You always hear about the booming tech scenes in Boulder, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco, but you never really hear much about the blooming tech scene in the Midwest/Bloomington. Why is that? Is it because we really aren’t blooming? Or is it really because we haven’t had enough time for it to blossom to become the next big tech scene? There are probably many reasons why we have yet to be considered a big tech scene, but we are making strides to be recognized.

If any of you attended the TEN Conference in Columbus, Indiana, Brad Wisler, actually listed off six elements he believes are essential for a startup/tech community. The elements are creative culture, education, heroes and soldiers, sense of place, organized capital, and culture of risk. Bloomington and Indy have all of these elements. So we’re ready to take off but what’s the next step?

Getting more people involved is the next step. Many people in both Indy and Bloomington work very hard to put Indiana on the map as a tech hotspot. With groups like Verge, BloomTech, and events like The Combine, many of these heroes, soldiers, and risk takers, are brought together. These events and groups need to be well marketed because when movers and shakers are together great things happen. People collaborate on their ideas and boom, we have a new startup. Little by little these great ideas can help build the road to a big tech scene, you never know what could be the next Facebook or Groupon.

How can you help? Come to the events, spread the word, just get involved anyway possible. SproutBox, for the past few years, has been working hard to showcase the talent of the Midwest. We can only do so much, we need your help. So stay up-to-date on the events going on in Bloomington and Indy. The Bloomington Tech Partnership keeps the tech event up-to-date on their website. Also make sure to follow SproutBox on twitter and we’ll announce important events.

Upcoming Events:

• 11/9: hYPe: Internet Marketing 101: 5:30pm, Ivy Tech

• 11/10: Geek Dinner: 6:00pm, Greek’s Pizzeria

• 11/18-11/20: Startup Weekend Bloomington: 6:30pm, Ivy Tech

• Every Friday: Tech Lunch: 12pm

• Every other Tuesday: Tech Coffee: 9am, Pourhouse Cafe

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Oh baby, you, you got what I need
but you say he’s just a friend
but you say he’s just a friend
-Biz Markie

Trying to get intimate
A couple weeks ago at the Startup Mixology speakers dinner I had a good conversation with Micah Baldwin about intimacy. Not the kind between the sheets, but the kind that perpetuates true friendship. It’s a topic that’s been rolling around in my head for a while, and I’m not the only one. Obviously, my acquaintance, Dave Morin has been thinking about it too. His new social network startup, Path, limits you to 50 friends. Zuck is taking a shot at intimacy as well, with Facebook’s renewed focus on one on one conversations and the new groups system.

Twitter is a lie
One thing Micah and I agreed on is that most social networks don’t really encourage you to be you. How many times have you started a tweet and then backed out? Not because you aren’t thinking what you typed, but because it’s not something appropriate to share with the world. Maybe it’s not relevant to everyone. Maybe it’s just too emo. Maybe it funny as hell, but could offend someone you care about. It’s not just about 50 friends vs 5000 friends. It’s about grandma vs Dave McClure.

I am not a private person. But while privacy isn’t a concern for me, respect for others is. I don’t curse in front of kids (usually). I don’t do shots at my parents house. I don’t rub it in that I had a good year financially to friends trying to make ends meet. This doesn’t make me inauthentic or non-transparent– It makes me not a douche bag.

Circles of friends
My social graph isn’t a thousand points of light. It’s not flat. It doesn’t look like some trippy exploding 3D dandelion either. I have an inner circle that I talk to almost every day– people I constantly bounce ideas off of (and still love me in the morning). I have friends that care what conferences I’m going to. I have acquaintances that may want to know what I think of my new XBOX 360 KINECT. I have announcements I want to get out to anyone who will listen, like that we’re hiring at SproutBox or that I’m throwing a conference.

Even though these same friendship levels exist for nearly everyone, they are largely ignored by social networks. It’s like each of us started up a radio station and then we’re surprised about the airwaves getting crowded. Facebook can’t tell the difference between my best friend at work (who incidentally I don’t interact with on Facebook much because, well, he is sitting next to me) and some over-requester  I accidentally added because we share 19 tech friends.

Users end up trying to model life by using different sites to segment their circles of friends. While it’s a pain to go to a bunch of different sites to update your status, the bigger problem lies in that people don’t use networks consistently. Some people use Facebook as a contact dump, others use LinkedIn for that. Some use foursquare for just their closest friends and some have 5000 foursquare friends.

Getting on the right Path
The just-launched “personal network,” Path, is attempting to identify the inner circle of your friends. The idea of a 50 friend limit has all the the right intentions. Segmenting your graph further, however, isn’t a solution–it’s part of the problem. Your friends change and having to remove one to add another is a not what a user wants. Granted, sometimes it isn’t what the user wants that matters, it’s what’s best for the collective that wins out (see 140 character limit in Twitter). But an arbitrary 50 friend limit isn’t good for anyone. If someone moves out of your inner circle, they are most likely still your friend. The last thing you want to do is indicate that: “Hey, you’re not in my inner circle anymore”. You probably still have a relationship with your former inner circle friend. You have photos you want to share with them, just maybe not the ones of your freaky new leg rash.

But Path is onto something big (at least for me). I want to decide who I’m sharing with when I post content. This isn’t new. Nearly all communication methods work this way. I can do a call with 1 or 100 people. I can send an email to 1 or 1000 people. I can mail a letter to 1 or 1,000,000. It’s up to me. As the creator of the content I control it’s reach. With status updates the problem is there is a lot of overhead in assembling lists to send to. No one wants to add recipients one at a time to a quick status update.

Your social circle
It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and bitch that someone else hasn’t solved your problem for you– So mostly that’s what I’m going to do. However, I do have a few half baked thoughts on a solution. It may be too complex for today’s non-power users. But it would work for me, so I hope someone builds something better.

What I want is a slider that I can quickly tweak when posting an update. The slider would have notches representing my inner circle all the way to up to a public post. When posting I could bump the slider up or down depending on my content and my intended audience.

I would define the rung of my social circle a particular connection falls into. These handful of rungs would correspond to a notch on the slider. Similar to friends, I could place web services at various rungs of the circle. So a post to Foursquare would be in ring 2 (among my friends), but a Twitter post would be at the public level (past my acquaintances). I’d post to public services like Twitter or Tumblr only when the slider was all the way up.

I could also see value in defining multiple social circles. So maybe a ‘Family’ circle would have my immediate family in the inner circle and extended family in tier 2, and family friends in tier 3.  A ‘Location’ circle could divide your friends up by how far they are away from you, etc.

Configuration overhead would be the biggest obstacle to adoption. You’d need a fun drag and drop interface to make initial sorting enjoyable. Categorizing a new friend would feel a little bit like building a game character. The process could be  jumpstarted by making recommendations for the default social circle based on interactions.

Obviously there’s a ton of flushing out to do– but the rewards could be meaningful. A system like this would have a significantly richer view of a users social graph. Widespread use would cut a lot of noise out of everyones feed– making some headway on solving the information overload many of us face daily.

I’m pretty sure the tools to do a proof of concept already exist in the privacy:allow fields of the Facebook social graph API. It’s just a matter of wrapping an interface around it. A social network with circle data at it’s core could use it to improve prioritization of messages, events, photos– essentiality any feed data.

One parting thought: Please, for the love of god, let’s never make a social circle public. The last thing we need is more MySpace Top Friends type drama among teenage girls.

Thanks to Kacey Martin for talking through this post with me.

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We’re pleased to announce that SproutBox is joining Startup Weekend as a national sponsor. Startup Weekend is a set of two-day events for software developers and entrepreneurs in cities around the world, and SproutBox will be its first national venture capital sponsor.  This partnership will provide additional support to create successful, sustainable startups and to close a crucial gap in the funding ecosystem for early stage software companies.

Clint Nelson, Director of Startup Weekend said, “The major benefits are taking teams further and supporting more teams than we can do ourselves. It’s a meeting of the minds and a gathering of passionate people that are willing to work together. For us, SproutBox clearly wants to be part of that ecosystem and that’s awesome.”

We’re going to be speaking at many of the Startup Weekend events, and one Startup Weekend team per quarter will be guaranteed a spot to present for the SproutBox selection committee for consideration as a SproutBox portfolio company, or “sprout.”

Also, all Startup Weekend teams will receive a fully-featured, six month CheddarGetter recurring billing account free of charge.  Additionally, participants will receive six months of Squad Edit, the premier web-based, real-time, collaborative code editor to help them through their development processes.

We’re really excited about this partnership- it’s going to mean great things for the software community.

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