Squeelr

Day 0: Squeelr made it to the App Store today.

What’s Squeelr? Squeelr’s a microblogging application that shares much of its DNA with other microblogging sites, like Twitter. You know, short posts, a public timeline, tags…However, unlike granddaddy Twitter, Squeelr costs money to use, and in some ways does even less than microblogging sites that came before it! (less is the new more, you know). However Squeelr has some DNA from wikis in its blood as well. Anyone can post, and anyone can delete anyone else’s post too. (there’s a catch, keep reading).

Perhaps the biggest difference is that in Squeelr, there are no user accounts. Just one big jumble of posts. That’s crazy, right? Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

I won’t repeat everything in the about Squeelr section but did want to start with what it currently does. Today, Squeelr is an iPhone Application (this opens in iTunes, in case you want to download it). We use Apples In-App Purchase to allow people to buy post credits. There is also a basic website, however most of the development work has been in the application thus far, so best to start there. API documentation is coming soon, so you developers can do your developer thing and make this better. But what is it now?

Squeelr lets you communicate with others in your physical environment by leaving and viewing tiny messages—called “Squeels“—tagged to your location.

So this is pretty basic—you write messages, and they’re posted for everyone to read. Everyone can search for specific terms, and see the messages about those terms.  This bit about being tagged to your location: if you want to you can attach a latitude and longitude to your posts.  Squeelr groups messages by lat/lon, so that you can see all the squeels that are physically near you.

How might it be useful to see use location-based squeels? One idea: before you go into some place, you might look at Squeelr to see what people are saying—good AND BAD—about the area. Maybe you’re thinking of buying a house and want to know what the neighborhood is really like…what it talks about…In many ways, Squeelr is an evolution of my Master’s Thesis, which (pre-iphone, 2003, be nice) had this notion of leaving messages (“nuggets”) in space for others to find. There are more usage examples in there, but things have evolved, and well, I bet you can think of more things to do with it than I can.

Squeels can include images that you take with your camera, or that you’ve got saved to your Photo Library.

Besides geo-tagged posts, you can add images directly from your iPhone camera or stored photos.  It’s easy, and fun.

We’ve grown accustomed to providing services with logins and passwords, so it may come as a surprise to learn that Squeelr has no logins and requires no password.

It’s as if Squeelr is one giant shared blog, with entries posted anonymously by anyone in the world, each one adding their own opinion or insight. If this sounds like it might be used in ways that do not benefit the public—for example creating something similar to the unsolicited email problem—have no fear, we have a funny sounding solution:

1. Posting a Squeel costs something (not a lot!).
2. Posts are monitored by the community, and can be deleted by anyone for the price of a post.
3. Flagging a message for review is free.

So there’s the catch.  Posts cost money. How much money? In the US, 5 posts cost $1, 20 cost $3. (I mean 99 cents and $2.99). Outrageous! It’s true, but I don’t know about your Twitter account, but mine is filled with requests from people selling this and that that I don’t really care to know about.  The signal to noise ratio is getting out of whack, and oh, here’s an idea: let’s make there be a little monetary friction to post or delete. Not a lot. A little itty bitty bit.  But something to make people stop and calculate: is this really worth doing?

Paul Krugman’s piece How Did Economists Get It Wrong mentions some other study (which I couldn’t find, help) which concluded that people are wired to care more about small losses than small gains. This sounds about right. I’m hoping that it will cause the Spammer’s tactic of blanketing everyone to die down. Of course it also means that YOU, the GOOD GUY with something to say might not be willing to spend 99 cents to say FIVE things. I guess we’ll just have to see.

Anonymous, has become newsworthy of late. Let’s talk about this, because it’s important. The current version of Squeelr is without user accounts, and so in that sense it is anonymous. It passes the mom test for anonymity.  However, in a cryptographic and practical sense, it is not truly anonymous. You have to trust Squeelr (and maybe more Apple). A court could send us an order to tell what iPhone sent what message.  It’s not obvious how successful this would be in tracking down the person who sent the message (Squeelr asks you for no personal information, but Apple does), but it’s clear that the risk is too great to consider this a truly anonymous messaging system.  However, as cryptography was my favorite class in college, I hope to add in some features to make anonymous messaging within Squeelr something that even Bruce Schneier is happy with. But really, none of this matters for social networking, which is what the site is intended for, so just treat this whole paragraph as a big aside, okay?

Squeelr is an experiment.  I think there’s something there.  But, to test a social networking application, we must release it, right?  So let the tests begin.

Please let us know how you like it, what tweaks you want to see, etc… Since we’re on the subject of “us”, I should send a shout out to the “iPhone Brunch Development Team” which comes up with iPhone applications over brunch and then I go make them real. I guess I like using money as a technology tool, as that’s how I spend most of my time.

Oh, and if you made it this far through this post, good for you.  As a reward, you can try manual code “icecream” (all lowercase) for some free Squeelr credits. For a limited time.