A Social Networking Device for Smokers

Now they are doing it with cigarettes.

Blu, the maker of electronic cigarettes that release a nicotine-laden vapor instead of smoke, has developed packs of e-cigarettes with sensors that will let users know when other e-smokers are nearby.

Think of it as social smoking for the social networking era.

“You’ll meet more people than ever, just because of the wow factor,” said Jason Healy, the founder of Blu, who did not appear to be making friends as he exhaled the odorless vapor of an e-cigarette at a coffee shop in Midtown Manhattan recently. “It’s like with any new technology.”

E-cigarettes have several obvious advantages to their traditional counterparts. They allow users to avoid bans on smoking in public places because they release only water vapor. Mr. Healy and other e-cigarette manufacturers also claim that they have practically no negative health effects — an assertion that draws skepticism in many quarters. But the devices are also, in their own way, gadgets.

The new “smart packs,” which will go on sale next month for $80 for five e-cigarettes, are equipped with devices that emit and search for the radio signals of other packs. When they get within 50 feet of one another, the packs vibrate and flash a blue light.

The reusable packs, which serve as a charger for the cigarettes, can be set to exchange information about their owners, like contact information on social networking sites, that can be downloaded onto personal computers.

The packs also conveniently vibrate when a smoker nears a retail outlet that sells Blu cigarettes.

Later versions will be tethered to a smartphone through an app, allowing more options for real-time communication, Mr. Healy said. The company also plans to develop a system through which the packs will monitor how much people are smoking and report back to them — or to their doctors.

Marketers think people want more devices to link to each other. More than 105 million adult Americans have at least two types of connected devices, and 37 million have five or more, according to Forrester Research.

Nintendo’s new hand-held gaming systems, the 3DS, communicate with one another when brought into close proximity. A smartphone app called Color allows users to take photographs that are then automatically shared with anyone nearby who has also downloaded the app. It recently raised $41 million from venture capitalists.

But Charles S. Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research who has studied connected devices, said that ideas like Blu’s connected cigarettes or Color show that digital connections can get ahead of the reasons for doing so.

“The way that groups of affinity are conferred just by physical proximity makes a bit of sense,” he said. “If someone walks by with a Nintendo, great, I share a common interest. The fact that I walk by a smoker? Seems like a weak link.”

Mr. Healy says he thinks the connected packs would be most useful in nightclubs, where people are interested in striking up conversations and want to smoke without being forced outside.

Adam Alfandary, 24, a Brooklyn resident who works for a technology start-up, was skeptical. He said that the social aspects of smoking were a part of the reason he continued to light up, but he scoffed at the idea of a cigarette that would do the social part for him. “I think that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” he said.

“And I’m saying that in full acknowledgment that smoking is one of the dumbest things I can do.”

 

Social Networks Offer a Way to Narrow the Field of Friends

Just ask Becca Akroyd. When Ms. Akroyd, a 29-year-old lawyer in Sacramento, Calif., wanted to share a picture of her new vegetable garden, she didn’t turn to Facebook. Instead she posted it on Path, a service that lets people share pictures, videos and messages with a small group.

“The people I have on my Path are the people who are going to care about the day-to-day random events in my life, or if my dog does something funny,” Ms. Akroyd said. “On Facebook, I have colleagues or family members who wouldn’t necessarily be interested in those things — and also that I wouldn’t necessarily want to have view those things.”

Path, which limits friend groups to 50, is among a new crop of Web services that allow people to connect with a handful of friends in a private group. Users get the benefits of sharing without the strangeness that can result when social worlds collide on Facebook. Other start-ups in this anti-oversharing crowd include GroupMe, Frenzy, Rally Up, Shizzlr, Huddl and Bubbla.

Even Facebook recognizes that people don’t want to share everything with every “friend.” It has privacy settings that control who can see what, but many people find these challenging to set up. So last fall, Facebook introduced Groups, for sharing with subsets of Facebook friends. And in March, it acquired Beluga, a start-up that allows sharing photos and messages with small groups privately.

Last month, Facebook said its users had created 50 million groups with a median of just eight members. It also introduced the Send button, which Web sites can use to let people share things with Facebook groups.

“We realized there wasn’t a way to share with these groups of people that were already established in your real life — family, book club members, a sports team,” said Peter Deng, director of product for Facebook Groups. “It’s one of the fastest-growing products within Facebook. Usage has been pretty phenomenal.”

Google is also working on tools for sharing with limited groups of people, according to a person briefed on the company’s plans who was not authorized to speak publicly. Slide, a maker of social networking apps that was bought by Google, recently released an iPhone app called Disco, for texting with small groups.

Google may discuss its plans in this area at a conference for developers this week. A spokeswoman, Katie Watson, declined to comment.

No one expects the start-ups in this field — most of which are new and have relatively few users — to replace Facebook or Twitter. Instead, their creators say that they do a better job of mimicking offline social relationships, and that they represent a new wave of social networking that revolves around specific tasks, like sharing photos or coordinating plans for the evening.

Shizzlr, for example, was created by two graduate business students at the University of Connecticut after they realized it was impossible to organize plans on Facebook.

“You put out a status about weekend plans and, all of a sudden, you get your uncle commenting that he wants to go hiking with you and your friends,” said Nick Jaensch, who created Shizzlr with Keith Bessette.

After users invite a few friends into a group on Shizzlr, the service grabs a list of coming events from Yelp, Google and Facebook and lets members discuss their options. The groups reach capacity at 20 people.

In the last three months, about 3,600 people have downloaded the application — a tiny number compared with Facebook’s 600 million members. But Mr. Jaensch says he is not interested in competing with Facebook.

“The people that you’ve called in the past two to three weeks are the people you actually do stuff with,” he said.

Shizzlr is just getting off the ground, but some of the other services in this field have attracted the attention of prominent investors. Path has raised $11 million from venture capitalists, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. GroupMe, which says it is handling 100 million messages a month, raised $10.6 million from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and First Sound, and others. AOL acquired Rally Up late last summer.

Dave Morin, Path’s founder, was an early Facebook employee, but thought the social network had grown too large and impersonal for sharing certain things. Hundreds of thousands of users have agreed and signed up for Path, sharing more than five million photos and videos so far, Mr. Morin said. Most of their groups include far fewer than the 50 friends they are allowed, he said.

“People pull out their phone and show their photos and start telling a story about their life — ‘Last week I was on vacation,’ or ‘here’s my cat,’ or ‘here’s what I ate for dinner last night’ — but when we ask if they put those photos anywhere, people would say, ‘Oh, no, no, no, it’s way too personal,’?” Mr. Morin said.

Those photos might also be too boring for the full lineup of one’s Facebook friends. And, of course there are other photos that your cubicle neighbors and former flames might find to be ... too interesting.

“The larger social networks have certainly become more loose-tie networks of acquaintances,” said Mo Koyfman, an investor at Spark Capital who follows social media trends. “But the way we communicate with acquaintances is very different from how we communicate with friends.”

Spark recently invested in Kik, a mobile group messaging app.

Mr. Koyfman said most of these start-up applications centered on cellphones because they were inherently more personal than Web sites used at a computer.

Mr. Deng at Facebook said that his company was working on more tools for small-group sharing. But some Internet users and entrepreneurs maintain that the big social networks will always be too big for people to share comfortably.

John Winter, a developer in New Zealand, cobbled together Frenzy, an application that lets friends share links, photos, songs and other items in an invitation-only folder on the Web storage service Dropbox, effectively turning it into a private social feed.

“Twitter is public and Facebook is basically public,” he said. “What else are you going to use?”