looking for?"

Social overlap between users can be used as a lubricant to meet friends, but it does not in itself force two of strangers to get acquainted. To connect two people requires that they have the same needs or desires. For example, two people want to date or two people to help each other. Another example of overlapping is that two people can help each other professionally. I have two friends with a guy next to me and two of us like surfing, which is not enough to motivate me to talk to someone I don't know at all. We need to better understand the needs of users and meet their needs.

3 Transparent privacy settings

Early adopters may be willing to try anything, but if a friend discovers that apps want to be popular, it has to give users an excellent grip on their privacy.

4 Select a vertical field

Do you want to connect people in the form of marriage and love services? Or are you connecting people from a professional point of view? Capturing intentions helps answer the question, but if you want to "provide all the services for all", it's very difficult to get mass popularity. It's hard to figure out how to put your services to good use, and they'll forget about your application without having to make sure they're available.

5 Imitate off-line behavior

How do people usually do it, can you do it better? From this perspective, an interesting approach is to help two people who have already been chatting to provide them with the topic of conversation. (For example, I was at the SXSW Convention, sitting at a coffee table, and I wanted to talk to the guy next to me.) Dear iphone, please help me to think of some good topics. It would be very useful to know that we have two friends together, and it will certainly make me enjoy the conversation more.

If you are an application or Web service and want to be a winner in a game, you don't need to completely solve these 5 problems from the start. For example, you can find a better mode of single player to win enough time for you to explore a deeper value proposition. Some argue that Foursquare has until now added a value layer (i.e. Radar+exploresquare) that will allow its services to develop permanently.

But addressing these 5 problems is likely to be necessary for any service that wants to cross the divide and get Twitter-like mass popularity.