It won’t torment you with joint horoscopes, Starbucks ads, or group bulletins full of memes, but Conspyr – Austin-based and mere months old – is a networking site. Instead of banners for the University of Phoenix and Verizon, Conspyr’s front page features quotes from Steve Wozniak and George Pólya. Perhaps strangest of all, its creator doesn’t want you parked in front of it for hours, stalking your exes. He wants to meet up with you at Emo’s.
“As far as I’m concerned, all those other sites encourage is sitting on your butt staring at a computer screen,” says Seth, the one-man programming team behind the curtain, who asked that his last name not be used. “I feel that the major issue with living in a big city is dealing with the information glut – too many events, too many people, too many places – and I’ve found it hard to keep in touch with my friends now that I’m not in school.” Most of Conspyr’s registered users – 320 at the time of this writing – are based in Austin, and the software is designed to link them up by shared interests and get them out the door to local events listed in a public calendar.
Conspyr got to know me and recommended the following interests: the Metro Espresso Bar, the Pilot P-500 pen, Cinematic Orchestra, Tom Petty, Jamiroquai, and Breakfast of Champions (the book, not the dreadful Alan Rudolph movie). It kept asking. Do I like Bob Dylan? The San Antonio Spurs? His Name Is Alive? Art (General)? Trainspotting? Hockey? Porn (General)? It was like having a kindly but persistent electronic yenta, especially when it wouldn’t let up about Xzibit, who is evidently the host of Pimp My Ride, and Frankie Knuckles.
So, finally, I just told it what I liked. And I totally blanked out, the way I would on a date. Movies? Do I watch movies? If I tell it I like Blue Velvet, will it match me with Frank Booth? Finally I felt comfortable enough to try to stump it. Hey, I like Equinox Flower and Beavis and Butt-head Do America. Find me some sick fucks like that! Music was easier; I pasted that from MySpace. By the time I got to books, the only one I could think of besides the aforementioned Breakfast of Champions was my son’s favorite book, Wibbly Pig Is Happy, so I put that down, hoping to find some cool 3-year-olds on Conspyr. Half of my interests came back unmatched, even prosaic ones like “thrift shopping,” and most of my movies, so I had to add them to Conspyr’s database.
Then I got to rate my personality with a little quiz. Am I abstract? Creative? Lazy? Introverted? Rambling? Nervous? I admitted to a few of these traits.
Time to make friends! A search yielded six pages of Austinites roughly characterizable according to the user-photo archetypes you’ll recall from other networking sites: the Party Pig; the Blurry or Dimly/Overly Lit Art Kid; the Random Google Image. A few of us admitted to being over 30. Each was ranked according to the number of interests shared by me. Primary among them was, strangely enough, Seth. Maybe I’ll see him around sometime.
This article appears in July 1 • 2005.