When Facebook is too much, use Go-Matic to create ad-hoc, mini-social networks

The enormity of Facebook has given rise to a plethora of private experiences such as Path and Everyme. But sometimes a person wants to share a social moment with a few folks right when the mood strikes. For those occasions, you’ve got Go-Matic.

Go-Matic is a new mobile application for creating mini-social networks on the fly. You can use it with select group of friends for any purpose, such as coordinating an outing or creating a back-channel for conversations about an event.

The application allows for group chat and photo-sharing, and includes location features to help members locate each other and discuss places.

“Services like Path and Pair also recognize that most of the time we don’t want to share with everyone we know or barely know. But they merely take the Facebook model and limit the number of people in your network,” the company said in a statement to VentureBeat. “We built Go-Matic … on a very different model, one that mirrors how we socialize with and work with friends and colleagues in the real world. A model that allows people to create an instant network of any size with the people they need and want to connect with in the moment.”

“I think the piece about not having to be permanent friends is a really interesting concept,” said Tracey Isacke, the Director of Business Development at Telefonica Digital. “We are all at an event where we want to share photos, but only with this transient groups of friends.”

Go-Matic hails from San Francisco-based Go Factory. The 1-year-old startup also makes the behind-the-scenes, cloud-based platform Go Machine, which supports the creation of these spontaneous networks. The patent-pending technology also enables developers to add the same type of instantaneous sharing functionality to their own applications.

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Go Factory is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

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