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"Yobongo, an iPhone application that seeks to serendipitously connect like-minded strangers in mobile chartrooms, will be available to users in San Francisco, Austin and New York City beginning Thursday.\nThe application promises to automatically place users in system-generated city groups based on potential compatibility with other app users. The idea is to engineer relationships between people who may already have an interest in one another, but just not know it yet.\n\"We analyze every pair of messages sent through the system and use that to build up an understanding of who you like talking with,\" says co-founder Caleb Elston, \"Then when you open Yobongo, we place you with people you have the strongest affinity for. All of these simple signals lead to a very powerful signal,\" he says.\nWhen it comes to using the application, Yobongo needs little explanation, and there's zero friction to getting started. Simply fire up the application and you'll find yourself in a chatroom with other users. You can post messages to everyone, start one-off private conversations and checkout other group members. \nYobongo is fast, simple and fun \u2014 if  conversing with strangers is something that sounds appealing to you.\n\n\n\n\nYobongo is the brainchild of Elston and David Kasper, formerly of Justin.tv. The pair initially launched a private beta release in January, gradually letting in 150 users to test a controlled and watered-down version of the grander vision. With such a small pool, the startup has yet to prove the group placement factors \u2014 affinity and location \u2014 that make it unique. \nBut, Elston says early users describe the service as addicting, and claims that the average user participates in 10 sessions per day and sends 25 messages each day. He also asserts that 90% of users return each day. I'm not convinced that these metrics are entirely accurate \u2014 a few beta testers I talked to are not using the application on a daily basis \u2014 but I can confirm that the application is engaging.\nIs it engaging enough to be at hit at this year's South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin? Yobongo has been craftily laying the groundwork to force this outcome by buying up Facebook advertisements and timing releases around the conference. Twitter and Foursquare, however, became breakout startups not because they engineered hype, but because they delivered a compelling reason for attendees to use their applications.\nYobongo has all the ingredients to appeal to a SXSW crowd looking to make new connections, and it could be a perfect, more private backchannel than Twitter for show-related chatter. Still, the startup will need to prove that it can scale to support a much larger audience, and turn-on those promised location and affinity aspects in a calculated manner should it wish to standout.\nImage courtesy of Flickr, Laughing Squid"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/03/03/yobongo-launch/>