Conga: A Proximity-Based Social Network for Missed Connections

If life is comprised of moments defined by people, places and time, then startup Conga is a matchmaker, weaving together these elements to help users turn missed connections into shared experiences.

Conga, launching in public beta in New York and San Francisco Wednesday, defines itself as a proximity-based social network. It’s designed to connect individuals from different social spheres who have or will gather at the same place at the same time.

“It started with a simple idea,” explains co-founder Ryan Kennedy, “What if it was possible to go back in time, to nearly any moment in life, and reconnect with people around any of the places we’d ever been?”

Kennedy tells me that part of the motivation for starting Conga came from a personal desire to uncover missed romantic connections — he was, of course, single at the time. Now happily off the market (but not thanks to Conga), Kennedy still believes that there’s something magical about making missed connections not so missed.

“We go through life and interact with all these people, but how do we tap into relationships with people sitting right next to us?,” he says. “We’re looking to fill that gap.”

Conga is structured around the notion of the moment, tapping into the user’s location history via Foursquare and Twitter to build out a replete record of where he’s been and who else has been. The user can manually enter moments as well.

Each moment has its own page and serves as a point of rendezvous. The site manufacturers a layer of collaboration over these moments to introduce users who have crossed paths and give them a means to communicate and share information.

The startup’s most intriguing feature is its ability to list the people the user “congas” with (ie. crosses paths with) under the People tab. Here, Conga unravels the mystery of the unknown and presents the user with his most frequent missed connections. I can, for instance, see that I’ve crossed paths with Noah, someone I do not know, at least 13 times. Clearly, Noah and I have more in common than we may realize. Conga has merely surfaced these commonalities to subtly suggest that we should connect.

But Conga’s purpose extends beyond these person-to-person connections. The founders speak of Conga as a place to reconnect with people you’ve interacted with in the real world. Weddings, conferences, reunions and other group gatherings are all Conga-worthy because users can come together around a specific place and time to share things that happened at that moment.

The service has a few drawbacks. At launch, it’s limited to users in New York and San Francisco, the site is a bit difficult to navigate and overlapping activity will be minimal until more users sign on. Still, there’s certainly something to the notion of using location data to fill in the blanks.

Conga is self-funded by co-founders Ryan Kennedy and Todd Fast. The startup is in the midst of raising an angel round to finance operations.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, RonTech2000

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