This post was written by guest contributor Paul Bragiel, founder of Meetro, a location-aware instant messaging platform that was DeadPooled last month. Bragiel is also the founder hosted forum solution Lefora. See our coverage of these two companies here, along with our first post on Meetro in August 2005. Also see our post titled What To Do With Failed Startup IP?.

In the spirit of openness, I write this post on what we did wrong at Meetro - a post mortem of sorts. You don’t see this often enough in the startup world even though the majority of startups go belly-up. Hell, there are probably a few today that will go away with a whimper. So much knowledge is lost. If you’ve had similar experiences, I encourage you to share them over at Lefora.

To those of you not familiar with Meetro, we were one of the first location-based social networks. We figured out where you were physically and then we would tell you else was around you in real-time. You would then be able to instant message with them, check out their profiles, and hopefully meet up. Other functionality included telling you about restaurants close by, media created nearby, and various local information that pertained to your location. We also supported all your various instant messaging protocols (AIM, MSN, Yahoo) and a slew of other social features.

Even with a robust product we simply couldn’t capture enough market share. So here are the major problems we had that, in the end, we couldn’t overcome. There were, of course, mini fires and random things but every startup goes through those. I have a feeling some of the other location-based startups out there right now are experiencing the same things.

Most importantly, there was a “location problem”. It’s really hard to grow a product that’s 100% focused on where you physically are. Tons of companies have tried this before and most of them have died. We, of course, were cocky and had to give it a try. There was just something so sexy about the idea that you could load up a piece of software and it would tell you about someone nearby who was interesting to you. Someone will crack this and make billions of dollars on it. I can only hope to be involved in some shape or form, since it’s an itch that hasn’t gone away for me.

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Meetro is finally coming out of the closet with the hosted forum solution we anticipated last October, and it’s pretty much what we expected it to be: a white label platform like Ning except without all that social networking humbo jumbo, just good old fashioned discussion threads.

The product, once codenamed “Makaha”, is now officially known as Lefora. The team behind Meetro has effectively abandoned Meetro for Lefora, dropping all development and support for “the world’s first location-aware IM client and real-time social network.”

Much of Lefora’s feature set should be familiar to anyone who used forums in the 90s (they haven’t changed much since then). But it also supports capabilities not found with many modern-day forum solutions, such as the ability to easily embed YouTube videos, files, and images. Lefora uses Amazon S3 storage to host files uploaded to its forums, currently with no storage caps.

Lefora also surfaces the hottest topics and most recent activity on a special homepage, in addition to providing the standard structural overview of a forum. Membership to one Lefora forum can be easily extended to membership of another, since all of them access the same user base.

The look and feel of Lefora forums can be customized extensively with CSS modifications, pre-made themes, and color adjustments. Categories and widgets, such as those for polls and hot topics, can be managed via drag-n-drop. The company’s working on an API that will allow developers to add their own widgets to the gallery, although you can already add your own custom, HTML-based widgets.

Moderation is an important element of forum management and Lefora has decided to build their own spam detection engine from the ground up. The engine is similar to Akismet and that used by Gmail in that it leverages data from many properties to detect and eliminate spam more effectively.

When we first wrote about Meetro’s plans, many commenters were skeptical that the web needed a Blogger for forums. CEO Paul Bragiel insists that forums are still very popular, with the top 2,000 forums boasting over 200m registered users.

He believes Lefora will not only make it easier to create forums, but it will “light them up” as well since the platform has been designed with SEO optimization in mind. Threads are given URLs that reveal their topic, as with blogging platforms like WordPress, instead of ones that look suspicious to search engines. If Lefora takes off, we might expect to see even more search results point to discussion threads.

In its current form, Lefora is a pretty solid product but not without its quirks, bugs, and inconveniences. The design editor could use some UI improvements and there’s no simple way to reset your password as a user. Also, Lefora has yet to feature some premium capabilities that more serious customers will demand, such as domain masking. But all in all, the service is off to a good start.

Join a test TechCrunch forum here.

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Seattle-based Wetpaint, which launched in June 2006, is a hosted wiki site that focuses on great looking sites and making the user interface as easy as possible. A number of wikis have popped up around popular pop culture stuff, as well as more private sites.

Tonight they added new feature that should generate a lot of page views - they have fully integrated a forum/message board into every wiki.

This isn’t Tangler-level forums (which we consider to be the bleeding edge), but they’ve put a lot of thought into the feature set around these message boards. Posts can be tagged, the view expanded/contracted, there are email notifications of new messages, and the search feature works well. Any forum thread can also be turned into a wiki with a couple of clicks.

CEO Ben Elowitz says the two products go together well - wikis are great for evergreen content but don’t allow for good conversation. Forums allow great conversation but aren’t great for new readers. The hope is that by combining them they’ll allow for better content for all users. And in the process get a lot of page views.

Other startups innovating in the forum space (besides Tangler, mentioned above) are Meetro and Grouply.

The hosted wiki space is crowded, and Wetpaint competes with Wikia and PBWiki, among others. Comscore shows Wikia in the lead with over 3 million monthly uniques, followed by Wetpaint with 1.3 million and PBWiki with 770k (Wikipedia, of course, is the 800 pound gorilla, with 228 million unique monthly visitors):

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We’ve been informed that Meetro - provider of a location-based instant messaging service - is working on a stealth project that aims to make forum setup, customization, and moderation as easy as blogging with Blogger.

The project, codenamed “Makaha”, has been in development since the beginning of this year. While many forums require users to find their own hosting and install software, Makaha will enable users to create and personalize forums through a point-and-click interface. Forums will have their own subdomains at the Makaha website just as blogs have their own subdomains at Blogger.

Forum moderators will have full control over CSS styling (in addition to premade templates) and will benefit from an extensive community moderation system. Popular discussion threads will rise to the top of forum homepages in a Digg-like fashion, and users have access to a search function that crawls both individual forums and Makaha’s collection of forums as a whole. Makaha’s forums will also be designed with search engine optimization in mind so that traditional search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) index discussion threads effectively.

Makaha will launch about a couple of months from now. With the rise of social networking in the past few years, the popularity of good ol’ forums tends to get ignored, as do the billions of page views per month they generate. Even with the attractiveness of that traffic, few companies have been innovating in this space. We recently reviewed Tangler, which provides forums that function much like chat rooms by immediately displaying posts via Ajax when they are added to a discussion thread.

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New York-based LifeAt wants to create a social network around your residential building. Do you need one? Nope. But maybe you’ll use it anyway. And perhaps you’ll even get to know some of your neighbors.

The building managers control the network and post information about the building itself. Residents sign up to get news about the building, interact with other users, etc. They’ll provide information about local businesses (dry cleaners, restaurants, delivery services, etc.) and allow residents to post reviews (similar to Yelp, but even more geographically targeted). They’ve also included a marketplace for people to buy and sell goods within the building.

The only thing it’s missing is a dating area; perhaps the LifeAt guys thought that would be too risque. Meetro, a location based instant messaging service, also once had dreams of getting people in the same apartment building to actually talk to each other. Perhaps LifeAt will succeed where they failed.

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We’ve been tracking emerging mobile-only social networks such as ZYB and Mocospace and Mig33. All have unique selling points (Mocospace is dead simple to use, ZYB has a rich set of potential users from their address book backup service, and Mig33 has a VOIP tool that has attracted over seven million users), but there’s one solid gold feature that none yet have: physical presence detection and information exchange with other users.

This is the Holy Grail of mobile social networking, and one of the main reasons for taking the networks off the desktop/laptop environment in the first place. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting - quick LinkedIn type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

Knowing when your friends are around, and having the ability to meet new people who share your interests (even if it’s just that you are both single), will drive massive usage of networks. But, as with many new services, a chicken and egg problem looms. Until everyone is using this, there is no real reason for anyone to use it. Meetro, an instant messaging service that finds friends based on location, has struggled to gain users over the last couple of years for this reason.

Technical barriers aren’t an issue - cell phone tower triangulation and bluetooth solve a lot of the problems of locating users and transmitting information between phones. What’s harder is just plain getting a critical mass of users.

The Failures

There is a trail of failed attempts at getting this right. Nokia released Nokia Sensor nearly three years ago. It broadcasts information about yourself to others via bluetooth. Never heard of it? Neither has anyone else, although it is still available for download. Google’s Dodgeball is another example that’s fallen flat - it tells friends (and friends of friends) who are within 10 blocks of you where you are and what you are doing.

The New Experiments

A bunch of new startups are giving this a shot, too. In a post yesterday TechCrunch UK mentions Germany’s Aka-Aki, Paris-based Mobiluck and MeetMoi (the lone U.S. startup). Another startup is Copenhagen-based Imity. It’s not surprising that most of the innovation is occurring in Europe. The current approach is to get java-based software on the phone - very few U.S. carriers and handsets allow user-based installs of java apps.

Aka-Aki

Aka-Aki, based in Germany, is just a couple of weeks old. Create a profile and download the java app to your phone. You can also create and join groups that say things about your life, job, etc. When you are near other people who are members, data about you is transmitted to them via bluetooth, and vice versa. Users have control over data flow with privacy settings. And the groups supply another layer of privacy. You may transmit that you are single only to other singles, for example. Or share your sexual orientation only with others with the same orientation.

After a silent launch, word is getting out. Thousands of people in Berlin are using the software, and there is a chance for them to get critical mass there with proper marketing. The company has raised a small seed round from FoundersLink and is currently looking for a larger round.

Imity

Copenhagen based Imity, which launched in April, has also been flying under the radar. Like Aka-Aki it detects other members via bluetooth and send basic profile information to your phone. It also keeps track of people on its website, so you can check that out periodically from your normal computer. It’s bridges mobile and traditional social networks, which may help it gain critical mass. Co-founder Nikolaj Nyholm is also behind Polar Rose, a facial recognition and image tagging service.

Imity went open source in February 2007.

MeetMoi

MeetMoi, the only U.S. based service, is most like Dodgeball - it uses text messaging to help connect people. It’s dating focused - text your location to the service and it notifies other users in your area that you are there. If they are interested, they can contact you. The company has raised $1.5 million from Acadia Woods Partners and is based in New York.

MobiLuck

MobiLuck, based in Paris, is another bluetooth solution similar to Aka-Aki and Imity. Download the software to your phone and it vibrates when other users are nearby. You can then chat with them, send photos, etc.

Update: Per a comment below, we’re adding Britekite to the list. We actually covered them briefly last month as part of the TechStars event.

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Only very long time readers will remember our coverage of proximity-based instant messaging service Meetro back in 2005. Meetro is an instant messaging client for Windows and Mac that shows you other users (and their picture) that are physically close to you. Want to make friends with someone sitting near you in a cafe, or who lives in the same, apartment building? Meetro can help you do that.

One problem though…the company has not gathered a critical mass of users and has sort of gone sideways. The company has survived on a very low burn rate, but there isn’t much buzz about it.

Now we’re hearing a rumor that the Meetro team is quietly building a new product - an easy “one-click” way of creating new forum on the fly. Instant messaging and forums are very similar businesses. In effect they are the same thing except that one is synchronous (IM) and one is asynchronous (forums). So the meetro team should have the expertise to create an interesting forum product. As an aside, another startup, Tangler, is tying the instant messaging and forum worlds together.

Meetro is being tight lipped about this, but some of the investors they are pitching are talking. We’ll post more information as we get it.

AOL is also rumored to be releasing a new forum product in the Fall. We’re hearing that the product was handed over to the Userplane team after some development difficulties (Userplane was acquired by AOL in August 2006). The new product is to be called Userplane Boards. Update: Userplane says this is not quite how things are. See CEO Michael Jones’ comment below.

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New York based RadiusIM is a just launched web based Ajax chat service. Like Meebo, RadiusIM allows users to log in with Yahoo, AIM, Microsoft or GTalk credentials. They also have their own direct IM service, which auto-determines your location and places an icon on a Google map embedded in the site.

Comparisons will invevitably be made with Palo Alto based Meetro, a very similar instant messaging application that we’ve written about in the past. There are two main differences between Meetro and RadiusIM. First, Meetro is a downloaded application, whereas RadiusIM is entirely web based. Second, RadiusIM has a cool way of just dragging the Google map around the world and seeing which members are located there, whether they are logged in or not. Meetro only shows users within a stated radius around your current location.

RadiusIM isn’t stable and is very slow, but given that it is only a day or two old that isn’t unusual.

Meetro has not seen the hockey stick growth phase yet. And based on what I’ve seen from RadiusIM, the subtle feature differences won’t be enough to make it stand out. What this really comes down to, is, do people really want to see and possibly chat with random strangers just because they are geographically close? We’ll see.

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Meetro, an interesting location-based instant messaging client that’s compatible with AOL, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo!, is now alpha testing a Mac version of their software. I profiled Meetro originally in August,

If you are a Mac user and want to try Meetro, email mac@meetro.com and include your city, state (if applicable) and country of residence.

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Company: Meetro
Previous Profile: August 1, 2005
Location: Chicago

Google to Acquire Meetro?

There are rumors that Meetro (profile), a location aware instant messaging platform and application, may be aquired by Google this week.

We’ve been using meetro for a couple of weeks and love the service.

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