Have you ever had a truly stimulating or enriching conversation on Facebook?  What about on Twitter?  When was the last time you carefully read a blog posting by a person with whom you tend to disagree?  If you’re like me, the answer is “not often.”  Isn’t it ironic that the technologies that connect us to everyone we’ve ever known have done very little to actually improve our online conversations?

Rather than deepening our connections to the wider world or empowering like-minded people with meaningful modes of interaction, the innovations of the last decade have emphasized self-expression and networking with people you already know.  We read blogs that jive with our worldview, visit news portals with a predictable editorial bent, and we Tweet our opinions with little incentive to fully flesh them out.  To my mind meaningful conversations are those where all parties walk away with a slightly different perspective or attitude.  For this to happen there must be some friction (ideological, emotional, or experiential) as well as a conducive context for actual discussion.

The dominant activities on Facebook are by nature frictionless: sharing photos, status updates, and grooming one’s personal timeline.  Furthermore, the nature of the Facebook social graph precludes much more than a superficial exchange.  Our Facebook network now includes acquaintances, colleagues, close friends, immediate family, and extended family.  We are connected to so many different groups of people it often feels like an awkward dinner party where one doesn’t want to spoil the mood by getting real.   It would be impolite in this context to talk about serious topics such as politics or religion, because they tend to divide as much as bring people together.  You have to have a safe context for such discussions.

As a response to this generic audience problem, Google+’s introduced “circles,” whereby a user can sort their contacts into groups.  This innovation, Google+ argues, allows users to share what’s really on their minds, because the audience for their statements can be hand-picked.  While one could argue this addresses an obvious shortcoming of Facebook, it still does not address the larger issue that people don’t operate this way in real life.  Social context is often completely unconscious to the person, yet they adapt their language and behavior instinctually.  Asking a person to deliberately choose the appropriate audience every time they say anything is stifling and unnatural.

Twitter also lacks for meaningful conversation much of the time due to a lack of friction and the wrong context — namely, “here is where I share my every thought.”  In this way it does little to facilitate a real back and forth of ideas.  The 140 character limit on all Tweets, for example, does not afford enough space for thoughtful exchange.  Second, there are few social cues on Twitter that would allow one to assess the impact of their statement on others.  We take these cues for granted in normal conversation (a nod of the head, a distracted look, gesturing, etc.), but they are extremely important in the exchange of ideas, especially in preserving the tone and attention necessary for a substantive discussion.

This irony is central to contemporary social media: we spend more time networking and grooming our social identities than we do in actual meaningful discussion.  In this way, our contemporary discourse via “social” media is not unlike an institutionalized Aspberger’s syndrome, characterized by “difficulties in social interactions and often accompanied by restricted or repetitive patterns of behavior and interests”

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.  Once upon a time when the Web was new, we had things like AOL and IRC chat rooms.  In these places one could encounter the world, interact with strangers over shared interests, and develop ties to others half a world away.  These old-school chat rooms shared a lot in common with great sporting events; people from all walks of life would come together to enjoy and celebrate what they have in common, whether it’s a sports team or an interest in the Presidential election. 

There are elements of this initial experiment that can and should be revisited online.  With the rise of mobile devices and the readily-available confirmation of real-identity via platforms like Facebook, we can once again imagine a network where people meet to discuss their shared interests in a high-fidelity and immediate way.  And given the increasingly divisive political, social, and economic environment we live in, we need more than tools for self-expression and the cataloguing of friends, we need tools that bring people together for real and substantive discussion.

A network that can balance the right amount of conversational friction inside a positive and focussed social context can fundamentally reshape online discourse, and thereby contribute something that the world desperately needs at this moment.

————
Sean Zehnder is the Co-Founder of Meeps, a new topic-based mobile social network, currently available in the iPhone AppStore.  Sean grew up in Lexington and Versailles, graduated with Honors and as a Gaines Fellow in the Humanities at UK.  Sean later earned his Master’s at Georgetown University and has been building and studying social media ever since.

We wanted to do something fun to launch Meeps, and what’s better than free stuff that is awesome? We’re giving away a custom Meeps iPhone 4S & custom Meeps Beats Studio’s by Dre as the Grand Prize. We’re pretty bummed not to be getting these ourselves…

We’re also giving away 50 First Place Prizes, some t-shirts that we’ve coined “The Chat Rat Edition”. And also up for grabs is a SWEET iPhone sticker that fits your 4/4S. These iPhone stickers are so super nice, and can’t thank our friends over at Sticker Mule enough for whipping up such fantastic custom stickers.

Check out The Every Share Counts Contest

Google’s mission is clearly stated – “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” I was reading a great post a friend, Gerry Campbell, put up this morning titled “We Need a New Google. This One is Broken.” It does an excellent job of explaining why Google is making some bone-headed strategic decisions in response to the pressures of competition.

To sum it up, Gerry is calling Google out for failing at it’s mission, for departing from their core values, and points out that history tells us great companies will fail when they forget their founding vision. He also goes into a bit of detail as to why some decisions Google is making right now poisons their own well.

His post got me thinking about how the world’s information is organized today, how relevant is the search engine as we’ve come to know it?

The Search Plus Your World (SPYW) product from Google is a clear stake in the ground. Google wants to change how their search works by adding it’s own Google+ social data results to what were once objective and comprehensive results. Obviously, the objectivity and comprehensiveness of results is tainted when ones own product is given priority.

It’s clear search as we know it is less relevant today, the world’s information is generally pretty organized. We can now find better information around specific results through services like Foursquare, Quora, etc. And these services highlight a fatal flaw in Google’s founding mission – Google did not consider people.

Organizing the World’s People

When Google set out to organize the world’s information, they could structure the data they were mining: addresses, phone numbers, businesses, residences, news, blogs, etc. The information on web pages has some kind of predetermined bucket you can drop it in most of the time. 

That’s not so much the case when you consider the problem of organizing people, what are the buckets you put people in?

Facebook is certainly the juggernaut in this space. Approaching 1 billion members – they have captured more real identity information and “people” data than anyone. But I want to pose a question as to how we think about this data.

Is your identity on Facebook an accurate representation of who you really are?

Who you are goes far beyond structured data points like where you went to high school, your hometown, the drunk squirrel video you liked… just because you went to Lancaster Catholic High School and so did I doesn’t mean we have any reason to be connected. Because there is nothing more than a coincidence which connects us.

Google’s Page Rank is (was?) brilliant in organizing the world’s information. It removes coincidence and creates a valid results by looking far beyond one point of data. It compares billions of points and RANKS results. And it works (worked?) : )

Ranking people is a slippery slope. Klout is catching a ton of shit for doing this algorithmically, and not all that well frankly. Klout’s approach is flawed IMO. The data Klout is starting with is not pure - it lacks the right signals to “rank” beyond an arbitrary popularity score.

Popularity is just a terrible measuring stick of true influence. Our number of friends or followers is irrelevant, what’s relevant is the relativity of influence an individual can have in a any community or group they find interesting. No shit Justin Beiber’s tweets have more reach than a dude with 267 followers, it’s foolish to even measure.

Looking at small pockets of individuals who share an interest is the most effective way to organize and understand people. It’s pure. It allows for natural human interaction. People can rank each other – removing the creepy algorithmic classification.

Connecting the world through shared interests will organize the world’s people meaningfully.

@mranauro

Yesterday I had a conversation with one of my mentors, he is about as sans bull shit as they come and I sincerely love the dude for his candid qualities. So yesterday he jammed his verbal fist into the side of my face (again) and when he did – it hurt like a m’fer. 

But it was powerful after a little reflection on the conversation. While tough to internalize at times – he made an impression (again). It’s amazing how great conversation can stimulate new thinking and stoke fires way more effectively than staying in your own head.

What’s perplexing about conversation is that if the ones participating have some sense of shared interest—a common thread for being there and taking part in what’s being discussed—friction can actually enhance the outcome for all.

Tension is not always bad. Often times, in the right sized dose, it can create something great.

There are varying degrees of tension created in conversation. I think most can relate to the infinite loop of misery and despair we get spun into when at a family event and Uncle Ass Hat decides to beat us stone-dead with his “world views.” I don’t feel all that enriched post the preach session.

Pretty simple explanation for why those conversations rarely end well – there is no common thread or shared interest. Oh and your uncle is a dick.

Now think about a random encounter you might have with some peeps at a concert. You’re watching one of the bands and the set ends so you start chatting about the show with the group next to you. As the conversation goes on you agree and disagree over what band is best, which album was best… whatever. You decide to grab a drink with them and start chatting more with one of them and find out you both grew up in the same home town, ran cross country against each other and were at some of the same shows back in the day. 

Now think about it in terms of posting status updates. I’ve never had one serendipitous interaction or discovery through a status update, and that’s how many of us now share and communicate. Frictionless sharing is valuable but it’s too disposable and often times too self-centered.

Five minutes of conversation can reveal more about a person than their last fifty status updates. 

Real connections and communities take shape through positive dynamics over time. We build relationships with people through shared interests and shared experiences.

Conversation is the super glue that holds communities together.

@mranauro

We’re pretty fond of these t-shirts. Want one? Stay tuned…

Just because we grew up with the internet we think the internet is all grown up. Sherry Turkle

Twenty years ago today, on August 6th, 1991, Sir Berners-Lee published the first website – it marked the birth of the commercialized web. While the internet turns twenty today, lets look back on how the web arrived here and predict a bit of its future.

The internet is brand new, its modern incarnation, a short burst from commercialization in the early 1990s. It bares resemblance to the popularization of television in the 1940s — both have changed the way we think and act as humans. 

Evolving at a rapid pace, as evidenced by recent major social network announcements from Google and Facebook, the web is beginning to mature. But to understand where the next decade may lead us, we must first recall how we got here.

The Founding

The internet began simply: a point-to-point communication tool between mainframes and terminals. It was a rudimentary way to connect machines to one another in order to accomplish a task and did not achieve anything resembling scale until the 1980s. It took roughly 40 years to reach commercialization – allowing network access to anyone interested.

The initial creation of network infrastructure and architecture is, unsurprisingly, only a small piece of the story behind the founding of what we call “the internet” today.  The years leading up to commercialization can be looked back upon as the creation of vacant plots of land for us to inhabit. We were given access to open space on the network and, if we decided to stake a claim, we were able to share whatever we wanted with others in near real-time. This ability to access something from an anonymous individual several thousand miles away felt truly magical.

When the “land” was opened for anyone to inhabit in the early to mid ’90s, content was being created around any topic imaginable. Was it good content? Not exactly; most was rubbish. The internet was a completely blank canvas back then (can you imagine?) and it took several years of use and learning to understand what one could create that had value to others. We’re still continuously learning how to create valuable and enriching content for the internet.

Those years were a gold rush for those seeking to capitalize on the virtual land they came to inhabit. The potential was crystal clear – as an individual you were now connected to the entire world and, if you created something of value, you became a king of the digital territory you claimed.

The Kings

While many were focused on the creation of content, a problem surfaced almost immediately: the need to organize an expanding sea of information before it essentially became worthless. At the time, there were quite a few search engines trying to solve this problem: Lycos, Excite and Yahoo. The first batch focused on categorization of content, kind of like the index to a book. While categorization certainly helped, it ultimately didn’t work. This methodology failed to prioritize the best – or correct – content based on your intended search.

The first king then took rule: Google. It was clear to everyone using Google’s search that it was superior to the categorization method. Its clever algorithm, PageRank, analyzed relationships between websites in an effort to solve the problem of understanding what you were after. Google’s impressive search results were based on the natural network effect surrounding the piece of content they served you. Many existing search engine companies believed young Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s “Google” was so good, they couldn’t buy the technology, because it would destroy their business model. The existing search engines couldn’t have been more right.

The organization of content may have become such a critical utility in the late ’90s because the network was still very immature. Its infrastructure and ability to connect individuals was so painfully slow and unreliable that we needed to create destinations. These were places we could go to learn, be entertained, or communicate with one another – destinations that were permanent in their existence.

Google search became our relay switch to these destinations. We spent a small fraction of our time actually using Google’s utility, as we were quickly given a path to the content we were looking for. Given this limited window of exposure to users, how was Google going to become a revenue generating business?

Brin and Page were initially reluctant to introduce an advertising-funded revenue model to their search engine, citing in a research paper, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – “We [Google] have a strong goal to push more [search engine] development and understanding into the academic realm.” And later in Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives – “But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”

We all know their search engine today is not without advertising; in fact, it’s their core revenue model and does quite well for them. But kudos to Page and Brin. While they did introduce advertising, Google makes it clear what are ads and what are natural search results.

Google’s initial intent seems genuine: to organize the world’s data and, in turn, facilitate the scaling of the web. They have since achieved that goal, creating a latticework for content creation and discoverability. The introduction of keyword-based advertising also hinted at how their algorithm was working, which opened the door to game their system.

While Google has been working hard to refine their business and expand their product offerings, the infrastructure and architecture of the web has also been evolving – in large part due to Google’s efforts. Their hardware and software technology is one of the single reasons the web has scaled beyond comprehension and, ironically, why they might end up passing the crown to a new autocratic ruler: Facebook.

Facebook has reached gigantic scale and has essentially stiffed Google by not allowing them access to the mind boggling amount of data Facebook is mining. In doing so, they cut off a critical signal Google has relied on for the past ~15 years – hyperlink structure.

Mark Zuckerberg, on par with Page and Brin, also initially did not want to rely on advertising for Facebook’s  revenue model. He believed it would impede his goal of connecting the world. Of course, we now have ads on Facebook, yet another concession made by a king to cultivate a viable business.

As the internet continues to evolve, we are witnessing the true potential of the web come to fruition – connectedness. We no longer need to rely on destinations and search engines to find what we’re looking for; we now rely on our friends and individuals who share and communicate with us. It feels more natural to be connected to those with similar thoughts and interests, rather than relying on an impersonal search box to give us hundreds of options that might be right.

It is true that Google Search has faced a noise problem from spammers and those gaming their algorithm. But the new potential king, Facebook, has a completely unique noise problem.

Facebook was created to connect you to those you know, regardless of whether or not you share true friendships or interests. This raises a series of compelling questions: in a closed news feed ecosystem, how will they ensure we’re seeing what’s most relevant to us? Should my interests really be limited to information provided by those I already know? Does who you know trump who you should know?

New Republic – The Decade Ahead

We have entered the individual-centric era of the web – the little internet. We are becoming hyper-connected to whatever and whomever we’re interested in. Infrastructure and technology have reached incredible scale and reliability, and the initial goal of the internet – to connect everyone in the world together - is finally in sight.

It’s interesting to note that the complexity which underlies the existence of the web today is actually simplifying the experience for those using it. Through apps and mobile devices which we are now using most often to access what interests us, we are given the ability to easily compartmentalize our digital lives. A fundamental change in how we use the web has begun to unfold – the essence of a paradigm shift. 

There are many scrappy startups working on solving this new problem of connecting the world through physical location, interests, conversation, and proximity to others. This is an extremely fun and enlightening time to be working on making the web a better place. But to solve these new problems, those engineering solutions must design an evolved way of interacting with the world around us; simply porting an analogy from our physical world will not be enough.

I believe we’re about to enter the most innovative decade the internet has known and, in a sense, come full-circle back to the original vision of the web: a point-to-point communication tool. While Google, Facebook and Twitter are certainly leading the race to innovate, I prefer to root for the underdogs.

@mranauro

I’m not sure anyone strives to be a bore: but let me tell you, sweet reader, Facebook is making us fucking boring. Facebook is a self edited version of our real lives – sharing moments, places, things, the food on our plates – and in summation it’s all dreadfully *meh*. Now, I’m not saying you, or I for that matter, are a bore in our real lives, Facebook is simply making us appear that way. 

“Why?” you ask. “Facebook just facilitates our offline friendships in an online system, Mat – you idiot.”

Well, sort of. But through this system, we edit ourselves. We’re afraid to post certain things because in our mind saying something that creates tension is worse than not saying it at all – and that’s because our posts are all tied to our real identities. You can’t be – even a little bit – anonymous on Facebook.

Being anonymous while interacting with others, in the physical world, is also tough to do. Your interaction with a person or group is typically face-to-face and that inherently sets up some boundaries, respect and awareness of the person or people you’re with. Ex: If you bitch slap a fool in the real world – expect consequences. 

But…

Do these *rules* which surface in face-to-face interactions reveal our true self or one that is only adapting to the people around us? Could it be that anonymity is what establishes reality in our hyper-connected world? 

Facebook has built itself on our real identities; we give them our real names, phone numbers, addresses, hometowns, interests – but does Facebook create an environment where we can speak our minds freely? Their system helps regulate behavior through the convention of politeness.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for being polite, that’s just my personality, but certainly not something I want to adhere to every waking moment.

For example yesterday, I really wanted to lay on a thick pile of sarcasm by calling out a friend for buying a pair of those Five Finger toe shoe monstrosities, but alas, couldn’t bring myself to be a jerk on Facebook and endure the lashing I would receive in return. So while Facebook still serves me ads for these god damn toe shoes (assuming because I live in Boulder, CO) they have no idea I’ve got absolutely zero interest in the shoes – all because of the cultural checks and balances they’ve established within their system.

I find it comical that the way we interact on Facebook edits out so much of who we actually are and replaces it with mild personas of who we want others to think we are.

Facebook is not as prevalent in other cultures, most notably, and sharply contrasting, is in Japan. The Japanese web culture is very private and typically users will hide behind nicknames and pseudonyms online. The Facebook platform is not built for this type of interaction.

I believe a balance is needed to solve for the polarizing effects created by online and offline communication; you’re either too accountable for your actions or not accountable enough. In face-to-face social interactions you have nonverbal cues and emotions that surface to help convey thoughts and intent to one another, while online relies on how we convey intent through nuance in writing.

Nuance is very hard to get across, thus, why I didn’t light up my friend for his funny choice in footwear. It was too much work and I didn’t want to edit myself.

We must be accountable for what we say and do on or offline but we shouldn’t allow it to get in the way of expressing our true interests and beliefs.

I crave a more colorful, enlightening and genuine dialog.

Later…
@mranauro

We’re fortunate to have such a great startup mixer here in Boulder, CO. The Boulder Beta events are ridiculous fun thanks to Tim Falls, Absinthe House, the volunteers and all the killer companies showing off their technology (still bummed I missed forkly).

In t-minus 7 days, on June 14th, Meeps will be showing off a little bit of what we’ve got cooking. You’ll also be able to reserve your Meeps username at the event – so if you want to be known as “ab” or just “B” or “John” come say HI and we’ll hook you up. 

Tim just let us know that an iPad 2 is also up for grabs – check it out. Thanks to Softlayer and SendGrid for ponying up such a sweet prize… dare I say… this may be the best Boulder Beta to date. AND check out the other Boulder tech you’ll get to demo: FourthSegment, Geronimo, Glö, GroupHigh, Napkin Labs, Prediculous & ReportGrid.

We can’t wait to hang and show you what we’re working on. 

Many apps are dedicated to tying physical location to an interactive social experience: Color, Yobongo, Grubwithus. They require an active group of participants in your proximity to offer a useful or fun experience, several require massive network effect – already in place – to work at all.

I admire what those companies are working on, they are forging new ground, as we all try to learn “what’s next?” 

While location and your proximity to others is important in determining what your social intent could be, it is a far cry to say it can stand on it’s own. The “close talking” image above, while it may seem for pure comedic effect, is actually there to illustrate a point. Many “serendipitous” social apps fail to take into consideration that proximity will only amplify an awkward or less than ideal social experience.

Where you are can only enhance a social encounter if you and others share the same intent while being there. Inferring intent is extremely difficult to do – and usually ends up doing a diservice to the person using your technology.

A social experience must LEAD with intent in order to understand who you are and what you’re interested in to facilitate the best experience. Because while being exposed to more social encounters through technology can increase the chances for serendipity – without knowing intent – will only guarantee you have more random encounters with strangers you’ve got nothing in common with.

Later…
Mat

There’s a lot of hype around the word “group” and its implementation within technology products as of late. It’s an interesting phenomenon and may be related to the greater ability we now have to connect with others in real-time. The speed of communication and connectedness certainly has allowed more sub-cultural groups to form and organize. 

What’s most interesting is that while we have the ability to quickly broadcast and loosely organize through existing utilities and apps, we lack the ability to compartmentalize some of those interactions as you might do with people you know and actually hang out with. What’s missing?

Here is a brief example to illustrate a point :

Lets assume the following – You’re a football fan, your team is the Philadelphia Eagles and you watch games on a weekly basis.

1. [Scenario 1] You live near a bunch of friends who also love the Eagles. You meet up on Sundays and watch the games together.
2. [Scenario 2] You live far away from your friends who follow the Eagles and you very rarely watch a game with them.
3. [Scenario 3] You’re the black sheep. None of your online or offline friends are Eagles fans so, you watch the game solo.

So what group interactions unfold in each of these examples?

1. [Scenario 1] You’ve formed relationships and social bonds with these friends through your shared interest(s). You’ve developed a Sub Social Network with this group based on something you all enjoy participating in. You’re having a compartmentalized social experience (Group Cohesion).
2. [Scenario 2] You have also formed relationships and bonds with these friends through a shared interest(s) and a Sub Social Network might be formed, but the participation is fragmented. You have options to socially interact during a game but it’s difficult and not all that social. You’re having a fragmented social experience (Group Dynamics are unformed).
3. [Scenario 3] You’re screwed. Just kidding… kind of. You do have options if you want to socially participate with other Eagles fans but it’s difficult and not a replication of either of the above experiences. You’re not having a social experience (No Group Present).

In Scenario 1, you can imagine the fun someone with that interest would have in that type of social situation: awkward chest bumping, plates of fried *things* and beer, lots of beer, all fueling the excitement.

Scenario 2 and 3 are much different. Of course you might be excited by the game but you can’t easily share your emotions with other folks. 

But that’s just one example. What’s intriguing is the possibility of enhancing the social experience in each scenario, which can be mapped to almost anything you’re interested in.

If you were to plug-in other interests things get very compelling. Say you’re interested in road biking, gardening, the park you’re sitting in, the new car you want to buy or the city you’re going to visit on vacation; the idea of forming a group around an interest now becomes extremely powerful. 

Uniting individuals – through an ephemeral or enduring interest – is a truly Social Network.

Later…
Mat

We totally @LoveBoulder, who doesn’t, right? Tomorrow some serious startup shit begins to go down in Boulder, CO: Boulder Startup Week. Several days of meetups, drinks, tech, conversation of above average intelligence and a table tennis tournament at Napkin Labs. The BSW crew and Ef Rodriguez have outdone themselves.

Gonna be excellent.

We at Meeps have a few things planned, so keep an eye out for us. We’ll be around and we’d like to say “hi” and show you what we’re working on. We’re also helping out with the closing party at Napkin Labs, you’d be sorry if you missed it, the awesome quotient is through the roof.

6pm, May 21st at Napkin Labs – 1877 Broadway, Suite 701, Boulder, CO 80302

Other awesome sponsors include the illustrious:

Silicon Valley Bank
SendGrid
Threadless
Techstars
StatsMix

See y’all around town,
Meeps

Lately I feel like social networks are hard work. There’s a level of effort required to dig through a feed filled with things you’re not all that interested in. This past weekend I felt over it. I found one post memorable; the rest just amplifying the noise.

Here’s the ONE post of hundreds that caught my attention:

Awesome post, indeed. But, damn, shouldn’t the ratio of interesting to not interesting be at the very least a bit more balanced?

Something stood out while I browsed what my “kind-of friends” were posting – my social networks really have nothing to do with me because the people I’m interested in and actually friends with are not active anymore.

I’m curious if others feel the same or have encountered a similar sense of disinterest while scanning their feeds? My “real” Facebook friends are long gone and Twitter has become a re-tweet culture or a source for news, not social communication.

Maybe the art of conversation is dying off. Is passively watching what others say more compelling than contributing to a conversation with them?

I don’t think so.

The ability to discover an interesting person, thought, place, etc – through social interaction – feels missing to me. 

Later.
Mat

First things first. We have been completely floored by the support, help and hookups from our friends and Boulder crew. We absolutely could not have pulled off announcing Meeps in such a fun way without them: Tim Falls, Kenny Kim & a shadowy entity that will remain unnamed.

Truly, we are super grateful for their generosity to help with what we’re doing. So a very big THANK YOU to them.

Meeps is all about spontaneous conversation, so we wanted to announce what we’re doing in a way that would hopefully spark a little chit-chat. We decided to create physical (mega-awesome-kidrobot-custom-figure) invites to our first private beta happening in a couple months and Boulder Beta is where we decided to kick things off, cause’ it’s a great event.

We made 100 invites… plus a few super secret special ones too =). So if you happened to snag one, kudos, you’re going to be one of the first hundred to beta test what we’re building (please sign up to participate). If you didn’t get a beta invite, don’t fret, you can also sign up to be part of our private betas. There are several going down this summer.

If you didn’t get to see any of the invites we gave out, here’s a behind the scenes look into how we made them:

In Progress:

Finished sans Meeps icon:

The Super Special Invites:

Finished Invites – The Candy Colored Army:

We had a blast making these little dudes and hope everyone that got one enjoys them as much as we do.

Later!
Team Meeps

^{Image via: 3ERD}

Hi there and welcome to our first blog post. We thought we’d share a (tiny) peek at what we’ve got rockin’ here at Meeps.

Here are a few things we’d like you to know about us :

1. Who’s making Meeps? Just a couple guys in Boulder, CO who love making sweet technology for the world to enjoy. We also like tasty beer, sporting contests and many classic nerd activities.


2. What is Meeps? Meeps plugs you into real-time conversations by what you and others have in common. You don’t need friends or followers; you’ll meet people who are thinking like you. 


3. Why are we building Meeps? It’s our belief that who you don’t know but share a common interest with is equally as awesome as following the friends and people you really care about. 


4. Why care about Meeps? Well this one’s really up to us. It’s our job to make something you care about. We care about Meeps because we want a better way to interact with people and the world around us that is fast, simple, fun and useful.


5. When can you get your paws on Meeps? We’re doing a few rounds of closed betas over the summer, so some of you will start seeing it very soon and your feedback is going to help shape Meeps in a big way. Stay tuned by following our blog and feeds. You can sign up to be notified of our closed betas on our homepage : meeps.com.

We’ll continue to share with you our progress and thoughts, along the way welcoming contributions from any of you who are interested in making Meeps something awesome for all.

Later!
Team Meeps