Here’s a new app for finding nearby people as crazy about something as you are

Let’s say you like golf (for some reason). How can you easily find fellow golfers in your area?

That was the dilemma facing Christopher Obereder, CEO and co-founder of Inlope, a mobile-only social network that today joins a growing crowd of interest-based communities.

“We were trying to find golf partners,” he told VentureBeat. “It’s hard if you’re 20 and looking to find other 20-year-olds.”

About 120 interests are currently available in the new app-based service, including sports, animals, technology, traveling, music, nature, and political issues. Users cannot add interests by themselves, but they can email suggested ones to Inlope for approval.

There are two text-and-media newsfeeds — a local one that can include your selected interests in your area, ranked in order of geographical closeness to you, and another for getting updates from Inlope people you’re following.

The people newsfeed includes every post from them, not just your interests. Users can indicate their approval of newsfeed items by swiping right. For disapproval, swipe left. Items will then show a green line if a majority favors it, a red line if a majority dislikes it.

Inlopers can instant messsage anyone, a function that Obereder said will be “monitored closely” to prevent spamming. Inlope’s launch version is for iOS, with an Android version coming in a couple of months.

Above: Two screens in Inlope

Image Credit: Inlope

The Munich-based network, whose name stands for INterests LOcal PEople — the service’s three key attributes — has mostly been bootstrapped so far, Obereder said. The only outside support for the company behind Inlope, T&O Applications GmbH, has come from Microsoft’s BizSpark program for startups, with the technology giant covering initial server costs and marketing through its Azure cloud.

Inlope is built on what Obereder’s team learned from a Tinder-like social network they built and released last year, called Friending.

That endeavor suffered against Tinder, he said, because Friending required a fee. “That was a big mistake,” he told us, and so there will be no effort to monetize Inlope for the time being. “Eventually,” he said, “we’ll add really targeted ads” based on interests.

Obereder characterized Inlope’s functionality as a combo of Pinterest’s and Facebook’s, in that it combines interests with social. But Pinterest isn’t as location oriented and doesn’t offer the same tools for interpersonal communication, he said.

On Facebook, he noted, “there are over 50 golf groups in Berlin alone, and this does not create a tool of communication for the whole local golf community.” He added that it’s “difficult to contact people [on Facebook], because messages go in the ‘other messages’ folder and many people don’t check this folder.”

On Inlope, he said, there is no need to join and be approved for different groups, posting on each separately. “We make it really simple and you can connect with a whole community with two tabs.”

There are also such general interest-sharing communities as question-based Quora and discovery engine Flipora, as well as highly specialized ones like the medical social hub Sermo. There are even golfer social networks, such as Time to Play Golf. But Oberder told us that no other services are like his, because of the emphasis on local connections and people, as well as interests.

“We want people to share what they’re interested in,” he said, “not [just] what they like.”