[App Fridays] Scoreoff is a slightly different version of Meetup.com, on mobile

This series is sponsored by Nokia Asha

Here is how you scare the donkey out of anyone -

While you figure out what this has to do with a networking app, let me introduce you to the problem that today's app friday is trying to solve. Often times, your populated Facebook friends might be of little or no relevance to your likes and interests. Finding that one person who plays Badminton well among your thousand odd friends can quite prove quite difficult. Even if you find that person, they're rarely in the same locality as you. How do you connect with these people?

Scoreoff is an Android app that can help you connect with people who have similar likes and interests as you. By listing events from your location and friend activity, users can join events to connect with people of similar events, without "friending" them.

What's it about?

On a simplistic level you can think of Scoreoff as an event listing app. But the kind of events that it lists are it's USP. It crawls events based on location and your social circles. The events that show up in the location category are also "open" which means that the event is visible to everyone and attendance is open to everyone.

You can also filter events based on your circles, which is a list of events that friends that you've chosen to follow, are going to. You can also create an event. If you want to make this private, you can generate an invitation key which can be shared among people you want to specifically invite. Furthermore, you can key in an invitation key to join a private event.

The app also has a calendar feature that it displays the events that you're going to for the month. It gets this information from the events that you signed up for on the app.

How is this different from Meetup? 

I think Scoreoff is a mobile version of Meetup, in the problem that it's trying to solve - get people of common interests to meet. But while Meetup goes about doing this by creating meetup groups of different kinds, Scoreoff just displays all events, based on friend data. These are two different approaches - one goes on interest, while the other goes on interest data.

Now Meetup also uses friend data to help its users to find more meetups that might be of interest to them. Scoreoff also does a kind of categorization, but it is quite broad and rudimentary. Using hashtags could be an interesting, as it saves the app maker the trouble of making numerous categories.

But does Scoreoff satisfy what it sought out to do?

Pros and Cons 

It's a very well built app from a design standpoint. Scoreoff follows all the Android design principles. If you've used a reference Android app like Gmail or Google+ , you'll have no trouble figuring out what the app is about and how to use it.

However, Scoreoff is very finicky with network. A slightly flaky network can render the app useless. Furthermore, some phones that we tested Scoreoff had problems syncing with Facebook. Also, I feel that Scoreoff presents too many functions to a first time user. I never got to use the calendar option and groups feature until a few days with the app. Also, the app could do with push messaging services for events nearby, which would drive more engagement to Scoreoff.

Our Take 

Scoreoff is definitely onto something. I could find events that did Indoor bouldering and ATV dirt riding, which I couldn't have never heard off other way. It can definitely be made much better. The sync problems and its network problems might be something the dev team want to look into, as it can really frustrate users.

But other than this, Scoreoff is a well built app and I think you should definitely give it a shot. You might just find the your next gym/badminton/cricket/running/jamming/.... you get it, right?

Download Scoreoff today and tell us what you think