Everyone, please stop. Seriously, stop. How many more of these things do we need?

"Find people nearby with similar interests", sounded like a semi-decent premise 3 or 4 years ago, but no one did it well enough to reach a critical mass, and nor did the 100 or so clones that followed. I cringe every time I hear about a startup like this now.

People (maybe just me) don't generally make friends in this way. How many times have you honestly been walking down the street and thought, "I must find someone who shares my love of handball as well as Star Wars!" You don't. You go join a handball club, or you find some nerds that are into sci-fi, and maybe there might be an overlap. And if not, who gives a shit - there's much more to liking a person than what their interests are. They might be really unkind or talk about you behind your back. I'd rather not be friends with them in that case, even if they love handball and Star Wars more than they love breathing.

Offering control over your users privacy can not be claimed as a selling point, as I see so often in social media startups. It is a minimum user requirement and in some territories, a legal requirement.

I hate to tell anyone that you can't do something, but I think there are so many more valuable unsolved problems out there.

You know, at first I was thinking this is a cheesy idea, especially with it not really giving anything new. But then I think, what would I pay to find a friend that truly has overlapping interests? I'd probably pay decent money for that, because I can't seem to find a "best friend". The people who share my sports interests don't understand how I can watch a chick flick. The people who are into programming can't understand my religious views. And those people don't take kindly to my love for science. And those people don't appreciate my musical abilities. So on, so forth. Only my wife understands all that, which is great, but I need a friend outside that. My existing friends are good for diversity, but nobody understands me enough to really be my best friend. So, in short, I'd pay for something that let me find someone who can actually understand me. Call it "friend dating".

I had this idea when I was employed at Facebook. I was even considering doing something similar to it on the Hackathon. I believe in your idea and if Facebook won't do, in my opinion it it will be big (I didn't see anyone there interested in picking up this idea, so I don't think they will).

Graph search solves part of this problem - on example you can search "Friends of my friends, who like tennis, programming and Game of thrones". The problem here is that it's awkward to contact these people - you won't message person "hey, I found out that we have similar interests, we may be friends". The whole problem is "breaking ice". The fact that you know who could be a good friend doesn't solve this problem, because you don't have a good way of meeting these people.

I had a few ideas how to solve it, any wasn't perfect. Core thought behind is that you usually meet new people not through internet, but either on parties or by introduction through common friend. Maybe you will have any use from them:

1. Facebook or your site could algorithmically organize events for people. But honestly I don't know if people would be interested in attending such parties. You would sign up for a party and Facebook would find ideal group of strangers, that according to some machine learning would be your ideal friends. Having enough data is is possible to make awesome selection, but I don't know if people would be interested in attending such parties. Some slight modification is organizing "lunches". Imagine you are working in big office or at big school campus. Then your site could find ideal people to eat lunch with.

2. This is slight modification of point 2. There are tons of public events and venues. You could suggest what are good public parties and venues where I could find the most likely minded people. This is probably the least awkward option, but it is also the least accurate in finding likely minded people.

3. Introductions. Likely minded people will probably be close to you in your social graph. There's a chance that you have common friend. He could get a suggestion from Facebook or your site - "Hey X, we found out that your friends Y and Z should know each other. Do you want to introduce them to each other?". But here I am again sceptical if people would do it.

4. Having option of posting a status to result of graph search query. Then you could on example post a status "Hey, who wants to play tennis?". Problem here is that to initiate a conversation another person needs to write a message to you. Messaging a stranger is always awkward and in my opinion won't work, unless there will be big mental shift among people.

I believe this is a big problem for a lot of people nowadays, especially introverted people not good at making new connections. I believe in you, good luck :).

I think meetup.com fills this role fairly well at the moment. There's definitely room for improvement but if you're looking for a group of people that want to play some tennis, go climbing etc. then it's a pretty good bet.

I have been thinking about something similar to this for a while. The problem is the negative stigma of hunting for friends. That makes it difficult to get people to want to signup. The best potential candidates would already have lots of friends and wouldn't need your service.

However, this would be immensely helpful in finding new friends, especially if you just moved to a new area. Even moving within a city, it is difficult to maintain close connections to your friends if you don't live near them.

Best of luck

I'm really surprised that this post was able to reach the front page with "I'm building another social network". That being said.. here's a startup that's trying to deal with this problem: http://www.joinbunch.com/group/28/startups/1/

Still, I find it unclear if the goal is to meet people online or offline..? Or why I would like to meet someone sharing the same religion/book/movies/job/etc... My startup buddies don't share all the same religions, and my starcraft buddies don't share my startup enthusiast.. but so what?

If the goal is to meet new people sharing your passion, just join the next meetup or events related to that passion..

If the goal is to meet new people online sharing your passion then.. I guess that's an interesting problem to tackle. There are lots of verticals going after this (I.e. finding a fitness buddy). The only difference with yours would be "having all these in the same feed". Is that enough of a value proposition?

A friend of mine created something that could clearly hit that market idea.. still unclear if he wants to go in that direction.

This would be great, if you could pull it off. I'm stuck in a bad situation like this - most sites connecting you to a single person are dating oriented, and that is HELL as a female user, and otherwise I have made a little bit of use of meetup.com and couchsurfing.org, but I do find it lacking. The issues with meetup.com is that you have to tolerate sometimes awful group meetups, and one person will come every time and be really awkward or something...I'm much better person to person. When I've used OkCupid to meet people, guys assume they're on a date and start doing a ton of inappropriate crap even though we're just meeting for coffee. Would love to see the niche filled, and please see if you can do what you can for gender balancing/creepers, which is a huge problem for female users of such sites.

I've been working on http://www.socialocale.com . It's interest and location based. Judges at Startup Weekend hated it. What do you guys think? Is it worth pursuing? Here's a screenshot of what it looks like on the inside http://imgur.com/ciPp9pA

I would avoid calling it a social network, simply because of the increasing "social network fatigue." Even when fatigue isn't tangible (and I don't think it yet is for social networks) it can mean the difference between a potential user visiting your site and possibly signing up, or never even clicking the link.

I think this sounds really cool. It would be really interesting to get REALLY specific into your interests and see if anyone matched up with you.

It's great that it's not designed to be a dating site, I take it there'll be no pictures or 'how would you describe your body type?' data fields, then?

We think we are on track with http://www.LetsLunch.com to cater to people meeting during lunch hour. It is a least friction way for you to meet new people. Tell us what you think about it? so far 12,000 lunches setup and going up!

I remember PG interviewing Zuck for Startup School 2012, and Zuck mentioning that while Facebook solved the "How to connect with existing friends" problem, it wasn't really focused on solving the "How to meet new friends" problem. So, nice work!

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Interesting concept, I'm looking forward to the first release.

> it's not a dating site

The skeptic in me says that if it works to some scale, it will quickly become one :)

If you want to meet new people is the solution really to spend EVEN MORE time on the computer?

I'm interested

Sounds like Reddit++ to me