Few thoughts on Manchester’s latest social network #Padoq

I love trialling new products, especially those built in my home town Manchester, UK. This used to be part of my job over the last five years to discover new products, increase my knowledge and explore partnership opportunities for UnifiedVU. When it comes to social, I spent two days solid when Google+ was first introduced. I found myself spending a fair bit of time with Manchester’s latest, Padoq yesterday and thought of sharing my initial thoughts.

 

 

I find Padoq interesting not just because of it’s potential, but because of an individual who is supporting it. Malcolm Evans used to moan about Manchester producing gimmicks and not real problem-solving technology products. Given that Padoq is a social network, and therefore does not feature in solving world’s greatest problems, I can only come to two conclusions:

1. Malcolm has gone soft over the years.
2. Padoq has something that Joe Blogg, aka me is not aware of.

Either way, I am glad I trialled it yesterday.

 

Here are my two suggestions without reading a single word about what the founding team is trying to achieve.

 

Request 1 – Authenticity

All social networks have the tendency to go for the mass. Everyone wants to beat Facebook and there is nothing wrong with this strategy. In the process, all of them end up having fake accounts. Padoq has the opportunity to only allow authentic validated users into its product. By doing so, it can set quality as the key value, and not quantity. If you decide to go for the mass and then introduce authenticity later, I doubt it would happen. Authenticity to me is that when you chat or transact with another user, you know s/he or it (if its an entity) is genuine and Padoq has performed checks to verify who they say they are.

Whilst not that important, use of only the first name makes it difficult to recognise people. Rhys joined the second Padoq I setup and I had to ask who he is as I know few Rhys’. In the world of super efficiency, that’s a waste of an activity.

 

Request 2 – Events

There are many products in the market which has built-in functionality to allow users to organise events. In my opinion, none of them have managed to remove the need to use Eventbrite in the workflow. Take for example, Facebook. You share the event, but if you need tickets either free or paid, typically, you need to click on an Eventbrite link to finalise the process.

If Padoq is serious about usefulness of its product, I suggest they build this functionality fully before introducing anything new. The product suggests there will be payment functionality, so tickets can be sold from within. A deep understanding of Eventbrite would be needed to ensure Padoq provides a compelling tool kit for event organisers. Padoq’s success or failure could ride on this, as Padoq is not the only company trying to capture the event market.

 

Note: Another Manchester based ticketing company is rumoured to be in the process of introducing an easy to organise event app in addition to its main product offering.

 

Join Techcelerate on Padoq

As far as I understand, Padoq is the word used in Padoq to mean groups. We’ve (Alex and I) setup two, one for #Techcelerate and the other for #TechcelerateCoffees.

 

[su_button url=”https://padoq-live.app.link/Techcelerate” target=”blank” style=”flat” size=”12″]Join Techcelerate on Padoq[/su_button]