Social platform discovers mutual connections across social networks
Saskatoon, SK, January 28, 2010 – Today, VendAsta Technologies announces the release of MashedIn (www.mashedin.com), an application that allows people to discover mutual connections across multiple social networks. MashedIn provides the user a widget that can be added to a website or blog where visitors can authenticate with either Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to reveal common connections to the widget owner.
People have different groups of friends or connections on different social networks they use. Being able to see mutual connections across multiple networks increases the chance you’ll find common linkages. MashedIn provides a great value to businesses and business professionals. People can visit a business web presence or profile and be able to see if anyone they know is connected. For the business, it is like receiving a warm introduction to someone who is otherwise completely anonymous. Each connection you uncover provides more context for the visitor.
“MashedIn, like life, is really all about who you know and who they know,” says CEO Brendan King. “MashedIn allows people to leverage their investments in social networks like Faceboook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. People use these networks to connect with weak ties – people they didn’t, until now, communicate with all that often. MashedIn lets you profit from the experience and knowledge of your close friends, weak ties, and everybody those people know – without explicit communication. It does this by building trust, which is attained by discovering common ground and mutual connections. After all, let’s face it, recommendations from people you know trump all other types.”
The MashedIn team overcame considerable technical obstacles to make the application a possibility. “MashedIn is deployed entirely in the cloud on Google App Engine,” notes CTO Jason Collins. “This framework, combined with MashedIn’s parallel processing extensions, allows us to query social networks in a massively parallel manner and traverse large graphs of social connections. This approach allows for relevant, meaningful social connections and recommendations to be presented to the user almost instantaneously, despite having to gather and process large amounts of data from a number of third-party sources.”
VendAsta (www.vendasta.com), based in Saskatoon, Canada, develops software to leverage social networks and improve trust. The first solution released by the company in early 2009 was a reputation management toolkit for small businesses called StepRep. MashedIn is designed to have broader applicability for people to improve trust and identity through social connections.
VendAsta raised $3 million in venture funding in the summer of 2008.
