LikeALittle
LikeALittle is a company based in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 2010 by Evan Reas, Shubham Mittal, and Prasanna Sankaranarayanan. It is a free "flirting-facilitator platform" that allows users to anonymously discuss possible love interests in a specific area[1]. College students are its target audience. In the first six weeks of its operation, it generated 20 million pageviews. In January 2011, it was reported that the website attracts an average of 57,000 users each month.[2] Since its release, it has created two websites and released a mobile phone application. After just 4 months of existence it became active in over 450 schools throughout the United States and Canada.[3]
Contents
History
LikeALittle was founded on October 27th, 2010 as LikeALittle.com by Evan Reas, Shubha Mittal, and Prasanna Sankaranarayanan; the initial coding for the site was produced in under a day. It achieved national attention when it hit virality via social networks, such as Facebook.com, and attracted 20 million pageviews in its first six weeks. Users may login using their Facebook account.
In early 2011, LikeALittle received $1,000,000 in Angel funding.[4]
On June 30, 2011, LikeALittle received $5,000,000 in Series A funding.[4]
As of October 2011, LikeALittle is still in its initial growth phase.
The company's long-term goal is to achieve maximum growth and generate dynamic mobile phone-based leads for revenue.
Products and Services
lal.com
LikeALittle's first website was LikeALittle.com, which is now lal.com. Each campus has its own subpage, typically of the form LAL.com/[school name].
On lal.com, users can anonymously post "flirts" about someone that they find attractive, complete with location and their physical appearance. To promote a positive and fun environment, users are given temporary fruit names to identify users within a thread or conversation. You can create an account that links all of your "flirts" and you can monitor responses.
people.lal.com
LikeALittle's next website, people.lal.com, stripped a layer of anonymity from their initial project. The company gave users the ability to sync their Facebook profiles with their people.lal.com profile. The site combines GPS technology from mobile phones and IP addresses with users' interests via their Facebook profile. The resulting service provides a user with other users who have similar interests AND are in close proximity to them.
Chat Function
Within each school's page is a custom chat function that shows how many people are online and nearby. LikeALittle randomly assigns nicknames to visitors, such as Cucumber_17 or Blackberry_23, that maintain the anonymity of the website. Similar to online dating, you can provide as much or as little information about yourself and it can serve as a launchpad for starting relationships.
Founders
Evan Reas
Evan Reas was a valedictorian at Ohio Wesleyan University in 2007, and earned a Master of Business Administration from Stanford University in 2009.
Shubham Mittal
Shubham Mittal was a valedictorian at India Institute of Technology. He was also a gold medalist at the International Physics Olympiad, and worked at Google and Microsoft before joining LikeALittle.
Prasanna Sankaranarayanan
Prasanna Sankaranarayanan is from Chennai, India. He previously worked for Google and Microsoft Bing before winning first place in the TopCoder competition. Additionally, he is the youngest person to ever finish as a finalist in the Google Code Jam. [5]
Funding
LAL is funded by a handful of venture capitalist (VC's). One of the top VC firms in Silicon Valley is Andreessen-Horowitz, it's newest VC Jeff Jordan has decided to invest over five-million dollars into the company. [6] Other high-end investors include Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, one of the most popular technology blogs. [7]. LAL is worth over $35 million[8] and has around 14 investors.[9]
Specific Cases
Jessica Pickles, a student at Queen's University was interviewed about her experience with LikeALittle. She published a post about another male student studying in the same area in the library, just for fun, but he also happened to be on LikeALittle as well and posted about her shortly after. They realized the mutual connection and starting chatting privately, and started dating shortly after. He later proposed to Jessica through LikeALittle and she said yes. [3]
Ethical Issues
Similar to many websites that are driven by user-generated content, LikeALittle's services are prone to abuse - specifically bullying. In its relatively short life, there have already been countless examples of posts that have targeted individuals or groups offensively.[citation needed]
Due to the anonymous environment that LikeALittle provides, anyone can make inappropriate comments with no affiliation to themselves. This is a common problem among most websites and communities that provide anonymity. LikeALittle attempts to control the quality of its content by employing moderators to edit offensive or threatening posts. Additionally, on some campus pages, any user with a .edu email address of the corresponding school can delete a post.
LikeALittle also provides an anonymous forum for people to compliment others without fear of rejection. Often the descriptions are so vague, it allows people an imagination to believe that posts are about them, even if they were not originally directed to them. The ethical implication of this aspect of anonymity is that it gives people a chance to boost self-esteem of members of the community.
While concrete relationship successes and new friendships have come out of LikeALittle, one can question the validity of the relationships and/or friendships formed in an online environment. Many criticisms of connections through online mediums discuss the idea that only weak ties can be formed in comparison with real time contact and conversation. Additionally, users often behave differently in an online environment than in the real world because of an anonymity factor, so validity of posts is compromised. LikeALittle, for the most part, is purely anonymous, but users can choose to reveal more information by linking their accounts to Facebook and other social networking sites, strengthening ties.
Also consider a sense of empowerment for those individuals who may not feel comfortable interacting in a flirtatious manner a real world setting. The anonymity of LikeALittle gives people who may have difficulty interacting with individuals they are interested in/attracted to an outlet to express their feelings and practice to gain confidence and empowerment to potentially approach the person in real life.
See Also
References
- ↑ http://www.lal.com/about
- ↑ http://www.appappeal.com/app/like-a-little/
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Er-Chua, Gloria. "Students like LikeALittle a Lot; Social Media Site Popular with Studious University Crowd." The Toronto Star. 7 Mar. 2011. Web. 15 Dec. 2011.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 http://www.crunchbase.com/company/likealittle
- ↑ http://startuphoodlum.com/tag/topcoder/
- ↑ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/30/andreessen-horowitz-adds-jeff-jordan-as-partner-leads-5m-likealittle-series-a/
- ↑ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/30/andreessen-horowitz-adds-jeff-jordan-as-partner-leads-5m-likealittle-series-a/
- ↑ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/30/andreessen-horowitz-adds-jeff-jordan-as-partner-leads-5m-likealittle-series-a/
- ↑ http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/02/the-full-very-impressive-list-of-likealittle-investors/
