A new London-based geolocation startup wants to make meeting new people with shared interests easier.
There are already a variety of meet-up planning services from Yahoo’s Upcoming to newer entrants like Plancast, but what about if you’re new in town or want to get involved in a new ‘scene’ and don’t know where to start?
LikeOurselves aims to solve this problem with with a geolocation service for people who want to meet others for the first time “Without planning, formality and without the awkwardness of a meet and greet.”
Once signed up, users can select the type of people they’d like to meet based on categories like ‘Students’, ‘Hobbies’ and ‘Spontaneous date’. A series of tags for each category help narrow down potential matches. Then, when you’re out and about you can use the service’s mobile website to locate nearby matches. A “dual opt-in” system helps ensure that both people are happy to meet. At present the categories users can sign up to are quite limited but LikeOurselves co-founder Pardeep Kullar tells us that the next stage is to open the service up to user-created categories and tags.
“We are doing something quite different from Foursquare, Gowalla and others, partly as we came to this idea without any knowledge of those services and so we’ve taken a different path”, says Kullar. “We see it as a service for anyone with an existing base of users e.g. bloggers, universities, neighbourhood hyperlocal sites, artists (e.g. Lady Gaga fans) etc.” He also believes that the service, which its founders have bootstrapped thus far, is the perfect antidote to the problem of alienation caused by social media, which we discussed recently.
With a very limited userbase at this early stage, you might find the service a little empty right now. However, the development team is running regular beta test days in London to help gain user feedback. The next of these is this Thursday 12 August; you can find more information on the LikeOurselves blog. LikeOurselves has also set up a category for The Next Web readers to find each other in case you fancy meeting up to talk about us behind our backs – be nice!
This is what I wanted in FourSquare. Userbase is the problem with startups. Does the FourSquare API allow these features to be joined with the existing strong userbase? If you need a developer… #unemployed ;p
I have always found the idea of using digital technologies to promote the discovery of new potential acquaintances who are proximate in physical space and personal interests to be very appealing. However, I don’t know of any such technologies that have achieved the mass adoption required to succeed.
Four years ago I wrote about various devices and applications for promoting serendipitous encounters in physical places, e.g., LoveGety, Meme Tags (later nTag) and OneKeyAway / MatchLinc … none of which are currently available today. Two years later, I wrote about the challenges of location-based social networking applications, e.g., Meetro (based on laptops + shared WiFi access points) and Nokia Sensor (based on mobile phones + Bluetooth), neither of which succeeded, either. Nokia Sensor had 1 million downloads, and yet I never read of a single report of an unplanned encounter among users who didn’t already know each other.
I hope that LikeOurselves will succeed where others have failed, but looking at the rather sparse profiles (a set of 10 or so categories) they provide, I’m not very optimistic that they will achieve mass adoption … or mass serendipitous encounters. I wish them well, though, and will look forward to experimenting first-hand if / when the service available in the U.S.
@Joe
We have not really gone for chance encounters using Likeourselves.com. In some ways the real power of the site is hidden and not available yet. The ability to create your own groups and tags is coming soon and the site was specifically built with this in mind. This would give every university, blog, site, alumni group, popfanbase etc, it’s own location based network. The way a gathering of people is organised will change. A site with 20,000 users would have a problem organising an event for those users but with likeourselves.com, you can state a time and those users globally could co-ordinate via mobiles and come together.
very nice article
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