We heard from Gatsby members Xianhang (who goes by Hang) and Jorge about their match (right in our hometown of San Francisco) and asked them if we could share what happened. Here’s what happened from Hang’s perspective:

I was at a bar with some friends. One of us checked us all into Facebook places and I get a text message with a match from Gatsby with Jorge.

I pinged Jorge asking him how he knew Robert which was the one mutual friend shown in the text message. It turns out Jorge went to Stanford and knew a ton of that crowd. He then noticed that he’d recognized my answers on Quora which was cool.

I didn’t really think about Gatsby while I was hanging out with my friends but then everyone had to be somewhere else which left be a bit of time free, plus I hadn’t had dinner, so I pinged Jorge and asked if he wanted to grab dinner together.

We’ve tried to make the Gatsby chat into a safe space that members can evaluate how well they click with each other and from there decide if they want to stay in touch digitally, or even meet-up in person. Hang and Jorge did just that – they figured out that they had a lot in common and several shared experiences and intersts. Most strongly convincing for Hang, they had several friends in common, which really speaks to the things they share that are harder to express with a single word ‘interest’ on Gatsby.

I didn’t really think about Gatsby while I was hanging out with my friends but then everyone had to be somewhere else which left be a bit of time free, plus I hadn’t had dinner, so I pinged Jorge and asked if he wanted to grab dinner together. It was kind of awkward to start off with since there was kind of a “blind date” vibe to it even though we were both guys. It was hard to explain to my friends what I was about to go do. Also, I was afraid that if we didn’t click, I’d be stuck at dinner with someone I didn’t like. But once I met Jorge, after 5 minutes, it felt completely natural.

What Hang describes, that feeling of not knowing what to expect – the ‘blind date’ sensation, is pretty common among people that we’ve talked with who’ve met up in person (or considered it).  The relative privacy and low commitment of the chat space gave them both an opportunity to decide that their interest in meeting the other person outweighed the risks involved.  Once they made the leap, the awkwardness quickly faded.

Jorge was in town for a conference and he brought another conference goer he met along for dinner. We sat down, had a really interesting conversation and some good food.

We are thrilled to hear about these kind of serendipitous meet-ups enabled by Meet Gatsby. It’s great to hear how the service is working to connect people and through the chat, help them bridge the gap between virtual and physical. Thanks to Hang and Jorge for agreeing to share their Gatsby experience with us!

As Meet Gatsby continues to grow, we look forward to hearing more stories of chance connections that Gatsby has sparked.

It’s been several months in the making, but as our previous post alluded to, we are proud to announce that Meet Gatsby is now available for free in the iPhone app store. We’ve built in all of the features from the text message/mobile web service and, thanks to the advantages of a native application, we’re able to offer a few more.

Background Location
This makes us totally independent from whether or not you remember to check-in onFacebook or Foursquare. First of all, this means that serendipity is even more on your side – and everyone else’s. On the iPhone app, every member of Gatsby has a constant low-level of availability, if just the right person passes by.

Even during our beta-testing, we’ve seen people on the iPhone get much higher quality matches than they did when only on SMS. Because Gatsby evaluates your potential matches based on how many chances he might get to make a match for you, being on background location means that Gatsby can be a whole lot pickier. It also means that Gatsby can be useful for a whole new group of people for whom checking in isn’t second nature.

We worked very hard to make sure that Gatsby background location doesn’t drain your battery– because none of us like having a dead phone any more than you do. We think you’ll have a tough time noticing the difference (but if you do, be sure to let us know).

While you’re on background location, Gatsby can’t be sure if you’re going to be available for an introduction. That’s why he now sends you a message before he makes the match to be sure that you’re not too busy. Gatsby’s just a gentleman like that.

Interface
The short answer is that Meet Gatsby on the iPhone is just a nicer experience than having
multiple text messages and mobile web pages to deal with. It’s much easier to see just what you have in common and your previous matches are stored and filed for your reference.

The native app also makes it easy to add interests to your profile on the go. It also lets you update and edit your answers to a set of ‘Bio Questions.’ Inspired by our experiences introducing people at The Summit SF and at SXSW, these questions add an extra layer of personalization when you are introduced to other people.

Notifications
For those of you who have limits on the number of text
messages you get per month, you’ll be relieved to know that the Gatsby app sends you native notifications instead of eating into SMS allowance. This also means that Gatsby will works perfectly for international users (without US phone numbers) who have previously been excluded from our mobile web/SMS service.

Those are the largest changes– there are lots of other small additions for you to discover. And everyone who is on the service will always be introduced to each other, regardless of whether they are using the shiny new iPhone app or the cross-platform mobile web/SMS version.

Try it out and let us know what you think!

It’s too early to say how these matches stack up (in terms of response rate) to matches based on common tags or Facebook ‘likes’ – only time will tell. However, here are some early observations we can make because we’ve been running this on our testing site for much longer than it’s been publicly available.

More potential matches

This new feature opens up a whole field of potential matches that current Gatsby members would never have gotten otherwise. Over a typical week without friends-of-friends turned on, our average New York user has the potential of 2.7 matches. With the new feature using common friends to make matches, that number rises to 6.6. Now, that doesn’t mean that we make all of those matches – just because it’s possible doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea. We know there is such a thing as too many Gatsby introductions, that’s why we recently put the rate limiting in place before rolling out this feature. What this does mean is that if you are interested in at most one match per day, then we have more potential matches to select from – translating into a higher frequency of meaningful and locationally convenient introductions.

More matches in more places

So far we’ve seen Gatsby working the best in large cities with a high density of members. That’s to be expected, but when we turned on friends-of-friends, we also began to regularly see matches being made in cities where we have far less density. In Chicago, this feature has resulted in our matches per week increasing by 180%. In cities with even lower density (e.g.: Seattle, Portland, Washington DC) that number goes up even more – to triple the previous number of matches being made. Almost all of the users involved in these new matches are people who previously weren’t getting any matches. This means that many members in small cities got their first ever Gatsby match last week! Welcome aboard!

If you’re a Gatsby member in New York City and you’ve opted out of match messages because of message volume, do give us another shot — you might find he’s far more sensitive to your availability and interest in new introductions.

Since February, we’ve teamed up with Desi Danganan, the manager of The Summit SF (a lovely cafe in San Francisco’s Mission District), to try out some of our latest ideas in a controlled setting. Desi’s on side promotion of Gatsby at the Summit let us create a pocket of local density in the cafe, giving us a chance to try out a new idea we’ve had on making better introductions.

Specific shared experiences create instant connections

Having run Meet Gatsby for over a year, we’ve learned that the more specific the shared experience that we can expose to a matched pair, the more able and willing they will be to initiate a conversation (we have many interesting data points on this, and we’ll follow up with them in another post). Up to this point, the connections we’ve been able to surface have been matching tags. Some of our most responded-to matching tag introductions have been:

• You both like ‘urban planning’.
• You both like ‘mountain biking’.
• You both like ‘mexican food’.

At the Summit, however, we realized that once a user is (a) at this specific coffee shop, (b) either already on Gatsby or intrigued enough by the signage to try it out, and (c) available enough to check in, perhaps those common factors might be a stronger connection than any tag we might have in their profile.

The pitch makes all the difference

Gatsby has a limited window (160 characters in an SMS) to make an introduction compelling enough to convince each member to take the leap and start a conversation. And at The Summit, where we allow instant sign-on via SMS and therefore have no access to tags or social network profiles to get your interests, we had to figure out a way to make good introductions with as little data as possible.

To figure this out, we took a cue from how people introduce themselves naturally in this type of cafe setting. Face-to-face conversations we observed or participated in often had some version of this conversation in the first few seconds:

Person A: “What are you working on?”
Person B: “I’m building a service for networked fashion advice, what about you?”

We used this pattern to help Gatsby make better introductions with much less profile information. To make introductions at The Summit, Gatsby asks: “What are you here to do?” and “Describe your job in three words or less.” He then used the self-descriptive answers to these questions to make more inviting introductions. Some of our most responded-to examples from our members:

• You should meet a ‘Programmer’ who is here to ‘work on a side project’
• You should meet a ‘Wandererexpertatnothing’ who is here to ‘Stay awake, conquer o-chem’
• You should meet a ‘Service industry robot’ who is here to ‘Craigslist for a new house’

Our results

Even though we had much less data to match people at the cafe than we typically do, our response rate was much higher: an astounding 68% at the Summit versus our running average of 5% for the service that’s rolled out everywhere. Even more encouraging, at the Summit 30% of all of matches resulted in ‘good’ conversations (two or more back-and-forth chat exchanges).

These great results hinted that we were on to something with these new introductions that incorporate more self-description, but there are a lot of factors at The Summit that are unique besides the new introduction model: it’s all at one venue, that venue is promoting us, and it’s via SMS. So we expanded the pilot to South By Southwest in March with the goal of testing these two kinds of introductions to see which got better responses in a more pervasive use case.

We asked members two questions (“Describe your job in 3 words or less” and “What do you make”) when people arrived at Austin, and used their self-descriptions to make introductions. We made over two thousand pitches, some with matching tags (like our normal Gatsby), some with the new self-descriptions, and some with both. Here’s how we did:

Adding self-descriptions to the introduction more than doubled our response rate.

Making more effective introductions

Self-descriptions are authored by our members specifically for their matches, whereas matching tags are chosen by Gatsby. Our most responded-to self-descriptions all present a complete idea in the voice of the person being introduced, not the introducer.

In the comments on this post and others, we’d love to hear if this sounds right to you or not, how you approach making introductions yourselves, and your thoughts on how Gatsby could be doing his job better.

Overall, we’re pretty happy with the way these profile questions allow us to make great matches even with a paucity of shared interests, and we’re looking forward to rolling the updates out to all Meet Gatsby members.

“You should meet Gabe. You’ve both liked Fireball Island.”

We’re really excited about using more information from your social network profiles to make great matches. Using Facebook likes lets us make very specific introductions while preserving our breezy signup process. Additionally, one of Gatsby’s strengths has always been that he effortlessly works for you — now, whenever you like something, it’s added to your matchmaking profile instantly.

This is the first step in what will be quite a few new updates in the coming months, and we’re looking forward to sharing some of the exciting things we’re working on!