Location-based services (LBS) and the privacy of their users – it can work out: aka-aki is celebrating 500,000 members! And despite (or because of) the toughest privacy policy of the industry.

Thousands of encounters per day

Thousands of times a day, somewhere in the world, a phone goes “beepbeep”: it’s the aka-aki signal, which we use to introduce people crossing paths.

There are neighbors who have discovered hobbies they have in common, business travelers that were complete strangers (but had a high stick-o-meter match) spontaneously meeting up for a beer, a Franco-German marriage of aka-aki members and many, many friends made through aka-aki.

Nearly two years after aka-aki launched and just over a year after the first iPhone version our numbers look something like this:

• 500,000 registered members, mostly in Germany and France
• 300,000 aki-messages sent daily
• about half an hour daily online time per member
• 30 million monthly ad requests

This makes aka-aki probably the most successful location-based mobile social network in Europe.

This is just the beginning

But we are far from satisfied. We know what our members want – from new features to support of other platforms. Of course we continually fix bugs that crept into the system during the rapid growth. Next week another bunch of bugfixes will go online while we continue working on the next big thing.

Thank you!

We thank our members who have accompanied us through ups and down(time)s, and thanks for forgiving us the chaos we sometimes create. Honestly: aka-aki has the best members around the world! Not just nearby.

All the best from Berlin
Gabriel (aka-aki-team)

Founder and investor Stefan Glänzer recently wrote in German newspaper FAZ, that Berlin-Mitte was “probably the world’s greatest factory to copy digital ideas”. Some well-known (and a lot of less-known) companies that copy concepts from the US actually have their offices in Berlin-Mitte.

As if we had sensed it before, aka-aki moved from Berlin-Mitte to Kreuzberg a couple of weeks ago. But honestly there has never been a role model for aka-aki. Neither when the project started as a Bluetooth Jave app, nor today. That was a risk we took, because even after many focus groups you can still be far out with the product or service you create and need to touch it up. And sometimes, certain features just happen to be similar all over the internet. And that’s ok, because sometimes there IS that special way a problem is solved best.

aka-aki (since December 2008) and Facebook (February 2010)

When we saw Facebook’s latest website update, we didn’t presume any copying. We were just amazed. The new layout looked a bit familiar. Maybe to the one that aka-aki has since December 2008? Friends online on the left… three icons top left.. Well, we wouldn’t call that copying. It’s just two companies having the same keen sense of usability! And there are still enough differences to tell us from each other. While Facebook is about your existing circle of friends, aka-aki lets you discover new people in real life. Very soon in a new playful fashion. Which will be another original idea from Berlin-Mitte.

Sorry, but this post is not available in English

Sorry, but this post is not available in English

Photo, license

A bit of heavy reading for the weekend. But aka-aki users are tough, so here we go:

One of the special features of aka-aki is actually none. It’s about the whereabouts of the members, their locations. When the location based service (LBS) hype started, every company wanted to capture as precisely as possible their users’ locations. Some services pinpoint its members on maps.

Paradoxical user needs

When we designed aka-aki, we thought about this, too. Our gut feeling was against it, and the user surveys then brought the following paradox to light: If we asked people whether they would like to see their friends on maps, many said yes, that would be practical. But asked if they were to participate in such a system, they said of course not! Who wants to be a moving target on a map?

“Make it abuser friendly”

In addition, aka-aki is indeed heavily used to discover new people – and sharing your precise location with complete strangers doesn’t seem right. Or does it? Imagine this case: I am stranded at Hamburg main station because of the regular train chaos (German rail is actually not as good as many people might think abroad). Now it would be nice to have a beer with a like-minded aka-aki member. We know that aka-aki is being used for situations like that. Although we do not specify precise locations. As Professor Franz Liebl said, who has advised us in the design: “Make aka-aki not just user friendly, but abuser friendly.” Of course he didn’t mean to make the system more cosy for abusive behaviour, but to keep it open for use in cases that we haven’t yet anticipated (an API comes to mind here).

Relative vs. absolute location

In 2006, when aka-aki was designed, we assumed users would be very cautious about their location, so we have decided to provide users only with imprecise locations. This behaviour is by design, as they say. We broke the latitude and longitude, which provided us with the phones down to four categories: near, around, in the city and the region.That means not only an intentional blurring of precise location information, but has another effect: all locations in aka-aki are relative (if the user does not voluntarily specify his residence). You do not get the absolute location of a member unless you ask them for it.

Success by omission

And it seems that we did quite well with this strategy. aka-aki is the leading location-based social network in the two countries in which we have launched so far (Germany and France). But everything changes, and so did you, our users. The fear of sharing your whereabouts, seems to diminish from day to day.

At the crossroads: more precision, but also more privacy

“More accurate location information” is by far the most requested feature in our feedback form on the website. It was also # 1 in our e-mail member survey in late 2009 and a top request from our interviews with female aka-aki members in January 2010.

As you might have noted, we don’t make changes to the location feature easily. We have imposed on us the toughest privacy regulations in our industry, we voluntary and automatically delete location data rather than storing it, we anonymize IP addresses in our log files and more.

“Just make it configurable!”

There is a (seemingly) universal answer to all these questions of course: Just make it configurable! But it’s not that simple. A product that wants to be good for everybody, will end up not being good for anyone. Because it’s complexity and uncertainty that comes with configurability. And users tend to leave the default settings as they are. Even when it comes to privacy, most users are not willing to make extensive settings (see Facebook).

This may not be true for the readers of this blog, which show above-average interest for the services they use – and this is not the norm. Most users muddle through (no matter what the service) and are happy when they get their things done quickly (as Steve Krug says).

Opportunities and limitations of location based services

Imagine a scenario like this: I wish that all my friends could see that I’m in the club such-and-such, but not x, because she’ll want to join the party and really don’t want her here tonight. Who’d want to set up something like this on a mobile phone?

So we have to realize that location based services aren’t appropriate for all cases of social interaction. And concentrate on the cases that actually occur, while keeping aka-aki open for the scenarios that we don’t see today. The crucial question is: Why do I share my location with whom – and how accurately? And why will I do it in the future?

I look forward to your feedback.

Greetings!
Gabriel (aka-aki-team)

That is Japanese for “aka-aki. the people nearby.” Here at aka-aki we are currently working on a Japanese version of our application. But how do you translate a social network for mobile phones?

Find a common language first

First thing is to create a glossary. It’s a list of the essential aka-aki terms and expressions: encounter, sticker, within walking distance, interesting stuff, etc. Those make the special character of aka-aki. This special tonality should be retained in other languages, too. And there’s something else the glossary is important for. If different translaters are working for the project at the same time or in the future, same things should still be called the same names. Nearby stays nearby and doesn’t become closeby or around. The glossary is the dictionary for aka-aki where the terms are fixed for all language versions.

Flying blind

When it comes to translating the mobile software itself things become technical. The problem is, that the texts have to be translated insight a very chaotic text file consisting of variables, keywords, comments and the actual text elements that you’ll see on the screen, so called “strings”. The translater now has to locate the “strings” within the text file, translate them and replace them by the translated strings. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. As while translating the translater doesn’t see where the text element will appear later in the software. Neither in which context nor in which position on the screen.

French needs space

Which brings us to another challenge. The Layout. The words have to fit in. Into boxes, on buttons, in lists and titles. The translater has to stick to the length of the original string. Unfortunately, the amount of words needed to say something, varies from one language to another. Let’s say, some languages are more efficient than others. While in English a short and chunky “interesting people” is enough, French likes to describe the same thing with an epic “membres qui pourraient t’intéresser”. For this job, you really have to KNOW a language, and you have to understand software, mobiles and the social networking concept.

Get professional help

Well, we are an international team at aka-aki. But for the translation of our community we need professional support. And we get it from our friends at easytrans24.com in Hamburg. This translation agency understands what we do and what’s important in our business. They know how to overcome the difficulties described above. And they do it in a very short time at a very good price. At aka-aki we are also lucky that the guys at easytrans24.com are very keen aka-aki users and decided to sponsor our localisation projects. Thank you very much for this start-up support! So if you ever have to localize a software, website, iPhone App or whatever, give those guys a call!

Nearby meets big, wide world

At the end of each localization project comes the magic moment when you finally see aka-aki on the screen in a new language. Titles like “in der Nähe” “autour de toi” “intorno a te” and “a tu alrededor” make the people nearby screen smell like the big, wide world. And soon this world becomes even bigger. When we’ll release the Japanese version of aka-aki. We are excited about aka-aki becoming exotic.

Greetings from Berlin
Roman, aka-aki team

People nearby (at aka-aki offices)

Several members had complained that they have seen fewer people around them on aka-aki since our relaunch. There has been speculation here in the blog comments a lot about what could be the problem. First of all thanks for your advice on the subject.

@kapitaenchaos had suspected that we had reduced the radius of the “people around you”. Others said that members would run away from aka-aki, bugged by bugs.

Neither is the case. So what happened?

As is often the seemingly simple functions are quite complicated. So are the “people nearby.” When aka-aki was designed, we assumed that it would run on on your cellphones in the background. So while you were making calls, surfing, listening to music or just have the cellphone in your pocket, aka-aki would forward your location to the server and thus makes you visible to other members.

On the iPhone / iPod touch this doesn’t work.

As you know there is no no real multitasking on these devices (as of now). That is, you start aka-aki, you close it, do something else, start aka-aki again, etc. If we immediately removed all the people from the list of “people around you” who just pressed the home button (below the iPhone screen), this would result in a super-annoying coming and going of people in the list. aka-aki would become unusable.

So we decided to go for a technique that is generally recommended: tolerance.

Pressing the Home button, you will stay a few more minutes around others. Thus we can avoid that you were “just missed” by someone. And thanks to push messaging, you don’t miss other member’s aki-messages, even if aka-aki is no longer running. This tolerance, we had reduced with the new backend. Ie, if you pressed the Home button, you’d been removed faster from other people’s “people around you” list than before. This had more dramatic consequences than expected: The impression was created that far fewer people use aka-aki – although this was not the case, according to our statistics. Furthermore, the new backend does not deliver more than 100 people “around you”, where the old backend did not have this limitation.

We have now taken action.

On Sunday 14/02/2010, at approximately 6.30 pm, we have reverted the tolerance back to the old higher value. This had an immediate effect on the amount of people shown as “nearby”.

The limit of 100 people “around you” will be removed during the week, too.

And then some people in metropolitan areas will not have less, but perhaps even more people around than before the relaunch. Should you still have problems with people nearby (not with the people, but with the function, haha), then mail your user name and cell phone model to support@aka-aki.com. Thanks for understanding!

Next week there will be visitors from France here in Berlin. A team from Canal+ is coming to visit us here to shoot for a documentary about aka-aki.

For this we are looking for aka-aki members who want to appear in this documentary. The shooting will be either Wednesday or Thursday 17th or 18th at St.Oberholz in Berlin-Mitte.

If you are interested or have any questions, please send us an email or give us a call:

office@aka-aki.com
+49 30 288 86 76 – 6

Cant wait to hear from you
Roman, aka-aki team.

It’s done. aka-aki has moved and this time, different from our virtual move a couple of weeks ago, everything went well. In the end we are talking 150 boxes and loads of furniture in two 7.5 tons trucks and one van.

A big thank you goes out to our moving saints Petra, Dorina, Lena, Antje and Sonja for their perfect organisation and commitment during the crazy days and before. To Felix and Daniel who took care of setting up all the communication infrastructure that we need to go back to work. And to our forwarding company CL-Spedition. If you ever have to move a startup, give them a call!

Some impressions of the new home you see in the gallery. Well, it has kind of a rough, industrial charme. But it’s huuuge! For the first time in our company history we have to introduce room numbers for orientation. Cranzy. But we need the space. Game development, community management, marketing and internationalisation takes much more space than it used to one year ago. We are looking forward to working in aka-aki office number 4. So let’s go!

Greetings from Berlin
the aka-aki team.