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.

A perfect example of this difficulty was our community in Chicago. We launched our product and got all of our friends in Chicago on it. We then had the largest papers in the area do nice detailed write-ups on us. Things were going great. We had hundreds of active users and you could feel the buzz around it. We threw a few parties that continued to support the good mood all around. Hell, our CTO Sam even met his current girlfriend at one of them.

The problem we would soon find out was that having hundreds of active users in Chicago didn’t mean that you would have even two active users in Milwaukee, less than a hundred miles away, not to mention any in New York or San Francisco. The software and concept simply didn’t scale beyond its physical borders.

I would also cite a theoretical Idaho example. No matter how slick Meetro was, if you opened it up in the middle of Idaho and no one else was nearby using it, the service simply wasn’t that interesting. We did do a few things to address this, such as including “random” people and the whole Meetro team in the application. I must say, this did create some great friendships and kept some people around, but in the end it just wasn’t enough.

So how do you overcome the location problem? The way I see it, a Meetro-like application will succeed with one of the following strategies.

1. A product with a HUGE audience turns it on. I’m talking about a MySpace, Facebook, etc. Something that has a really rabid audience, where it would be a great feature addition. It still wouldn’t be easy. You would have to do it properly right out of the gate. There are just tons of privacy and personal issues that come into play when you are talking about physical location.

I remember vividly being pissed that MySpace didn’t work with us (read: buy us) after talking with them off and on. I was naive, the more I think about it. It would have unleashed pure anarchy and it wouldn’t have been worth it in the short-term. Plus, at the time they were dealing with their own scaling issues and moving over to .Net. However, I still think it’s something that should be on the roadmap of one of these big players.

2. A company has a really long term vision and builds it out city by city. This is similar to the approach taken by Yelp. They know it’s not easy and I know first hand that they are putting a lot of effort into fostering their communities. It’s an ongoing job. You simply can’t establish a city and then let it fend for itself.

We had this happen to us in Meetro. After we got the Chicago community going, we up and moved our company to Palo Alto. We weren’t there anymore to be the face of the community, organize events, etc. While the service continued and had a core bunch of people using it, by no means was it as rabid as it was at its peak. By the time I realized this, it already was a bit too late and we had shifted our focus to getting a community going in San Francisco.

3. Someone creates a viral product that grows like crazy but location isn’t the core feature. It just happens to be part of the bigger whole and as people use it more and more, they realize that the location piece built into it has become increasingly valuable for them. I don’t know what this product is, otherwise I would be building it right now.

Next, the “download problem”. This one is obvious now but when we started in 2004, Web 2.0 hadn’t quite happened yet and some download apps were still growing (e.g. Skype). Plus we needed a download for the application to work. Having worked with phone carriers for years, I had decided early on that we simply weren’t going to wait for the carriers to get their act together on location. They still haven’t done it properly 4 years later.

So to get around them we decided we would build out our own location technology. We filed patents and everything. Simply put, we were counting on the continued growth of WiFi. When you launched Meetro we would scan for all the WiFi networks out there. We would then crosscheck what was out there with what we had in a huge global database (it had grown to 4+ million hotspots when we stopped). If it was in the database, then we would do some trilateration to figure out where you were. If not, we would ask you to enter your location. We would save this info and use it later to crosscheck and verify it against similar data.

This data grew quite fast. We averaged around 5 wifi routers found per location, and in dense cities like New York, I remember averaging 9.6. I remember being quite excited since a key part of our business plan was to build an alternate GPS of sorts and use Meetro as a vehicle to gather and refine this data. The best part was that the technology was self-healing, so if some router was replaced or moved our system, we would learn about it very fast.

In the end, though, the dropoff that happened once people had to download and install Meetro was HUGE and didn’t help us at all. If I recall, it was something in the 80 to 90% range. It crushed adoption rates.

Lastly, the “realtime problem”. This one is similar to the location problem in that if someone wasn’t online when you were online, they were no good to you. While the realtime chat aspect of the application made for some really serendipitous meetings, it also made it harder for people to gauge the activity of their communities, especially if they logged in at odd hours, people were set as away, etc.

I can still feel the magic of when I was on layover in the Denver Airport, I met one of our users, and we grabbed a beer. This is what I dreamed Meetro would be about all the time, but those moments were too few and far between. We did fix this in the end but it was too little too late. So, to anyone tackling this problem in the future, make sure you have some type of persistence built-in, be it “people here previously” or “most common visitors to the area” etc.

Compound these 3 problems and the writing was on the wall. So how would I do things differently today?

1. I would wait until location is all clean and dandy with the carriers and build on top of that. Loopt has been doing the huge business development cycle and has been waiting it out for the past few years. It seems as though they’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m not really following who else is doing this stuff right now, but I’m sure they’re out there.

2. I would take our technology, create an API, and plug it into existing applications that have already been downloaded and given low-level access to the hardware our technology needed. I’m thinking about something that would run on top of AIM, Skype or Firefox, for example. Act as a friendly parasite on top of these apps that are already well established. Expect some licensing announcements soon concerning our IP on this front.

3. The other option is to build out something that just allows you to “check in” where you are at. Kind of like Twitter meets location (Dodgeball did this). However, this in my mind compromises the ultimate use case of a Meetro-like concept.

We could have gone about trying to fix Meetro but the team was just ready to move on. Raising money on the flat growth we had was nearly impossible. Plus I knew that in order to keep the tight-knit team we had built together, we needed to shift focus for sanity sake. People (myself included) just felt beat up. We knew that fixing these issues would involve a complete rearchitecturing of the code, and people just weren’t excited about the idea enough anymore to do it right.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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):

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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.

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.

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.

Company: Meetro
Location: Chicago

What is it?

Meetro is an instant messaging service that works both as a stand alone client and also integrates with other IM services (AOL and ICQ for now, others to come later). Meetro determines where you are phyically located automatically (or you can override by telling it manually) and shows you other meetro users near you. It’s a cool way to see when your friends are nearby, and to meet random people who are physically close to you.

Meetro currently only works on the Windows platform, with Mac and other clients coming in Q4. The download is small – 3.5 mb, and registration was very simple.

Overall, the service works very well. I chatted with two of the founders (Wendell and Paul) and also asked a couple of random people near me what they thought of it – everyone was very enthusiastic and loved the service.

This is an application that will stay on my desktop. It will become increasingly useful as they integrate additional IM platforms, as I run five on my desktop currently (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Skype, Gizmo).

Additional Screen Shots: