Have Arrington and Conway screwed up big time with their investment in Highlight?
Tonight I'm getting message after message that friend after friend has joined Highlight (the photo above is of Paul Davison showing it off to some of its first users back in December on the day it launched into a closed beta).
Context & Ripple Effects
Highlight entered its closed beta in December as a social network built around meeting people in the physical world, rather than Facebook’s online relationship graph. Its planned SXSW moment had already been framed against Foursquare and Glancee in a comparison of the location-social contenders.
The reports of friends joining give Arrington and Conway’s confirmed investment an early adoption test: the product must turn event-driven curiosity into useful real-world connections.
First-order effects
- Highlight gains an early cluster of users whose presence makes its people-nearby experience more useful to other users; Arrington and Conway’s investment is more exposed to whether that activity persists beyond the initial rollout.
Second-order effects
- Foursquare and Glancee face a sharper contest for SXSW attention, because Highlight is being evaluated on whether it can translate proximity into social discovery rather than merely attract downloads.
Third-order effects
- If location-social services can sustain dense local participation, consumer social networking shifts toward products whose value depends on simultaneous use in the same places, increasing the premium on distribution and early community formation.
The trend: Consumer social startups are testing whether real-world proximity can become a durable social graph distinct from Facebook’s online network.