It’s Friday night, and you’re looking to have a good time.
You’ve texted a few friends, but no response. You’ve heard through the grapevine that Lambda Chi is hosting a dance party, and one of your classmates mentioned he is having a housewarming out on Ridge.
It’s 11:47 p.m. Knowing how quickly things wrap up at Northwestern, you need to make a decision about where to go.
“Create a hangout in the Kickin.it application,” says Jeff Byun, Kickin.it co-founder and MIT alum (MBA ’08). “Say your friends take a picture of a party. Your reaction might be, ‘Oh, looks like there’s a lot of cute guys,’ and decide to go.”
Kickin.it, a new Web and mobile device start-up, is launching a private beta at Northwestern this coming week. Here’s how it works. Log in using your school e-mail addresses and link the website to your Facebook. Then type what you’re doing now or will be doing soon. Last two steps: tag friends and post.
Northwestern students can access the website through a “secret” URL. After signing up, iPhone owners can download the Kickin.it application through iTunes, while non-iPhone users should keep their eyes peeled for a mobile version of the website in the next few weeks.
After five months of development and production, the application is ready for launch, say co-founders Ambert Ho and Henry Lee. They decided which objects and interactions needed to be on the server before building an early prototype of the mobile Web. This allowed for a feel of the user experience, says Ho, software engineer and Stanford alum (BS ‘06), who then tweaked the prototype into its current state.
“The application is very simple,” Byun says. “The main thing is seeing what your friends are doing in real time. You can create a hangout and comment within the application. Message someone. Take a photo.”
It carries a bit of the flavor of Facebook Places or Foursquare. But Ho says this Northwestern-centric application focuses on what your friends are doing, not where they are.
“In college, your location doesn’t change that much, but you interact with a lot of different people and this is a good way to organize that,” Ho says. “I remember studying for an electrical engineering exam and wanting to get a group together, but maybe not with my immediate friends, so I couldn’t just text them.”
Kickin.it is equipped with a Facebook connection: upon registration, users are able to select which of their Facebook friends they want to import to the application, thereby creating a subset of followers. Contrary to Foursquare, which involves “checking in” to various locations, Kickin.it incorporates the “who” element. It is also more specific, Byun adds.
“Once you’re in, you can edit that list,” he says. “It’s not a public feed like Twitter — you don’t randomly follow people, it’s only your friends. At most, it’s one degree of separation.”
Facebook started as a Harvard-specific network. Similarly, Kickin.it will launch privately at Stanford and Northwestern next week: two campuses chosen for their “smart, interesting, savvy and fun” student bodies, says Byun.
“Kickin.it seems pretty useful,” says Helen Li, a Weinberg freshman. “It would make chilling with people much easier than sending out a mass text of ‘what’s up’ to certain people, and then waiting for responses to figure out what to do, while politely saying no to those who ask you to join them.”
The three co-founders are still considering different features of the app, but they say it will stay focused on people and their activities. Ho says users worry about privacy, but he maintains that Kickin.it is “fairly private.”
“We’ll definitely implement more privacy controls later, depending on user preferences,” Ho says. “It’s only a private beta, but you can choose to follow or un-follow friends and hangouts.”
Li voiced similar fears about privacy. “It could be a creeper’s best friend,” she says.
But Byun says locations are not made public, unlike on Twitter. “Honestly, we built this product based on our own need,” he says. “We want to deliver it to college students. Our focus is building an enticing product, not a huge project.”
According to Lee, plans for Android and Blackberry applications are already underway. As Byun puts it, students “live on their mobile phones,” which has served as the business model for the trio.
But if we live on our mobile phones, do we really need a new app to help us hang out? Can’t we already find parties well enough with Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, mobile messaging and by knocking on neighbors’ doors? Won’t this turn the art of planning an evening into a soulless sift through status updates?
Maybe that’s what we want. “I love the idea of knowing what’s happening without committing to anything,” Li says.