blog+news

If you’re a Rails or Java ninja who can work in our New York office, mail us now.

Review the job descriptions first…

• Ruby on Rails Engineer
• Mobile Java Engineer

…then, if you’re qualified, send an e-mail to jobs [at] socialight.com with your resume and one or two paragraphs describing why you rock.

Existing Socialight users get first dibs at the positions!

I’m excited to say we were featured in this bastion of business news, in a piece titled Social Networking by Cellphone (registration required). Jessica Vascellaro wrote up an overview of the mobile “friend-locator” market and tells readers how Socialight lets you keep up with friends.

I love hearing about the innovative ways people are using social software. Humans are, by nature, social beings so when we hook up special software to enhance our social proclivities, we can work together to do amazing things. While we’re here at Socialight using social software to connect messages and pictures to place, people to place, people to people, and sometimes even place to place, there are people out there using social software for all kinds of new stuff.

Recently, I listened to this podcast about an initiative out of New York Law School called The Peer to Patent Project aiming to fix the US patent office review process. Many consider the process broken since there are multi-year backlogs of applications pending review. As a result many patents that shouldn’t be granted are, and those that should usually take years to get through the process. Peer to Patent, which has financial backing from the likes of GE and IBM, seems like a brilliant use of social software. It also could have huge positive effects on innovation and business. Essentially, the project’s aim is to design and pilot an online system for peer review of patents with integrated social reputation, collaborative filtering, and information visualization tools.

At Socialight, we’re harnessing the power of social software, and using some of the same social tools, for another new application: location-based communication. Our goal is to give people a tool for learning and communicating about, and through, place. Social software makes this work since we inhabit the same spaces as many other people but often care more about what the people we trust, like our friends and people with common interests, have to say about those places. It helps us figure out what gets shown to different people in different places. Without the filter, you’d be inundated with lots of stuff, much of which likely uninteresting to you. On Socialight, especially on our mobile interfaces, we first show you the content that’s coming from the Contacts you’ve made and the Channels you’ve joined. We also use the feedback – like ratings and comments – that you add to Sticky Notes to help figure out what others might like to see. If you haven’t already signed up and invited some Contacts to join you, we hope you give it a whirl soon and explore. Then let us know what you think.