Last week Jason and Dave were down at the Twitter Chirp conference in San Francisco. While they were there they showed off a new app that the MashedIn team developed, which we’re calling Flutter.
It’s a mobile app for location-aware phones. Suppose you find yourself in an unfamiliar place – maybe at a conference in a faraway city – heck, say you’re at the Chirp conference in San Francisco. So you pull out your iPhone (or whatever), point your browser to Flutter, and bingo – up comes a list of people who’ve recently tweeted (or accessed Flutter) using their mobile phones in the vicinity of the conference center.
But this is where we seem to lose people. The exciting thing about the MashedIn technology that powers Flutter is that it reveals connections across social networks. For instance, if you’re a Facebook user who’s never heard of Twitter, you might nevertheless discover you’re connected, through a mutual friend, to a Twitter guy who isn’t on Facebook.
So let’s take another look at that list of people who’ve recently tweeted from the conference center. Right at the top of the list you’ll see the people you’re connected to – your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn contacts, sure – but also people you don’t know directly but whom, based on mutual connections, you might want to meet.
What you do with this information is up to you. The Techi blog speculated that Flutter could be useful for stalking people. Well, I guess…but if Flutter is the best stalking method you can come up with, you really need some stalking lessons.
No, we think the main benefit of Flutter is that you can meet new people in strange locations. You might not know anyone at the Chirp conference in San Francisco, but think about how many connections Flutter could potentially reveal…
Maybe Flutter reveals that you’re connected via your ex-boss Cindy to a fellow conference-goer named Amber. So you fire Amber a message – “Hey, I used to work for Cindy. You want to grab a coffee and talk about that freaky hair-helmet of hers?”
Will it work? Maybe, maybe not…but it beats slouching back to your hotel room to watch old Friends episodes on TBS.
Before Jason and Dave left for San Francisco I dashed off a press release to see if we could generate some buzz for Flutter. I guess in retrospect I should’ve spent a little more time obsessing over the wording, because some people, like the guys at Techi, seemed to miss the point.
But we’ll win ‘em over. Just watch us.
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