Social communications company Jaxtr has just released a new destination called Jaxtr Cafe. Jaxtr is creating a social network on the go, allowing you to participate in your favorite discussions while mobile. Jaxtr has successfully completed eleven months of beta testing and today released version 1.0 of its service. The centerpiece of the 1.0 release is Café Jaxtr, a place where users socialize around the question “What do you want to talk about?�
Recently I spoke with Jaxtr CEO (and LinkedIn co-founder) Konstantin Guericke. Konstantin was at Black Sun Interactive back when I was doing lots of Virtual Reality stuff in the mid-90’s, and I think we may have met at a conference in New York, small world indeed.
Talking about The Rise of Multimedia Dating Profiles in April of last year I said:
Jaxtr, a free anonymous calling service that takes a grammar hint from Jangl, and as an added twist, allows messages to be played back in web browsers. It’s G*Number a la 2003 all over again.
Like sites that aggregate profiles, anonymous calling and social communications companies pop up every few years, enjoying various degrees of success. Something tells me the current crop of anonymous/social voice services have the right timing, management teams, funding and technology in place to make a good run at the market.
Factoid: 90% phone conversation is staying in touch with people you already know.
Jaxtr Café especially piqued my interest due to the fact that I have a business plan summary sitting right here which is 99% of Jaxtr Café. I wrote the plan a few years ago when someone approached me about scheduling and participating in conversations using Skype. That idea didn’t pan out for various reasons, but I’m glad to see someone running with the concept.
I thought perhaps that Vivox or Jangl would have run with the idea by now, but it appears Jaxtr has run to the front of the pack.
According to TechCrunch, all 10 million Jaxtr members ares grandfathered in to Jaxtr Cafe’s profile database.
Let me make something clear here. To the uninitiated, it’s difficult to tell the difference between Jangl, Jaxtr and Jajah. Not only are the names similar, but they all offer anonymous calling services with additional social services presently, or planned, layered on top. Confusing.
In the dating space, Jangl partenered with Match and PlentyofFish and Jajah hooked up with eHarmony. A gold star to anyone who can tell me how many minutes these services are actually selling through dating sites. Most only talk about the number of members on the networks they have deals with.
Jajah started as a straight long-distance arbitrage deal. I called my ex when she was in Australia for a month, and I don’t think either of us was charged a cent. Thats was a loss leader business model until they started getting bigger deals. But they got eHarmony.
In case you didn’t think much about voice-based services, check out companies like TellMe, which Microsoft bought in 2007. Interesting point, TellMe founder Mike McCue worked at Netscape, and TellMe raised $239 million over four venture rounds. I met Mike in Silicon Valley in the mid 90’s when he sold Paper Software to Netscape. Paper Software provided the 3-D browsing capabilities in the Netscape browser. What’s with the 3-D guys getting into telephony?
Ok, enough history, back to Café Jaxtr.
Visitors can find people to talk to by topic or country and then click through to the jaxtr member’s live contact page. On the contact page, they can learn more about the member and view the online profiles the member may have on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or 15 other social networks and blogging platforms. Visitors can also review the topics the member is interested in talking about and call them using their regular landline or mobile phone. The member’s phone number stays private, and jaxtr’s PrivacyShieldTM gives members complete control over which callers can ring through to their phone and which get routed to the digital voicemail box that is included for free with their jaxtr service.
Why use a social tool like Jaxtr Café? There are hundreds of millions of people without computers who have mobile phones. They need their social networking too. All those people who know how to use a phone, and getting them to use any of the J’s should be pretty simple. And no download, like with Skype or Gizmo.
The Jaxtr Café features a directory of pre-set topics to choose from. This is a spin on WooMe, which still doesn’t work with my Mac, but they are fixing it this week.
Social conversations can be time, topic or location-based. Café Jaxtr does topic and location, whereas WooMe focuses on time and topic.
The Dating category features, you guessed it, a lot of beautiful people. I’m convinced that any site that has a gallery display of members hand picks each and every one, just like dating sites only display the gorgeous people on their home page.
I click through to J***an Lewis, who is 18-25 in the US. It’s strange to see people’s full names, but if that’s what they put at the top of their profile, so be it.
She is cute and has similar topical interests as I do. Ok, we don’t share any topics in common, but she is, as I said, cute. I am too scared to call her directly, so I’ll leave a text message, we’ll see what happens. Is there such a thing as a virtual restraining order? No worries, you can set your account to only receive communications from your friends.
We’ve just stumbled upon the main issue I have with the Cafe. It’s awkward to pick up the phone and call someone just because they list interests. Texting is much easier, especially for us old folks (over 30). Actually, now that I’ve made a few calls, leaving a voicemail is probably the way you’re going to get a response from people. I wonder which channel will get the best responses?
This is where my original idea, and WooMe, and Skype Live, to some extent, make more sense. It’s much easier to break the ice in a small group conversation than initiating one-on-one conversations. I’m surprised Jaxtr didn’t implement this from the start.
I left a message for someone named Laurie who showed up as my first friend on Jaxtr. I clicked on her widget to leave a message, and my phone rang and told me to start talking. Only problem was that the call was ended after about 15 seconds, so I got cut off mid-sentence, which was annoying.
I don’t see a true search capability, which would be nice. The search link takes you to a “find your friends” link, which asks you to import friends from your various address books. I have 1,000+ people in my Gmail address book, and now I have to scroll through all of them. Google, I wish we could have a hard-coded group of people to send viral requests like this.
Jaxtr uses Javascript links to display profiles, which is a pain when you want to open a bunch of profiles at a time and you can’t open them up in separate browser tabs.
Speaking of going viral, Jaxtr goes viral through widgets posted on user profiles across the web.
For a standalone blog like this, the widget selection process is klunky and the widget code is not valid xhtml. However, for most people adding their widget to email, Facebook or hosted blogs, the widget embedding process is much smoother. I am a total outlier when it comes to services like this, I always have problems embedding stuff in my blog, or my particular situation is nothing that 99% of humanity is ever going to come across. Welcome to my world.
The Voice Blast feature is great. It’s a brief audio recording the person embeds in their widget on their blog, social network, or wherever. How soon will we see these Widgets on dating sites? Remember when Match had voice capabilities? I loved that, and this is even better.
Problem, I have no idea how to create a Voice Blast and there is no documentation in the support section. Can I get some help here?
Constantin finished up our discussion by talking about the online dating world. He totally gets what’s going on in the space.
Model of being a walled garden is understandable. At same time, web developed in amazing ways. Don’t try to hold onto users too tightly. Dating has moved from gardens to social nets and blogs. Scary to dating sites. Paywall as filter for serious daters.
Interesting factoid :2: Jaxtr VP Engineering is Taneli Otala, who’s previous gig was running the 100-person engineering organization at Various, Inc., owner of the FriendFinder conglomerate, which was recently bought by Penthouse for a reported $500 million.
Jaxtr Café could be a traffic driver for dating services, providing a new source of singles that may not necessarily gravitate directly to online dating.
Jaxtr Café is a step in the direction towards more realistic internet and mobile-based social communication.
