One of the paradoxes of big-city life is that the more people a city has, the more isolation its citizens often experience.
“It’s pretty much a global phenomenon that happens around high-density cities around the world, and the Internet’s actually contributing to it,” said Emir Aboulhosn, founder and CEO of Kinjoe.com, a new social media site designed to lessen urban alienation by bringing strangers together through common interests.
Kinjoe (Japanese for “neighbourhood”) officially launched last week with 500 Yaletown subscribers.
The new free site is similar to Meetup.com in that it brings strangers together based on common interests. The big difference is that users’ social spheres are limited to a 20-minute walking radius.
Two years ago, Aboulhosn founded Ryzoe Technologies with his own money specifically to develop Kinjoe. An angel investor and a $100,000 research grant has helped the company develop the site over the last 18 months, and Blenz Coffee has signed on as a partner to help promote the site. Aboulhosn and his team of five decided to limit the social network to a 20-minute walk because they determined there’s a higher chance of meeting someone who lives within that radius. The project was originally intended as a communication tool to help people living in highrise apartments get to know their neighbours.
Subscribers either sign up on the site or through Facebook Connect, which will pull their name, photo and email, although email addresses are never published. Neither are residential addresses. The site has a “me too” button that can be used to reply to comments posted on the site. This tags users’ interests and allows the site to build their social graph.
Once the company has built social graphs around members, it will start generating revenue through advertising. Tennis enthusiasts, for example, who have met other tennis players on Kinjoe might start getting recommendations for sports stores in their area that sell sporting goods. Because no one wants to join a social media network that’s a virtual ghost town, the challenge for Kinjoe’s developers has been to build a critical mass of users – something made more difficult by the network’s narrow geographical reach. And unlike Facebook, which connects people who already know each other, Kinjoe is more like a dating site in that it connects strangers.
The one advantage Kinjoe has is that people living in cities like Vancouver can be desperately lonely. A 2010 Angus Reid poll found Vancouverites among the loneliest city dwellers in Canada. It also found them to be among the most heavily connected to social media.
Originally from Ontario, Amanda Schwartz moved to Vancouver two years ago. A couple of months ago, a neighbour in her building posted information about Kinjoe, so she signed up.
“I think Vancouver’s much like any other city,” said Schwartz, who lives in a 36-storey highrise. “It can be difficult to meet new people. Things like this are really great for breaking the ice. In a highrise building you don’t have a chance to meet neighbours on other floors.”
To help build an initial critical mass, Aboulhosn approached Blenz Coffee president George Moen to help promote a beta version of the site in Yaletown, which now has 500 members.
“Blenz is very active in social media,” Moen said. “The Blenz brand has always been very neighbourhood focused … so Kinjoe’s format of building a social media platform based on neighbourhoods was very appealing to us. We felt by aligning ourselves with a Kinjoe product it was a good business move because where do people typically meet when they meet for the first time? Often in coffee shops. It was an easy fit.”
Blenz will be helping Kinjoe build its base in B.C. by advertising it with its own internal digital television in 65 coffee shops around the province.
Over the next six months, Aboulhosn plans to launch the site in Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Toronto and Montreal. The company will use community managers based in each city to help build membership.