Be A Settlr For A Singapore-Only Social Network
April 3, 2009 by Gwendolyn Regina T
If you’re tired of Facebook, you might want to try Settlr, a social network just for Singapore. Its focus is two-fold: People and Places. For People, you can find new people who have joined the network (even filtering by age, and looking like a Friendster-like friend search interface) and see what people have been up to. Even if you don’t have any friends at the beginning, your Dashboard is already populated by happenings of random people in the network. Meant to draw you in, perhaps.
For Places, you can indicate if you’ve been to a certain place and see others who have been there too, and how regularly they claim to go. This reminds me of 43Places. But Settlr allows you to do more than that: you can also add your review of the place, rate someone’s review, add photos and even “Grab It”. ‘Grabbing’ a place essentially bookmarks the place and accommodates tagging and personal notes too. This can be quite a nifty tool for a tourist to Singapore to cull the places (s)he wants to visit and essentially gathers all into a list for reference.
Settlr segments places into four categories: Restaurants, Shopping, Nightlife and Others. The Restaurants bit is redundant in my opinion, it’s essentially replicating Yum.sg or HungryGoWhere. Not going to work as a niche, but not meant to be a niche in the first place. My guess is that it’s just one of the many places that people obviously visit, so it won’t work to not have it there.
Regarding their business model, as of now, I don’t have a clue what the founders behind Settlr have in mind. One obvious one is to allow brands to ‘own’ their Place on Settlr. Give Zouk control over their page and have the ability to message all the people who have ‘been’ there etc. – akin to a Facebook Page. But brands wouldn’t be interested unless you have enough quality traction on their page, where quality is judged by how engaged the people of that page is, how many drunken photos they put up of themselves during Mambo Night etc. Trouble is, people already do this on social networks. My question to you, will you use Settlr? Or if you’re already using it, what’s so great about it?
About The Author
Gwendolyn Regina T - Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief
Apart from SGE, Gwen is also a Partner at Thymos Capital, where she focuses on early stage investments in technology firms. She has had two exits out of her investments via the firm, one of which is iHipo. A frequent judge for business competitions both locally and overseas, she graduated from the National University of Singapore. Gwen also spent some time in Silicon Valley and studied in Stanford University under the NUS Overseas College programme. Gwen is a mentor at Spanish incubator Tetuan Valley, Polish incubator Gamma Rebels, the Singapore Ambassador for the Sandbox network and the Singapore curator for StartupDigest. She enjoys languages, travelling, dance and adventure sports. Gwen can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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