Buried deep at the bottom of the ‘web only’ murmurs at Willamette Week (yes, that’s how far I’ll go to find a blog topic) is a note that Randy White is starting a carpool matching site: carpoolcrew.com
But don’t we already have a carpool matching site in our region?
Indeed, we do. But Randy apparently thinks that a site that lets you stay anonymous until you have a match is not going to do the trick. He suspects folks want to know more about their potential commute partners. His site wants to know your radio preferences, gender, whether you smoke, etc. There’s even a place to upload your photo or link to your MySpace page.
In a town where the Aerial Tram and Portlandia have MySpace accounts, it just might have potential.
4 responses to “Carpooling as Social Networking?”
I think this is a good idea. It recognizes that whether someone want to spend time with someone on a regular basis is more than just a question of where they live and where they work.
I didn’t build Carpool Crew to clash with the carpoolmatchNW efforts. What I see are regional databases that are run by city officials, lacking cohesion and integration with one another.
For instance, if you commute from Salem to Portland, you might have to be signed up for two different ride share programs, both with different user bases, Interfaces, tools, etc.
If every city, country, region, state, whatever makes their own site, Carpooling will fall flat because of system saturation without a large enough database to search for riders.
That’s why I’m offering Carpool Crew for free to any municipality that wants to use it. If there is a standard system that is marketed, then a larger user base will mean relevant carpool matches.
Carpool Crew is to Bright Neighbor what a paper airplane is to the Space Shuttle
So when is it out of beta?