WhereBerry (YC W11): A Social Network for Making Future Plans

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/a-social-network-for-making-future-plans/

by turoczy • 15 years ago

70 50 15 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

suking3• 15 years ago

Seems like YC will take anything with a few good people and buzzwords this day - ignoring the fact that there are 500 million social networks already... Seems better suited as a fb app or something. Either way I personally have little use for this, it's called a calendar...

dodo533• 15 years ago

I think social scheduling is not properly solved yet - mostly for me, this is either via facebook events (which is, I'm doing this, please show up) or email conversations (which get messy with lots of people). Like, I'd like to go out to the theatre with a good number of this group of friends - here are shows I'm interested in. This is when they're on (ideally event listing is provided via companies) Here's when I'm free. Here's what I'd pay. Collect that information from my friends and find a solution within constraints.

Also - could lead to a targeted-groupon like business model (in your circle of friends, 2 people have said they really want to come to our restaurant. Convince 10 people and get 20% off! Someone's friends that already like a product are probably the best word of mouth you can get). Or advertising could be much better targeted if you say what you're planning on doing instead of what you have done.

I had an idea like this once (and gave up cos I thought it was unlikely I'd pull it off - and I think I have a more reasonable idea to execute on) for a social-network travel agent. If you have hundreds of people giving you advance notification of their desires (I'd like to go skiing, for < £800, anywhere in the alps, with this group of people), travel agents could do collective purchases like booking entire chalets / chartering flights (a la Social Flights which also just hit HN headlines).

useflyer• 15 years ago

what differentiates whereberry from a calendar is that you can see all of your friends calendars, too. If you want your friends to see that you're going to the beerfest, it saves a conversation/invitation

the trick will be curating or culling the feed, we all have a lot of FB friends

suking3• 15 years ago

I'm not sold... If I want to see if my friend is going I'll IM or call or email them, this is almost an inconvenience.

nickbaum5• 15 years ago

Hi, I'm the other cofounder of WhereBerry. Thanks for the feedback!

dodo53 and useflyer's comments do a good job at explaining how WhereBerry is different from a calendar.

WhereBerry is helpful for capturing ideas that aren't fully formed events yet – simply things you'd like to do. In fact, a lot of our items don't have a set date (movies, hikes, restaurants...). Once you know who's interested, it's easier to pick a date and organize it.

Re:curation, for now you can unfollow people who post activities you're not interested in. As we get better data, we plan to add relevance ranking so manual trimming becomes less necessary.

kmfrk• 15 years ago

Calendars are a model, not a specific realization. Facebook does it one way, Google another, and so forth.

A lot of people have probably looked into social planning, but no one has done it very well so far. The execution is going to be all that matters with this, not the fluffy pitch about "social" and all that gunk.

alexsherrick• 15 years ago

I agree with suking, this would be much better as a FB app, something that could be part of your actual profile. It would be nice to see Wall, Info, Photos, Plans

corin_• 15 years ago

What's the advantage over a tweet or a facebook update of "I'm going to be at.." or "I want to go to..." followed by "anyone up for it?"?

marksbren2• 15 years ago

I have thought about this type of service for a while. The problem with Facebook and Twitter is the signal to noise ratio is too low. Your status saying, "I am going to be here, who wants to join" will only be seen by a fraction of your friends & is not necessarily limited to your current geographic location. There is just too much noise.

wferrell• 15 years ago

Hey Mark -- one of the WhereBerry co-founders here -- we think you are right on the money. We also find that having a persistent list of activities you want to do helps make that activity actually happen. Cheers!

theklub• 15 years ago

I actually think now is a good time for a new social network. People are increasingly sick of Facebook.

twakefield• 15 years ago

I think this is pretty useful for broadening your social graph, or as normals call it - making new friends. There seems to be a trend towards using technology to facilitate having experiences with people that aren't your closest friends but that you have some kind of connection to or common interest with (see grubwith.us). Maybe it's a new kind of social dating, although it certainly could be used for making/solidifying platonic relationships. This is obviously useful for someone that moves to a new city or just wants to explore new relationships. Also, it allows you to throw an idea out there to see if there's interest before having to figure out all the scheduling details.

gms• 15 years ago

The best ideas are ones that seem obvious in hindsight. This is one of them.

I look forward to trying it out.

mvkel10• 15 years ago

We tried solving this problem in 2007 with the "plans" functionality in the first iteration of Localist. It's definitely a tough nut to crack, as a website/app will never beat the convenience/accessibility of email.

Here's the biggest issue we ran into, which I'm not sure WhereBerry has solved either:

Let's say Julie wants to see Fast Five (ugh), and she wants to know which of her friends would like to attend. At first, she considers using WhereBerry, as it's designed for such things. But wait, Julie's friend Joe doesn't have an iPhone. And I know her other friend Steve doesn't use social networking sites besides Facebook. Julie resolves to just send an email out to everyone, so she knows she'll get a response from everyone she wants to talk to in one step. Plus, she already has everyone's email address.

See the problem? Julie is forced to isolate her non-WhereBerry friends, or invite some on WhereBerry, and others via email (huge inconvenience). This isn't solving the problem. It's compounding it. Let's say WhereBerry tries to "solve" this problem by allowing Julie to invite non-members via email. We tried that, too. While it sounds good on paper, nobody wants to send their friends an email saying "Hey I want to go to this movie. Join WhereBerry to tell me your response!" In reality, they'll probably text Julie saying "Sure, I can go! Why didn't you just text me?"

It doesn't matter if 95% of your friends are signed up to WhereBerry. You'd need 100% to get people to use it in any consistent form.

It's not a tough problem to discover, as many products have attempted to solve it. But, no company has succeeded, specifically because of the scenario posed above. I wish WhereBerry luck, but I think it needs to solve the problem before being a "cool plan-making utility." There are millions of those.

bricestacey2• 15 years ago

Did you try not requiring sign ups to respond? Invitees should be able to click yes or no and automatically create an account for them.

unfasten• 15 years ago

I had a similar thought as well, except no automatic sign up. What if the sent email had a reply-to address specific to the event?

In the event invite email you could have a short message that tells the person can just reply to the email with a 'Yes/No/Maybe' in the subject and any thoughts or questions in the body. The service would then show the appropriate response on Julie's event. 'Maybe' responses would be marked somehow to show they need manual review and Julie would be able to see the the response text from the email and easily set the status for that person.

To help make it simpler, for people that don't change the subject you could default to a 'maybe/review' response or try language processing on the response text.

Combine this with your idea of including links in the email for a quick response and I think it could work.

mvkel10• 15 years ago

Yes, we did a "token" approach where a non-user could RSVP via yes/no links in the email. Unfortunately, the problem is further up the chain -- the event host needs to know sign ups AREN'T required before they even start making an event. It's more than just a/b testing some "warning" language, too.

nickbaum5• 15 years ago

Hey mvkel, thanks for the great perspective. I totally agree that email is still easier for something like Fast Five.

We see WhereBerry as most useful for less mainstream things (Inside Job, Cambodian restaurant, Lebowski play) where you want to do it, but don't know who might want to join you. WhereBerry helps you gain some momentum, at which point you can organize it via email.

Did you see any of that kind of activity? I'd love to chat briefly if you want to get in touch at feedback@.

mvkel10• 15 years ago

I don't see how my example above is any less relevant if the event is less mainstream.

Ultimately, users want to publish their plans where most of their friends will see them. That is Facebook. Ever think about putting the app on FB, vs. rolling your own?

You, sir, have a chicken and egg problem.

edanm• 15 years ago

Great point of view.

Although it does surprise me a little. Among my friends, I don't think we ever use email to organize things like going to see a concert. Or really, anything.

And I doubt I have more than 10 friends' emails at this point. ALL my communication with (non-business) friends happens on Facebook.

Is it very common among other people to organize things by email?

mvkel10• 15 years ago

Facebook and email are interchangeable terms these days. They both have the same core functionality ;

daviday• 15 years ago

mvkel, what would you say are the best 'cool plan-making utilities'?

akkartik3• 15 years ago

This is hugely monetizable, far more valuable than checkins. Imagine being able to advertise coupons to people who have already indicated willingness to go to your competitor.

kongqiu3• 15 years ago

It is. Things like this are, ahem, the future. Maybe not this iteration, but something like this.

(Goes back to working feverishly on his own flavor of futurecasting...)

mvkel10• 15 years ago

Theoretically, but there have already been enough apps released to gauge viability... there's not much.

Groupon needs several thousand employees just to build the relationships with local businesses, the difference is it could be ANY business.

With this, WhereBerry would need to base their monetization on user activity, which means they need a critical mass of users before they can even approach businesses to ask for their ad money.

akkartik3• 15 years ago

Hmm, but do they need a larger critical mass than fourSquare or even groupon?

akharris• 15 years ago

loving what nick and bill are building - and if you want to join a smoked fish expedition to brooklyn, you really should.

kongqiu3• 15 years ago

Telling me I need to "invite a friend" to gain access is extremely lame at this stage in the game.

Maybe after I've seen the product and am ramping up my use, this would be ok, but before I've seen it? Poor form.

nickbaum5• 15 years ago

Hey kongqiu, this was actually a bug on our side. Until today, we were in closed beta where we required users to have at least one friend on the service.

We removed that requirement last night. Unfortunately we left in a piece of code that redirects you to the thank you page if the login fails. Facebook Auth has been failing intermittently for us all day, so that's likely what happened to you.

If you try again, you should be able to sign up immediately (and if Facebook fails again, you'll see an error screen rather than the confusing thank you screen). Sorry for the inconvenience.

kongqiu3• 15 years ago

Much better -- and good work doing customer service directly on HN!

Cherian_Abraham• 15 years ago

Its not everyday when something we are building ends up on NYTimes as being built by a competitor and that too funded by YC. Its a double whammy though with a cherry on top - of validation.

We still havent been able to figure out how to scale this and answer the questions posed by mvkel. We have not quit our jobs and are building this at our spare time, so that shows we are not committed as Whereberry's founders. But its still cool to know that someone else thinks the "pre-checkin" aspect is pretty interesting. Another startup in the same scene would be Ditto.me. They have a beautiful mobile app as well.

Just wanted to wish these guys the best.

WhereBerry (YC W11): A Social Network for Making Future Plans

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