UrbanSeeder is a start up from Israel whose goal is to “incite some love, friendship and mutual growth” by enabling real world connections to continue online in a safe and anonymous environment. The idea is simple plant a “seed” (a private collaboration space for two people), and either invite someone you know to participate via email, or use the seed’s unique URL to invite someone you’ve just met.
UrbanSeeder has a utility for creating attractive, printable seed cards with the URL to a private seed. If you meet someone at a party or bar, but don’t want to give out your phone number, you can give them an invitation to an UrbanSeeder seed where you can continue your conversation safely and relatively anonymously. But just what is a seed?
Seeds are kind of like a private shoutboard. They support short text messages, photos, audio, and events. As far as I can tell, there are no upload limits and you can import from Flickr and Upcoming. Everything you’ve already uploaded is saved in your library for easy adding later.
Seeds provide a pretty neat way to chat back and forth and get to know someone. Sharing music and and photos is a great way to explore a person’s interests, though the site somewhat annoyingly autoplays music (however, not if you were the uploader of the audio track). According to the UrbanSeeder folks this is a feature (to help immediately set an “atmosphere”), but I found it kind of annoying to hear the same song every time I logged in to check a new update on my seed. The events feature is kind of silly, too. It’s not so much different than the text posts that I think it’s actually necessary.
Your “Garden” is limited to 12 seeds at any single time in order to prevent the service from being used for commercial spam, but you can archive or delete seeds at any time to make more room. Along with your seeds, you also customize your “look” by assembling an avatar to represent you from premade parts. The artistic style of UrbanSeeder’s avatars (and indeed the entire site) is unique and very attractive, and the site’s flash design is easy to use and intuitive.
Seeds in your garden don’t sprout until they’ve been “followed.”
Conclusion
In all, UrbanSeeder is a nice idea and quite well executed. I always liked the idea of using social networking to strengthen your real world contacts, rather than building up a buddy list of thousands of people you barely know and will likely never get to know. UrbanSeeder lets you take new, real world contacts online into a safe, intimate environment where you can learn more about them and start cultivating a friendship (or perhaps a romance).
