Unsocial Social Media

I admit to having been intrigued by a new service simply by virtue of its name: Unsocial.  At first I thought someone had invented a backlash app to “tone down” social media in some way, but Unsocial is actually very social: it’s what they call “LinkedIn meets Foursquare.”  It’s designed for B2B users and it enables them to meet with people that they don’t know, but whose proximity and acquaintance might be mutually beneficial.

Unsocial is only available to San Francisco users at the moment, and mobile apps are currently for the iPhone and Android exclusively, but they say that they plan to expand to new cities and to Blackberry and HTML5 variants soon.  But, if you live in San Francisco, you can sign up for an Unsocial account now — or you can log in using your LinkedIn account to drive the your basic profile information, adding additional professional-type information, along with some Unsocial tags that describe who you are and what you do. These tags, along with your location, will enable Unsocial to suggest who you should be connecting to and networking with in a given location.

In a video demo of Unsocial, they show a CEO of a start-up on his way to the airport and to a meeting that he’s hoping will be key to the development of his new company.  He knows that he needs a lawyer, however, to help him navigate this opportunity. Coincidentally, there’s a lawyer at the airport that specializes in getting start-ups up and running and he’s looking to expand his client base. The video asks, “What are the chances that they’ll meet?”  The answer is, of course: with Unsocial, they can.

It’s really an interesting sort of networking vehicle – or is it more like match.com?  It will be interesting to see if this gains any traction.  

Now, about the name.