Wouldn’t it be great to walk into a room and immediately have information available about each person there?
Stop me if you think this sounds too voyeuristic. Or too familiar.
In April 2008, Michael Arrington, the founder and former editor of TechCrunch, boasted that he’d seen the future of social networking and that it was an app for the iPhone. “A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well,” Arrington wrote in a blog post. “And it will help us meet new people for dating, business and friendship.”
At the time, I was news editor of the gadget arm of the then-independent TechCrunch network, so I was intrigued by the notion that I would one day be able to see info about each person in any room by opening an app on my iPhone. Surely it would be the talk of the town. And it would help the introverts of the world communicate with others.
The name of the start-up was never divulged, and even after the launch of the App Store three months later, Arrington never brought it up again.
Fast-forward to 2011. The most talked-about app is a game in which you fling fowl across the screen at a pack of green pigs. And the rest are mostly other frivolous games and photo apps that are clones of other photo apps.
I don’t like being antisocial in public but these days it can be hard not too. My phone should work for me and not the other way around. I want that hyperlocal mobile social service Arrington teased us with back in 2008!
Enter Sonar.
The iOS app’s basic mission is to “uncover the hidden connections you miss everyday, in real time, in the palm of your hand.” While others have come and gone with the promise of connecting us with those around us, none have delivered in the unique way that Sonar presents the available data.
“The biggest challenge for location-based social services has been achieving hyperlocal density. Density of both information and people: getting enough data points about enough people nearby to make it valuable for users to look more closely at who may be around them,” Brett Martin, CEO and co-founder of Sonar, told The Daily.
“Many companies tried to get into the space by offering proximity-based chat tools, but such technology doesn’t really enable anything new. We’re already surrounded by strangers that we can talk to; why would we want to open an app to see more strangers?”
Piggybacking on Foursquare’s API, Sonar lets you “check in” to any venue that you normally would on Foursquare, but it shows you how you’re connected to the people around you based on your network of connections on Facebook, Twitter and thanks to a recent update, LinkedIn. If you see someone interesting, you can reach out to him or her on Twitter through Sonar. More than 60,000 tweets and messages have been sent through Sonar since the start-up launched this past May, the company said.
Don’t worry, you still get to rack up points and retain mayorships on Foursquare, but now you get to see how you’re connected to the people around you.
And no, it’s not creepy. We willingly opt into these types of services, so why not take advantage of that and make it useful? That could be a potential mate or business partner sitting down at the other end of the bar from you. Aren’t we all looking for some “in,” whether it’s for a job interview or a potential date?
David Foster Wallace put it best during his 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, when he said that we shouldn’t live the rest of our lives stuck in our “tiny skull-sized kingdoms” wondering who the other sheep are around us or not caring at all because we’re so self-involved.
Wallace was onto something. Our modern culture has presented us with an infinite number of resources and freedoms for getting out of our own heads.
Martin added: “Exchanging opinions and information through Twitter, blog-post comments and even dating services with people we’d have never otherwise met has taught us the value of a stranger, and is opening us up to having in-person interactions with them.”
Download from iTunes
Stop me if you think this sounds too voyeuristic. Or too familiar.
In April 2008, Michael Arrington, the founder and former editor of TechCrunch, boasted that he’d seen the future of social networking and that it was an app for the iPhone. “A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well,” Arrington wrote in a blog post. “And it will help us meet new people for dating, business and friendship.”
At the time, I was news editor of the gadget arm of the then-independent TechCrunch network, so I was intrigued by the notion that I would one day be able to see info about each person in any room by opening an app on my iPhone. Surely it would be the talk of the town. And it would help the introverts of the world communicate with others.
The name of the start-up was never divulged, and even after the launch of the App Store three months later, Arrington never brought it up again.
Fast-forward to 2011. The most talked-about app is a game in which you fling fowl across the screen at a pack of green pigs. And the rest are mostly other frivolous games and photo apps that are clones of other photo apps.
I don’t like being antisocial in public but these days it can be hard not too. My phone should work for me and not the other way around. I want that hyperlocal mobile social service Arrington teased us with back in 2008!
Enter Sonar.
The iOS app’s basic mission is to “uncover the hidden connections you miss everyday, in real time, in the palm of your hand.” While others have come and gone with the promise of connecting us with those around us, none have delivered in the unique way that Sonar presents the available data.
“The biggest challenge for location-based social services has been achieving hyperlocal density. Density of both information and people: getting enough data points about enough people nearby to make it valuable for users to look more closely at who may be around them,” Brett Martin, CEO and co-founder of Sonar, told The Daily.
“Many companies tried to get into the space by offering proximity-based chat tools, but such technology doesn’t really enable anything new. We’re already surrounded by strangers that we can talk to; why would we want to open an app to see more strangers?”
Piggybacking on Foursquare’s API, Sonar lets you “check in” to any venue that you normally would on Foursquare, but it shows you how you’re connected to the people around you based on your network of connections on Facebook, Twitter and thanks to a recent update, LinkedIn. If you see someone interesting, you can reach out to him or her on Twitter through Sonar. More than 60,000 tweets and messages have been sent through Sonar since the start-up launched this past May, the company said.
Don’t worry, you still get to rack up points and retain mayorships on Foursquare, but now you get to see how you’re connected to the people around you.
And no, it’s not creepy. We willingly opt into these types of services, so why not take advantage of that and make it useful? That could be a potential mate or business partner sitting down at the other end of the bar from you. Aren’t we all looking for some “in,” whether it’s for a job interview or a potential date?
David Foster Wallace put it best during his 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, when he said that we shouldn’t live the rest of our lives stuck in our “tiny skull-sized kingdoms” wondering who the other sheep are around us or not caring at all because we’re so self-involved.
Wallace was onto something. Our modern culture has presented us with an infinite number of resources and freedoms for getting out of our own heads.
Martin added: “Exchanging opinions and information through Twitter, blog-post comments and even dating services with people we’d have never otherwise met has taught us the value of a stranger, and is opening us up to having in-person interactions with them.”
Download from iTunes
