Social networking simplified with nextSociety
In a sea of social networking apps, how do you connect with the people you really need to? There are several apps on the market trying to address this concern, but the newest app, nextSociety, has a different approach. NextSociety analyzes your network to find the connection most relevant to you.
You choose what your interests are at the moment, so if you are about to attend a convention, you might choose business strategy, startup, and entrepreneurship; by clicking these, nextSociety will comb through your contacts and find only the people relevant to your search. You can also enter location for that upcoming trip and the app will add networking opportunities to your stream. The app pulls this information from your iPhone contacts and LinkedIn.
At any given time, regardless of the criteria you enter, you will be shown the top 150 people that meet your search parameters. Your contacts will be shown in a circle with a colored ring around the edge, indicating how many networking opportunities you have given a particular contact. Think of it as an interaction meter. You can tap on any contact to see where networking opportunities exist and reach out to them.
While the app is useful if you have a great number of contacts, it is infinitely more useful in places where you do not know any one: especially conferences and meetings. You can check-in at places and then see who else has checked in. The app is limited by the sources from which it pulls information, but the developers hope to add a full complement of social media networks soon. Also, several people have addressed the issue of security, as there are not many security features or filters at this point. But, as it is still in beta, hopefully these will be addressed in a subsequent update.
NextSociety is only available for iOS currently, but hopefully they will expand to the Android market as well.
