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Have you ever experienced times when you wanted to see what your friends and others around you were doing? Perhaps, you have already been out and were wondering where to go next. I’m sure you are not alone in having experienced this, and that is where The Hotlist app comes in.
The recently launched company, founded by Chris Mirabile and Gianni Martire, is a social discovery engine that enables you to view what’s happening today, tomorrow and throughout the week among your Facebook friends and the entire world. “No texting; no phone calls; no stabs in the dark.” The Hotlist allows users to easily share and discover “social intent” along with live location data, such as what the crowd looks like and the ratio of guys to girls, which enables users to effectively make social decisions based on what they are looking for and feel like doing.
Given the continuous debate about the future of social networks and location based services, I find that Mirablile and Martire have both come up with an interesting model. It is paving the way and demonstrating that the future of social online interactions is about making real-world connections take place. Taking an educated guess, I’d say the app is for the younger crowd, say 20 and 30 year olds, who are not settled down yet and have time to burn.
The company processes a ton of social information – roughly 34 Gigabytes a week from Facebook, Twitter, Google and others. A personalized “Hotlist” of recommended places is generated based on what your friends or others around you have done in the past, are currently doing and what they plan to do in the future. With more than 100 million people in its index, it has the ability to compute detailed crowd analytics for millions of venues worldwide. The company boasts having the first and largest geo-social aggregator that people can use to make the most effective social decisions.
The idea is pretty clever. Think of The Hotlist as a super search engine for social activity that scours the web looking for social chatter. The Hotlist then breaks down all of the social conversations taking place, figures out what people are and will be doing, removes private information, and then determines which places are most relevant for each one of their users (their “Hotlists”). What used to take hours of phone calls and texting now takes seconds. If you are wondering what’s the world up to next Friday you can ask The Hotlist!
I checked out my Hotlist and discovered that The Hotlist doesn’t just list bars and restaurants. The app also lists State parks, community centers, schools and churches. The State park close to me has a guy-to-girl ratio of 35% to 65%. It looks a little uneven. All kidding aside, my favorite hangouts are yogurt and coffee shops. They didn’t make the top twenty. But, I can see where this app is valuable for those who make it a habit to go out at night with the intent of being with the same familiar crowd.