City Chatter connects you with real people in your area

The mobile app is a social network for people who want to meet in person

Facebook was the first company to succeed in partially bridging Web users’ online and offline worlds.  Other companies have since cropped up to bring the online world that much closer to home by creating social networks exclusively for business contacts (LinkedIn), employees (Yammer), and even neighbors (Nextdoor).  A new mobile app, City Chatter, is taking a fresh angle: meeting new people in your neighborhood.

The mobile app, which launched Thursday, is essentially going back to the Web drawing board.  Remember when chat rooms were really cool?  Well, I guess they were never really cool, but once upon a time, they were the only form of social media on the Web.  The whole draw was e-meeting total strangers on the Internet, which you can now do with video chat services like Chatroulette (in a much weirder, up-close-and-personal way).  But what if you want to meet people in real life—as in, real people who live in your neighborhood (not some pantsless creeper on Chatroulette)?

The idea is fairly simple: you sign on to City Chatter wherever you are, find people nearby who are also on City Chatter, and start chatting.  If the two of you hit it off, then you can take the next step of locating one another.  It’s like warp-speed online dating.

It seems like this would be a clear hit among singles, but CEO Phil Shpilberg says that there are a number of ways in which City Chatter could be used.

“Dating is one potential use case, but there are many others,” he said.  “We don’t want to tell our users how to use it. We want them to show us what they want, and we will make it better around those use cases. Our motto is ‘You've got friends everywhere.  You just haven't met them yet.’”

I can think of a number of useful scenarios for this—from getting to know new neighbors to finding like-minded contacts at a business event, to meeting other moms at the park for a play-date (finding other mom-friends is just as stressful and nerve-wracking as dating).

Shpilberg says that the company’s target audience is “anyone who uses social network apps on their smartphone,” which would be primarily younger users.  “People under 30 have grown up with social networking and chat and instantly understand the concept. But many people over thirty, like me, find City Chatter useful.”

The company has raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding from Michael Gluck, President of VG Market, as well as an anonymous angel who is an executive at a major video game company.