I think it is most important for english speaking forums. I don’t know exactly about size of german forums with people from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, but at least Polish unicycling community is so small that we have no problem of having too much content.
But what is most important in Spencer’s project IMO is that it is not only about unicycling. And localization may be much more useful for more popular activities.
I follow the Hyphos thing a longer time now and real ylike the idea. I agree to Kris but the problem of fragmentation shouldnt be a realy problem as long as I can select groups of interest in a inteligent way.
If I can select for example LA and unicycling or just LA or just unicycling or Europe and BMX or Berlin or Berlin, NY and Longboard … there shouldnt be a problem to switch between local issues and global / continental things. It would be also great to have some API to connect plattforms like utv to the right place in Hyphos. There are several specialized plattforms which could participate from Hyphos and Hyphos can participate from them.
Really good point, Google+ presented the same functionality in a better way and it made a big difference. That said, I think the interaction is still too similar to what’s out there so in the long term either one site will be dominant or the community will be separated.
With Hyphos, there isn’t yet another popular site that offers the same experience. It takes a lot to get people away from what they’re used to using, but if there is enough value added by adopting something better, people will come. When something better comes along there might be some transition period (like the awkward times of having both a myspace and Facebook account), but in the end I think people will go where the majority is and communities like this will stay together.
Yep, that’s pretty much how the filtering is set up. For activities like unicycling in most places you’ll see a pretty low density of other people so you may only want to filter down to the state level (or international equivalent 
) but if you were browsing skating or tennis then the city level may be exciting. The fun is that you can jump around to different places or view everything in the world quickly and easily.
An API could be cool, the first step is growing the user base. We’ll also be making an mobile app and have other plans for useful things in the future.
I wish you well, but I’m pretty dubious about the whole thing. How do you plan to get over the hump of relevance? At first there will be no content at all. Maybe you can seed it with some geeks who’ll try anything new. Then what? I am a unicyclist in the Bay Area. Theoretically, if everyone in the Bay Area was on Hyphos, I could connect with them more easily. But, they’re not on Hyphos. If just 10% of the Bay Area unicyclists are on Hyphos, why would I bother? Even at 20%, 30% I don’t see the draw. People go to web sites for content, and if most of the content is being posted on Facebook, that’s where people will go.
Theoretically you could replace forums like unicyclist.com, where people go to read and post activity-specific content (which is not like Facebook or G+, where people go to share general content with circles of friends). But even competing with the forum seems tough; you have to not only offer a more effective communication method, you have to make it compelling enough that people will start posting content there instead of on unicyclist.com.
I also think there’s a questionable assumption in the phrase “new friends.” I don’t think people go online to find new friends. They might go online to find information about activities and events, and they might meet people at those events who become new friends, but it is rare that anyone goes online seeking to create new connections with people they haven’t met.
It’s a pretty crowded space, so you’re going to have to provide compelling functionality and/or compelling content to get anywhere. It’s a tough road, but good luck.
Awesome video and great idea! I love seeing the UCLA campus in your videos. Very slick! Go, Spencer! It’s a good sign that 40+ people may not get it.
If we launched and were open to the whole world immediately with hopes of people from all over hearing about and starting to using Hyphos, we never would get over that hump. Confining the launch in the beginning makes it much easier to get a high concentration of users in one place. If we were targeting Bay Area unicyclists initially and ended up with 10% using the site, you wouldn’t bother coming back. On the other hand, 10% of students at UCLA would mean thousands of users within walking distance of each other and there’s value in that. From there, expanding sounds more reasonable.
True, this is not meant to be a Facebook or G+ killer. The fact that so much of the traffic here (at least within a certain age group) has moved to Facebook (which isn’t actually even for community discussion) shows that its possible.
That’s probably what people used to say about online dating. People don’t currently go online to find new friends, but that could be related to the fact that there’s no place to do that. The motivation for using Hyphos doesn’t need to be finding new friends, but it is a likely outcome of interacting with people near you who share your interests.
Thanks! I don’t think the issue isn’t that they don’t get it, its more that almost every ambitious social web startup out to change the world will fail. We’re making something that I wish was already existing and popular so I could use it now, it has to start somewhere though.