We would have continued a while longer but the 08 recession really burnt us. We were raising $$ in the weeks where banks were literally failing. RIP Good Times era. Our iPhone app was just about ready to ship and we were going to start building integrations like email next, but no runway. We had an angel lined up who’d have gotten us about 4-6mo of runway but I didn’t want to burn that relationship in such an uncertain environment, we were all pretty down about prospects then.
Fun fact tho: the app continued to work for years after. FB took a long time to deprecate API and our code was pretty solid.
The goal is to avoid just a dumb timer saying 'its been 4 weeks, why don't you chat with X'. That's how Socialfly worked, and it was pretty high friction in practical use.
Problem is there’s a lot of input and upkeep which limits appeal, the most important social data sources (text & phone) are not accessible via api, its a personal tool that you don’t necessarily want to tell others you use which limits distribution & scale, and even after all that in general it’s hard to scale personal authenticity.
I think the problem needs to be approached from a different angle along the lines of a personal assistant rather that an explicit data management tool. And it likely has to come from those with access to privileged social data sources like Apple or Google or Facebook.