MessageParty - The Blog

Hi Friends —You might have noticed that messageparty.com now points to this blog. We have...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:00:05 -0500

Hi Friends —

You might have noticed that messageparty.com now points to this blog. We have taken down the old site and are working on a new and improved MP — follow us on Tumblr for updates. If you’d like to grab your data from the old site or have questions for us, email us at hi@messageparty.com.

Thanks!

Walter’s Bar is the spot to meet interesting folks,...

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 22:36:55 -0400

Walter’s Bar is the spot to meet interesting folks, apparently…

New App + Update

Tue, 31 May 2011 15:26:42 -0400

Hey all - there’s a new version of MP in the app store. A few things to check out:

—We added a button called “me” to make it super easy to see your own posts

—You can now share your messages on Twitter and Facebook directly from the iphone app

—We added a handy walk-through for beginners

—You can now view all nearby messages on a map to see those closest to you

Hope you enjoy the new app. Our goal is to make an excellent blogging product that is truly mobile. If you have feedback we’d love to hear it. Hit us up at feedback@messageparty.com.

Laterz

The MP Team

Mobile Blogging and Urban Adventures

Thu, 26 May 2011 17:35:37 -0400

Smartphone growth over the past few years is nothing short of astounding. With this exciting device growth comes all kinds of new opportunities in personal publishing — you can take advantage of previously arduous tasks, like geotagging and incorporating rich media, completely seamlessly. Because of our phones are with us all the time, we can now record our lives in a very different way than we did with regular blogs.

Many people keep travel journals filled with coasters from bars, ticket stubs, short anecdotes from their day. They are blips of what you’re thinking and what you’re seeing at that moment, and together they create a unique narrative. When thinking about MessageParty, we wanted to build something that harnessed exactly this — a way to chronicle your life in a new way from the device that’s with you all the time. It is a product that is mobile first, web second, and we will always think about it that way.

What we have seen from our early users has been really cool to watch — people are writing these amazing urban vignettes that are all sorted by place. This is one of my favorites:

Smartphones are already beginning to change the way we publish and express ourselves digitally, and the shift will be a significant one. “Blogging” is changing - it will soon be almost completely mobile, very here-and-now, and media-rich. We want to incorporate all of these factors into future versions of MessageParty and we are excited to hear your feedback.

MessageParty at the Brooklyn Blog Fest last night at the Bell...

Fri, 13 May 2011 15:49:36 -0400

MessageParty at the Brooklyn Blog Fest last night at the Bell House. Gowanus, FTW!

Boston Globe story on entrepreneurship. Check out the full story...

Sun, 01 May 2011 12:06:29 -0400

Boston Globe story on entrepreneurship. Check out the full story here.

amanda + jason at the Makery today. lady said “don’t...

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 19:59:00 -0400

amanda + jason at the Makery today. lady said “don’t smile but don’t not smile”.

MessageParty at the Small Girls PR prom last night. For the full...

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 11:37:58 -0400

MessageParty at the Small Girls PR prom last night. For the full update, hit up The Standard’s page on MessageParty.

A Bright Future For Location Based Communication

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 13:02:00 -0400

A Bright Future For Location Based Communication:

Cool analysis of MessageParty from “Politics and the New Media” blog at Yale. From the post:

“Location-based apps are all about exposing you to new people and places and informing you about events and ideas going on within your community. Yes, of course, these apps are very specific because they are catering to where you are, but they are significantly expanding your horizons within your vicinity. I believe the greatest implication of location based communication is that it is taking us closer to a media world where we are able to actually progress as a community…we are starting to move toward forums that cater toward this specific niche – community building. One does not have to overthrow a local government with these tools, but could instead create a closer and more aware community.”

Place as Filter

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:32:00 -0400

What’s most interesting about digital media is how you discover it. There are millions and millions of videos and photos and words and links circulating around the web, yet we only click on a tiny fraction of them in the course of any given day.

New methods for discovering media have changed dramatically over the past few years. I’m not talking about hand-curated sites, which are well-established and have much in common with traditional media (enlightened editor/network/publisher decides what you’re going to consume). These are new methods of consumption that are specific to the digital realm. If I had to categorize it, I would break it down into three phases: phrase as filter, people as filter, and place as filter.

1: Phrase as Filter

This was back before social news and crowdsourced news and Facebook news feed and etc. It was the days where, when you wanted to see a funny video, you typed “funny video” into Google, or even better, you typed bored.com directly into your browser (I <3 u bored.com). If you wanted to learn about botany or surfing or Bali you typed it into Google and that was that. We discovered information through single phrases and search engines. Some search engines were better than others, and you had to know what you were looking for.

2. People as Filter

Trading links has always been commonplace, but now there are services that formalize this process. Turns out people make an excellent filter, and are much better than machines at pointing out things we might enjoy. The great thing about using people as a filter is you don’t always have to know what you’re looking for. These human-filtering services are extremely popular - Reddit, Digg, Twitter, Tumblr, and the Facebook News Feed are a few that come to mind. The sites engage an entire spectrum from “friends” to “strangers” and these different relationships provide different types of filters. Some people prefer Facebook because they know who is seeing their links, while others prefer Twitter because it allows anyone who is interested to consume. It turns out, though, that people can be pretty consistent in their tastes — how does one discover new things?

3. Place as Filter

With the growing ubiquity of location-aware smart phones and geolocation in the browser, the potential for a new kind of filter has grown precipitiously: place.

Think about it — when you walk into a restaurant and there are articles posted on the wall, you read them. And when there’s a plaque on your building that says that Thoreau used to live there and write, that’s meaningful.

We all have a higher level of interest in our immediate surroundings. Such is the power of local news - a fire at some restaurant in Minneapolis is of little interest, but one down the street I care about a whole lot. A video of a high school basketball game is boring, unless it’s from my high school.

These new technologies allow for a complete re-definition of “local media” - it’s not simply a local paper putting their stories online, but incorporating mobile phones and geo-location as a way to facilitate discovery of place-based media (PBM). It is because of the sheer success of people as filter that we need a new, more finite way to filter, as it is increasingly more difficult to sift through the masses to find the bits of content that “hit home” - there are just too many social filters. Just as the smart-phone brought on a map-revolution, where once again we walk around the streets gazing at maps like silly tourists, we will also see a rise in PBM.

Place-Based Media

So WTF is place-based media?

Place-based media is seeing the post “The Chelsea Hotel, Chubb Rock, and you can never go home again” when you’re in Chelsea, watching “Lazy Sunday” as you stand outside the Magnolia Bakery and reading “Missing the A Train, and Taking the Not-the-Quickest Way” when you’re right by the A train station at 59th st.

I am not arguing that place-based media is a new thing, but rather that new technology will allow for a change in the way this sort of media is produced, organized, curated, and discovered.

So what does this have to do with the new MessageParty? We’ve made a ton of changes since August, and we think place-based media is pretty exciting. The new MP is built around this idea - that location technologies afford a new opportunity for personal expression and discovery. We’re calling it geo-blogging. Street art, billboards, photos, flyers and stories can and should be organized digitally around places.

We’re not trying to re-organize all the content on the web, so much of it is crap anyway - but rather, we’re trying to take interesting stuff and make it discoverable and accessible in a different way. If you’re in NYC, we’d love to hear your thoughts - click here to give us your email for early access.

<3 u,

amanda (march 2011)

Changes! The New MessageParty. And stuff.

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:35:00 -0400

Hey Party People —

Lots of changes to MessageParty coming in the next few weeks. You’ll hardly recognize it! Thank you for providing such amazing initial feedback — we really listened.

What’s different?

We started as a chat service, now we’re not. People were leaving too many interesting notes and messages at different places and chat lacks permanence. We realized what we had really built was a blogging service around places, so all the changes we’ve made have been around this vision: building a great way to create content around places - to leave links and stories and photos and whatever you can think of. We’re calling it “geo-blogging”.

Why Geo-Blogging?

Blogging is an established way to communicate online. But what if every place had its own page that anyone could contribute to? We are especially intrigued by the idea of “place” as a way to filter information. People experience places they visit in different ways and there’s lots of content around places that interesting to you when you’re actually there. Think of geo-blogging as “the writing on the wall.” Except better.

What to post?

We encourage you to post links, notes, short anecdotes and photos to MessageParty, and like other blogging services all messages are public and posted to the web. The only constraint is that all messages must be tied to a physical location. MessageParty has always been about places, and now you have the ability to post not only text, but links and photos as well. All messages will be posted on the web, and we put together a mobile web version as well. New iPhone version coming soon!

What’s the point?

There’s a lot of existing and yet-to-be-discovered content that should be tied to a specific place. The web is great at filtering content by specific terms (search) and by social connections, but the idea of using location as a filter is still nascent. We want to re-organize information around places.

How do I sign up?

Hit up http://messageparty.com/

LATES

Amanda, Jason and Jarod

Thanks to everyone who came by our SXSW party at Beauty Bar. We...

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 21:19:18 -0400

Thanks to everyone who came by our SXSW party at Beauty Bar. We had an awesome time and hope you did too!

So many interesting stories submitted to our SXSW Stories...

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 14:12:56 -0400

So many interesting stories submitted to our SXSW Stories project. Check it out! This one is from 1992. Excited! Sign up for MessageParty here: http://msg.pr/

MessageParty Sneak Peek: SXSW Stories

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 12:37:43 -0500

Hi Everyone!

We are super pumped about the new MessageParty that we’ll be releasing in a few weeks.

To give you a sneak peek of what it will look like, we put a feed from the SXSW Conference in Austin on our homepage: http://msg.pr. Check it out!

Also - come to our party in Austin tomorrow night: http://thewatercooler.eventbrite.com/

Later

The MP Crew

Come hang at our SXSW party! Joint effort with Bnter, brought...

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:21:00 -0500

Come hang at our SXSW party! Joint effort with Bnter, brought to you by Small Girls PR! RSVP here: http://thewatercooler.eventbrite.com/

The Makery on CNN

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 16:51:21 -0500

The Makery on CNN:

The Makery gets a plug on CNNMoney! Sweet.

Coming Soon! The New MessageParty.

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 20:59:48 -0500

Coming Soon! The New MessageParty.:

Hey all - lots of changes coming to MessageParty in the next few weeks that we are super excited about! Sign up at http://msg.pr to get all the news + an invite.

Hey People! We’ve been quiet for a while as we’ve...

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 14:02:05 -0500

Hey People!

We’ve been quiet for a while as we’ve been working on some new stuff.

A few updates:

1. check out our space! we work out of this great office in Williamsburg, Brooklyn called The Makery.

2. we are releasing a whole bunch of new stuff in Feb. and are excited for your thoughts/feedback.

More soon —

Amanda, Jason, Jarod