The Scene, a new social network geared towards improving your nightlife, is making its public debut at the Twiistup 5 event in Santa Monica, CA today. After three months in beta, the company is announcing the seed round of funding it has raised from Velocity Interactive Group and angel investor Marko Babic. An iPhone application (for when you’re stumbling around the streets at 1:00am looking for the next bar) has also been released.
The Scene has a strong “let’s go out to a club and get drunk” vibe to it (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But it makes me wonder how many people who have this urge will actually boot up their computers and start planning out the best way to go about it, let alone carry the iPhone app around in their pockets and post updates to the site as their nights go on.
The founders – four graduates from the University of California at Berkeley – obviously felt the need to create a whole new site around this idea, one that could possibly supplant MySpace as the most party-inclined social network around. The Scene started off as an application on Facebook called TheBarBook, which currently has about 6,250 monthly active users (although the company claims it has over 150,000 total users). It’s previous incarnation as a Facebook app shows through clearly in the new site’s design. Many elements, such as the Wall-like area called “My Feed” that displays prominently on the homepage, were blatantly recreated from Facebook. Things to do on the site include sharing your status, adding photos, creating events, viewing profiles, and making friends.
The Scene is also a lot like Yelp, with a near identical set of search boxes at the top of each page that asks you what type of establishment you want to search for and where. Each bar, club and lounge in your area is given its own profile page where users can post quick notes (effectively mini-reviews) and add their own events. Perhaps most usefully, each venue page also shows a list of related places under the header “People Who Go Here Also Go To”. And you can see everyone else enjoys your favorite dive bar under a list simply called “People Who Go Here”.
One thing I’d recommend to the team behind The Scene is to open up user profiles. Whenever I click on someone’s avatar, it takes me to a page where I’m abruptly informed that I can’t see the person’s information because I’m not friends with them. This is too much like Facebook where it needs to be a lot more like MySpace. After all, half the point of going out at night is to meet other people who like to have fun, too.
Addendum: I should note that The Scene isn’t the first social network to try translating social network activity directly into real-world experiences. College Tonight tried to convince college students to “get up and get out” (but not via Facebook) and failed spectacularly. It’s still trying under a new name but appears to have been forced into side services like college merchandise sales.
Update: Co-founder Erik Ober has since pointed out that one of the reasons they decided to leave Facebook and build their own site was “due to Facebook’s platform restrictions”. And he explains that TheBarBook’s current low usage numbers are a result of having not worked on the app since last summer and migrating the app’s users to The Scene.
I think this is a great idea. Nightclub is an area of the market that I believe is underserved but also offers strong demand. I think the most difficult thing with this space is creating the right product to address this market. I do not think the current local search models do this.
Hi, Pete here. Newly hired digital content editor at The Scene.
“But it makes me wonder how many people who have this urge will actually boot up their computers and start planning out the best way to go about [finding a club to get drunk at].”
Well I would argue that it’s a pretty well-established fact that people look for nightlife info online.
But just to get a bit specific here, I personally don’t like clubs. I like bars. I’ll take beer and conversation over loud music and bottles of the ‘Tron any day — well, most days. But regardless of what you like and don’t like about going out at night, pretty much everyone (over a certain age) DOES go out at night (what George said), and what everyone is looking for is their definition of a good time. Few things are more disheartening that coming home after a night on the town with nothing to show for it except a slight decrease in net worth (and … yes, why not? That WAS a double entendre.)
What we’re trying to do with our mobile apps is just improve the odds of someone finding something fun to do — whatever they consider fun — on the fly. (One of many things we’re trying to do with nightlife info overall.)
Let me just talk about LA for a sec. LA is sort of unique — at least as compared to the other cities I’m familiar with: SF, Chicago, Portland, NYC, DC — where, if you make the decision with your friends, “Let’s go here,” and you go there, and for whatever reason you’re not impressed, you might be stuck.
L.A. isn’t a walking city. There’s aren’t areas like the Mission in SF or Rush Street in Chicago, where if one place sucks, you can just walk out the door, look up and down the street, and see 20 other bars (The few areas in LA where there are lots of bars in a “walkable” area tend to be populated with the more exclusive, line-or-list–type venues — or they’re near the beach, which is great if you live near the beach, but …). So in L.A., if you do get stuck at someplace that for whatever reason you’re not thrilled on, there should be a way to find what else is going on around you — special events, other bars, maybe your friend is a few blocks away with a bunch of people, maybe some band you like is playing and there are still tickets available, just whatever. But if you get to a place at 10:30 with no backup plan, you shouldn’t just say, “Oh well, I guess I’m stuck here. Maybe NEXT weekend I’ll have fun.”
Congrats Mike, Eric and the rest of my college bros for a great application/website and getting on Techcrunch!
Doesn’t College Tonight do all of this already?
i’ve been using this for months. great clean easy to use site. loads fast. helps me find out who is where and what is going on. love it. congrats.
I still like Localist.com better, which does pretty much the same thing. It’s more usable and has more content (at least for Baltimore and DC). It could also be because it’s based in my home town.
So many sites just regurgitate the same venue and event information from Zvents, Upcoming, Eventful, etc. There’s no compelling reason for me to use The Scene if it doesn’t offer original content.
Sponty seems to do this quite well. It is popular in the college scene in Boston. http://thesponty.com/boston
Oh, also, isn’t this a straight copy of Going.com ?
it looks a lot like yelp
Comparing nightlife sections on Yelp and this site is fun… popularity is completely different.
I think “going” is a straight copy of them…
going has been around longer?
It’s actually more of a ripoff of LateNightShots than of Going.
http://www.tech...-drink-to-that/
Start as Facebook app and then become an independent project is a great idea and a feasible task.
Facebook gives an ability to drive initial user base and move it outside of Facebook website to a separate space using Facebook Connect.
I plan to do the same with my blogging platform for Facebook
Though I think you would hope to have more than 6,250 monthly users before you go and start your own site.
I think that blogging platform presented both within Facebook and outside of Facebook have much more chances to be successful.
At this time users have two choices – start their own blog outside of facebook or write notes within facebook without any option to display them outside of it. I want to change the situation and give users a possibility to create blog that will be equally usable within facebook (as application) and outside of facebook (as a web service).
better integrate into an existing social network or you just might miss the boat. visiting multiple sites for content of any kind will soon be over.
integration is innovation.
Sounds familiar….socializr?
Mark, do you think that any other Facebook apps could move to a stand-alone position?
Like the interface, which is very clean, and there are seem to be a lot of venues here in Australia, which is good. It’s not new or particularly unique though. It might not look as swish but thursdayclub.com (as one example) has been doing this for years now-merging directory and social app functions. Just wish they’d do a refresh and move the mobile app to a proper iPhone app, but that’s getting off track!
layout reminds me of brightcove
Nice to hear this. I think maybe we’re getting slightly guilty in touting startups to build upon platforms rather than going it alone.
Maybe too many are going straight to Facebook or Twitter to build upon when they could go it alone first?
You can always integrate with other platforms/websites afterwards.
Design looks to be heavily inspired by Yelp. Seems like an interesting service though.
it would be very interesting to see how these sites generate users – this service has been needed for quite a while – going out and staying connected and retrieving crucial info.
I remember when this was barbook and this is a great step forward. Super clean site and it’s also a good way to keep your social life separate from facebook.
I’ve seen other sites similar to this but you have one thing going for you-there is no market leader. Whether there ever will be one worth mentioning is a different topic I suppose. For certain cities this would be pretty cool, especially combined with something like the goog latitude. I live in austin, tx and we have a couple city blocks of clubs/bars that can be difficult to coordinate multiple parties in. Probably worth verifying with This* privacy/digital security site all the logistics of the process are ok.
Anyways, it’ll definitely serve a purpose. Hopefully, the implementation is good.
I believe The Scene to be a brave step in the right direction. I’ve been utilizing their site as the base for all my social events in Hollywood and implantation couldn’t be easier. I plan on fully integrating a Scene Connect (similar to Facebook Connect) into my website very soon. I won’t lie, I do love Facebook however, when it comes to meeting people with the singular interest of getting intoxicated on a Friday night, the Scene is the superior tool. It is also superb for anyone that is involved in the entertainment industry, even the slightest regard; whether you are an actor, writer, musician or mere party goer. The creators are CS Grads from Berkley so their code is top not notch and the site runs smoothly as a result. Very fast as compared to the choppy myspace which is child’s play in terms of overall functionality. Frankly, I believe Myspace is on its way out as a social networking tool. Perhaps that’s b/c Tom has been too busy engaging with Asian car models on the side rather than working on improving Myspace. I would know. Thank you lads at the Scene for creating such a wonderful tool that is doing wonders for my website’s popularity and business. Highly recommended.
you think this is freaky, have you all heard about match2blue’s webster hall nightlife application? it has some crazy friend matching real time technology that matches you up to people by your interests AND location. eeekkkkkkkkkk
NightLifeApp.com is an App for promoters and party goers.
Promoters post their nightlife events with pic, video, social links, one touch RSVP and more
Party goers use the Web App or Native App to find where to go out right from their mobile using GPS.
NightLifeApp.com
In the nightlife business, ego tends to drive people more than worrying about the details, the party and the product, so we really strive to keep our ego under wraps and work together with all of our business partners to create a collective vision, which is sometimes direct and sometimes a compromise.