We just launched our first FaceBook application.

It’s called Go Where?

Here’s the scoop…

First some context…

• Facebook is CLEARLY the high momentum social network today with a base of 43 million active users.
• Facebook currently has a VERY crude sense of location - no real connective tissue to the local world. However, with this critical mass, the gap will end up getting filled. We thought we should be a part of that!
• Facebook is a noisy, morphing scene that will completely ignore most everything put in front of it. I shake my head at the model being employed by many publishers who simply take an in-place web product and “re-deploy” on FaceBook’s platform. While this might drive good PowerPoint karma, it won’t drive consumer action.

So, what do you do when you have a “utility mission” trying to add value in a entertainment centric, social networking mecca? You adapt, you join the party, you step in with something that fits the vibe. Don’t stand there dressed all wrong, hoping the music changes!

From this place you earn the right to interact with a (hopefully very large) group of users and migrate them into more uses as the social network morphs. So, our “Go Where?” application is designed from that viewpoint.

the utility in this app is: send/invite a friend/group to a location.

Pretty elemental, but the base notion of “going somewhere” can be adapted to make valued things down the road. Meet up, recommend, check this place out, what’s nearby…

now, let’s turn this into an entertaining, socializing app…

“On top” of this concept, we’ve fashioned a fun way to not just send your friends to an address (displayed on a Google map), but to all sorts of interesting “places”. And we’ve added a few celebrities you might want to send somewhere! (Sometimes it helps to have the person who ran The Onion for most of the past decade driving your social media activities!)

We think maybe people have an opinion as to where Lindsey Lohan or George Bush should be sent - by themselves or perhaps even together…well, you get the picture…

So, give it a whirl: GoWhere? the action is today! (you can also use the Search box on FaceBook and enter “Go Where?”). If you’re not yet signed up on FaceBook, well we hope we’ve given you just the excuse you need!

Advertising has a pretty good track record of following the social-local patterns of legions of consumers. That’s the end game…but heck, why not have a little fun along the way?

Posted by Perry on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 3:21 am.