As the old adage goes: who you are with is often more important than what you are doing.
The founders of Kickin.it — a College alumnus and two Stanford University graduates — have taken this advice to heart, and created a website and an iPhone application that not only allow users to broadcast what they are doing, but also who they are with.
The interface of the product features clickable buttons, bearing text such as “In Class” or “Drinking.” Users click applicable buttons or customize their own, and then tag friends who are present.
College alumnus Jeff Byun, along with Stanford graduates Henry Lee and Ambert Ho are launching a private beta version this week at Penn, Northwestern University and Stanford. The website and application will be instantly available to Penn students, with a secret URL of kickin.it/penn.
Byun met Lee in California’s famed Silicon Valley through a mutual friend. Both wanted to work in a social-networking based start-up and drew from their own experiences in college to come up with the idea behind Kickin.it.
“I was curious to know what my friends were doing and also maybe I wanted to meet up with them,” Byun said. “It would have been awesome to just open my phone and see what my friends were doing.”
Jonah Berger, an assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School who studies social contagion, thinks that people in general are interested in what others are doing, but is wary of Kickin.it’s premise.
“My question is: why would someone use this service instead of another one?” he said.
College sophomore Marissa Seto agrees. “It’s not really that original,” she said of the idea. “I feel like if people are inclined to do that sort of thing they will have already done it on Twitter or Facebook.”
The founders of Kickin.it believe that the application offers something that Facebook and Twitter cannot, and point to the relative intimacy of their application as a unique characteristic. Followers on Kickin.it are instantly generated according to a user’s friends on Facebook. In the future, users will be able to further edit their list of followers.
“Twitter and Facebook are becoming increasingly cluttered with links and what people are thinking,” Lee said. “There is too much clutter and [Facebook and Twitter] are not optimized to do what we do, which is to hang out with your real friends and find out who to hang out with or what to do in the context of your real life.”
Eric Bradlow, co-director of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, thinks the idea has potential, but wonders how it will drive traffic due to its similarities to other established social networking sites. He does, however, have advice for the founders of Kickin.it.
“Test the model out, try it, get some feedback, be flexible and adaptable,” he said. “Listen to the voice of the customer in terms of the characteristics and features that people want and be ready to adapt as needed.”
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