Little Inc, the startup behind one of my favorite mobile messaging apps, MessageMe, just launched TenTwenty. I've had the pleasure of seeing its evolution pre-release. It looks much different than a few months ago. Great work, @liveink, @arjunsethi, @alexnchee, and team. But I have to ask: why did you move on from MessageMe?

When I was at Colgate University, JuicyCampus became hugely popular for dating gossip and name-calling. The university actually blocked the site after awhile. This seems like a potential replacement. Are you worried about that?

@sergeisorokin - "audience filter" is a great term for describing the friction of sharing/broadcasting with our identity. I may borrow that. :)

Nice write-up by @nitashatiku in Valleywag: The Week's Best Tech Gossip Has Been On This New Anonymous App.

I don't really understand its purpose from the App Store content and the landing page has no information. Any one know why this is useful?

To me it feels like local anonymous twitter. And that bubbles up a whole range of information that I'm not finding other places. Of course, some noise, not all signal- but feels like an ambient awareness of what going on around me. Then I can hypothetically dive in/engage when something meaningful is surfaced.

@SergeiSorokin Cool, that's good to hear. It's nice that a university can't block a mobile app either. :P

Reminds me of a modern version of Topix - which, yes, carries some risks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To...), but it sounds like moderation is in the forefront of your minds.

@rrhoover, we decided to move on from direct 1 : 1 messaging into building and facilitating conversation with your local community. We took a broadcast approach to 1020 which is new for us, but still very core to why we originally engaged in building products to make communication and connections easier. We have always believed in creating new ways for users to communicate and express themselves in. 1020 is exciting for us because it allows users to communicate without the fear of an audience filter. We did what we do best, we followed the data, and were inspired by what we saw naturally happening in group communication on MessageMe. The approach and bet we have taken is that it’s completely local within 1 to 50 miles of your location.

@ffumarola, we can always do a better job of describing our value proposition - thanks for keeping us honest. We’ve been inspired by many products but most importantly we took note of early bulletin boards that existed about 10-15 years ago, as well as craigslist. Our aim is to be a local bulletin board, from 1 to 50 miles of your current location, by showing you the most recent and popular posts from other users around you.

@ffumarola - Existing competitors on web today include craigslist and forum communities. On mobile, Whisper and Yik Yak cover competitive subsets of what we aim to see the community evolve towards, long term.

@harryraymond, we put almost the same amount of effort into our moderation tech and tools as we put into the product itself. We don’t allow for real names, harassment or any form of pornography to be posted on 1020. We want to allow users to express themselves freely but take a very hard stance on bullying and name calling. We make sure our users understand our rules of conduct and make sure that when we do notify, reach out to or suspend bad actors, they understand what rule they violated.

@harryraymond Yup they can't, although we're not planning to let it get to the point where they'd want to.

@rrhoover - 10-20, or more commonly just “20” is actually the radio shortcode for “location”. We felt it embodied a strong definition and history for the product and our users, because the app is centered around a user's location.

@sergeisorokin where'd the name TenTwenty come from?

@sergeisorokin Thanks for responding. Who do you consider your closest competitors or substitutes?

big fan of @arjunsethi and team - have seem some interesting stuff on TenTwenty