Whrrl v2.0 Has Arrived

Pelago has been on an absolutely incredible journey, and today we reached a momentous milestone with the launch of Whrrl v2.0. Our adventure has spanned the design and development of our first major product (the original Whrrl); the successful negotiation of multiple carrier deals; raising two rounds of funding; the appearance and rise of the iPhone and, later, the App Store; a challenging but ultimately successful struggle to hit our stride as a company; the decision to build an entirely new product in Whrrl v2.0; and a simultaneously intense and fabulously rewarding sprint to build and go to market with the new product.

I won’t try to expand on all of that in one blog post. Today, I’ll just talk about the transition from the original Whrrl to Whrrl v2.0 .

While the new product is very different from the original Whrrl, the vision and mission upon which both products are based has remained the same. Pelago has been around for a little over 3 years. When we founded the company, Facebook was still not open to the general public, Twitter was unknown and the iPhone was a year and a half away from its unveiling. That is a very different landscape from what we see today. The advent of the iPhone and App Store completely changed the way applications are built and distributed in the mobile industry. Facebook’s platform created a highly engaged and accessible social ecosystem. Twitter introduced the world to microblogging. Thanks largely to Facebook and Twitter, a significant percentage of the world interacts in a very new and much more immersive fashion.

Amazingly, none of this seismic change motivated Whrrl v2.0 or affected our direction in other than tactical ways. In fact, we built Whrrl with the expectation that the world would move in the direction it has (luckily or otherwise), with a desire to play a role in taking it even further. Back in 2006, we developed Pelago’s vision based on the convergence of some powerful trends that we predicted (in short, perfect information, people are media and pervasiveness of location-awareness — read more here). The true motivation for reinventing Whrrl was the learning that Whrrl’s users provided through their use of the product and their feedback.

Whrrl 1.0, a Valuable Experiment

Whrrl was a “social discovery” application for the real world. Our goal was to create an entirely new kind of discovery experience that went beyond helping people find, to actually introduce highly relevant new places and events to try – truly a serendipitous discovery experience for the physical world. Our approach was to create an ecosystem in which people capture (through Whrrl) where they go as they live their lives in the real world (something we call a “footstream”™). And then we organized all of the footstream™ history to enable discovery. The map showed the aggregated history of the activity and opinions of yourself and your friends. A person’s profile showed that person’s history to allow others to follow in his/her footsteps and be inspired by their activities. Whrrl’s personalization algorithms transformed user behavior patterns into recommendations. Whrrl essentially turned your friends into a personal team of discovery agents busily unearthing interesting things for you by simply living their lives.

Whrrl was a very worthy experiment, but we learned a couple of important things that led us to conclude we should build a different product.

First, people don’t really like writing reviews very much. Only a very small percentage of users actually wanted to take the time to write a review. When we talked to our users, they told us that reviews are too impersonal and they’re just not very engaging. They told us that what they really wanted to share was their stories. The second big learning was that gratification in Whrrl came too slowly — before a new user would start seeing social discovery benefit, they had to contribute quite a bit. This really had its root in the first point: since sharing reviews wasn’t very motivating for people, they needed a greater reward to do it. And truly getting to the discovery benefit was a bridge too far.

Enter Whrrl v2.0

We conceived of Whrrl v2.0 around idea of storytelling, and from the first concept tests we conducted with potential users, we received extremely positive feedback. The reason is pretty straightforward: storytelling is natural for people – everyone does it. And Whrrl v2.0 enables people to improve the human storytelling experience in two fundamental ways. First, they can share their stories in real-time, as they are occurring. This changes the entire social dynamic of a story, because it allows people who are not physically present to participate. And second, the stories are durable. A person’s real-world adventures are safely stored away to be remembered and shared with anyone at any time in the future. We believe this currency of stories will inspire people to go places and interact with people they otherwise would not have, and we see that as a fundamental improvement of human life.

In my own life, Whrrl v2.0 has been amazing. (Keep in mind, I’ve had Whrrl v2.0 since the alpha launch in January.) My wife and I have shared our kids’ experiences with each other in real time so we could both participate in two physically separate activities (a birthday party for Lucas and a basketball game for Taitum, for example). I’ve participated in numerous hilarious banter sessions that just would never have happened if not for the real-world experience at the center. I’ve gotten to know more of my friends more deeply through their stories. I’ve used Whrrl v2.0 to start a living history of my kids. It’s hard to imagine going back to a pre-Whrrl v2.0 life now.

The entire Pelago team is thrilled to bring Whrrl v2.0 to the world. Today is the day, and we’re eager for your feedback.