adrianmott.com

Every social circle is different it seems.  People have their work, agendas and times when they want to be social and hang out.  When my group of friends here in Boston and other places I’ve lived made plans to hang out, we typically do the planning via the phone, email or text.  I usually didn’t put these plans into my calendar, as they were things to look forward to (and therefore did not have the trouble of forgetting about).

I can honestly say that services like Facebook and Twitter don’t serve me much value with keeping track of things going on with friends.  Sure, Facebook enables you to create and manage major events that are going on with your friends, but it isn’t the place I go to organize a BBQ for Friday night or a bike ride on Sunday.

This is where Cambridge startup Sponty aims to add a lot of value.  According to a founder of the company, Sponty is focused on “bringing back more old school sociability, that is, real face-time with your closest friends.”  In theory, I love the concept, and I think there are many places where this application could be very useful.

The web application enables you to login and see a sort of calendar form that has your friend’s events on it.  You can then enter in times during the day and week when you are ‘hangoutable’ (their word, not mine) by posting things you would like to do – grab some beers, play some tennis, go skiing, etc…Your friends can then check on these ideas and join you.  It certainly seems simple and much more efficient than writing an email to 20 friends about doing something Saturday night, have 10 write back, then realize you forgot to include 5 people…let’s be honest, there’s nothing too efficient about that.

But here in lies the problem with Sponty – the tool is only useful to me if I can convince a large percentage of my group of friends to start using it.  Thus right now the tool provides me no value really (the featured feeds are nice, but not really my thing) and convincing my friends to use new web apps isn’t always the easiest thing to do (I probably have 5 that use Twitter) and I can’t blame them – adopting and learning new technology takes time and sometimes doesn’t work for people.

The being said though, there are many scenarios I can think of where Sponty could really be useful.  The first place is at schools and universities where kids have LARGE social circles and want to connect themselves with as many fun options as possible.  The idea of being in school and looking at what 50 of my friends are doing on a given day and choose from a bunch of fun sounding ideas is cool.  So if Sponty can figure out how to market themselves in the social college scene, they could have a lot of success.

The web application and company itself is fairly young and is working to build a mobile app for iPhone and other mobile platforms.  They’ve hosted their app with Google App Engine, who in turn takes care of their authentication (you can’t use Sponty unless you have a Google account).  Something I both applaud and worry about as they grow, especially if they decide that schools are their first target market.

We’ll see how they do moving forward – it’s certainly a tough space to get into as they try to tiptoe the line between social networking services like Facebook and location services like Loopt and Where.  And yes, I’ll plug the service to my friends and see if it catches on. Give it a shot yourself!