SXSWORLD

Finding Missed Connections Drives New Ambient Social Apps by Timothy Varner O you connect with more people by notifying you of potential personal and professional contacts while you sip coff ee in a cafe, enjoy a concert or pass time while waiting at a gate before boarding a fl ight. Th at is, ambient social is networking organized by geo-location and powered by chance. A short perusal of web reviews of ambient social apps reveals words know or might want to know are nearby. If you are not familiar with this type of app, give Highlight, Glancee, Sonar, Banjo, Intro, echoecho or Kismet a try. Th e promise of ambient social apps is straightforward: they will help ne of the newest innovations to emerge from the tech startup community is known as the ambient social app. Simply put, these social discovery apps notify users when people they Nick Bicanic such "creepy" and "lack of privacy." Privacy is a popular theme these days. Whether the discussion is about airport security, Google's data harvesting, or networking with people in your geographic area, there is a overarching concern among consumers about how much privacy one should sacrifi ce in exchange for technological conveniences. Echoecho co-founder and CEO Nick Bicanic recently discussed how his company is trying to balance the interplay between the public and private spheres. From his perspective, this conversation should be gov- erned by the acknowledgement that "the amount of time you struggle to meet up and coordinate life with the friends and business colleagues you do know far outweighs the amount of time you fi nd yourself upset because of someone's awareness of your physical location." Rather than having a solution that is looking for a problem, Bicanic insists that ambient social apps genuinely overcome the problem of missing connections or, worse yet, not even knowing important con- nections were available to you. "If you make a product that doesn't have a use, the privacy consideration is irrelevant. But when I think of prod- ucts, I think of solutions to people's problems," he says. To spotlight this problem, consider the following data point provided by Bicanic: "Th ere are 100 billion 'Where are you?' text messages sent every year. Th is is in the U.S. alone." Ambient social companies are betting that in time, the advantage of creating real-life social and business connectivity will greatly over- shadow privacy concerns. In Bicanic's estimation, the user experience sword cuts both ways. For all those who would describe ambient social as "creepy," there are those who would not enjoy the product if they were subjected to design that over-scrutinized privacy concerns. "We feel like it's our duty as software developers to make software which actually has no privacy settings. It doesn't need any. You only share your location with people you explicitly choose to." Although echoecho allows users to set privacy controls on a friend-by-friend basis, not all ambient social apps give their users the same controls. that's private by design but all the more useful and usable because of it … Privacy should not be an obstacle to clarity or speed, and users should not be forced to endure complicated privacy settings that they will neither read nor understand. "Th at's why we built echoecho to be a private location sharing system 38 SXSW ORLD / M AY 2012 " We feel like it's our duty as software developers to make software that's private by design but all the more useful and usable because of it …" "Overall I would not say our development decisions are governed by privacy, but I choose my words carefully here," explains Bicanic. "Our features and product are defi ned and governed by solving user prob- lems. But the way in which we implement these features is guided by the trifecta of usability, privacy and battery life [concerns]. Ultimately [echoecho] is judged by the utility of the fi nal product." One wonders if those who object to ambient social apps because they fi nd them creepy should actually concern these app developers. Th ose consumers are not likely to use one of these apps in any case, no matter how thickly the privacy settings are applied. Could developers ever allay their concerns? Instead, companies in the social discovery world are essentially treating use of their app as a kind of opt-in agreement to publish their users' geo-locations. And their hope is that this information is useful enough to help professional and social networks grow. ■

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