Naked is really naked

Written on 7th May 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Next Webtipr David Petherick advised me to start using Naked a few weeks ago. That’s a small British start-up in private beta, which aims to give users a better way to communicate with people they really care about than the dozens of other social networks do. It allows you to communicate more freely, in private. Tools are status-updates, private messages and group messages. To me it looks like they’re trying to be a combination between Twitter and e-mail, aimed at a crowd who doesn’t know what Twitter is.

So Naked is into communication and you can tell by the way the team communicates with its users: friendly, open and no-nonsense. They know how to create the feeling of a connection with the service, sort of bonding 2.0. The ultimate example would be the email I found in my inbox a few minutes ago:

The Naked team

Being Naked is all about being open, even if that means sharing not-so-good news. Our start-up has run out of cash. Just weeks before opening up the service more broadly and igniting the buzz…

However, we haven’t given up the faith. We will need to regroup, see who’s still on board, and work out a way forward. In the meantime we’ll do everything possible to keep the service going.

We’ll update you when we have more news.

That’s what I call REAL transparency. And why wouldn’t they be? There are plenty of start-ups that keep their mouth shut while they slowly sink in the deadpool. How is that helping them? By sending out this email they get (1) attention from the press, (2) sympathy from their users, and (3) street credibility – because this really is pr 2.0.

Update: David has ten invites for you to see whether Naked works for you. Drop him a line: david@thenextweb.org