The Online Social Network with an Offline Focus
AtThePool.com is an online social network that just recently started up. This network caters to people looking to get away from hours of browsing through posts from hundreds of “friends” on facebook and instead wish to make friends with local people with similar interests. The site parallels online dating in its criteria of pairing people: location, history, interests, and intents. In fact, the site can be used for dating if that intent is selected, but the main focus is on making new friends. Its other emphasis is taking online social networks offline. For this purpose, the site is very simplified, allowing for little more than finding and talking to new people (compared to facebook’s dozens of functions), so that one spends more time hanging out with one’s new friends than browsing through them.
At The Pool compares itself to a “host” of a party, bringing together two people with similar interests. In a technical sense, the network could be pictured as many edges emanating from the central “host” node. If links are defined by At The Pool’s main criteria instead of the conventional positive and negative interactions (since web engines don’t tend to hold grudges against people), then the triadic closure property can be used to connect people with similar location, history, interests, and intents. This differs from Facebook in the sense that, as mentioned in class, it is very hard to get to know new people because the pool of ones’ potential friends is limited to what the mutual friend knows about them. In class it was discussed that number of users in an online network gives the network its longevity–with a few exceptions of course. At The Pool can dodge this obstacle by focusing on gaining users in certain locations. As tumblr and friendster started out as tools used by a select few communities, as those communities grew in size, the number of communities involved also grew as a result of the multiple interests of the users. In this sense, total size does not matter as much as the size of the pools for the site to work efficiently. At The Pool is already booming at Cornell, so dive in!
http://www.atthepool.com/about
Very cool, thanks!