I was delighted to recently welcome Socialize to the SIIA membership. I had a chance to catch up with Daniel Odio the CEO and Co-founder to learn more about the drop-in social platform. Read my interview with Daniel below.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about Socialize and the benefits for making apps social.

Daniel: Making apps social boosts app discovery (downloads) and user engagement (impressions). It creates a viral loop where users share content with each other and their social networks, which leads to more downloads, which leads to more users, which leads to more social actions all over again.

Rhianna: This week you made an announcement about notifications. Why is this feature significant?

Daniel: SmartAlert notifications “Bring users back” to the app. For example, when a user makes a comment on a piece of content in an app, and subscribes to that thread, and then another user comments on the first user’s comment, the first user gets a SmartAlert notification inviting them back into the app to see what the second user wrote.

Rhianna: You recently moved your company to San Francisco. Obviously, the Bay Area is the home of many great technology companies. How important is it for technology start-ups to be local to the Bay Area? Or does it matter?

Daniel: It’s critical. There’s a great article on my move west at http://go.DanielOdio.com/west. The environment in the San Francisco bay area is world class and results in the ability to make connections, make key hires, and iterate on the business at a speed that is unmatched anywhere else in the world. As I like to say, San Francisco is “Mecca for Geeks.”

Rhianna: You recently participated in a panel led by the Department of Homeland Security at CES. What are some of the privacy and security issues you face versus the traditional software/hardware vendors? How do you address and ease these fears?

Daniel: Often times the least secure part of a device is the human using it. And that’s where we focus – in this realm security concerns are mixed with privacy concerns. Oftentimes, users don’t know the implications of their actions by design – we work hard to abstract a level of complexity into an easy-to-use service. This means we bear a responsibility to ensure the user doesn’t compromise themselves in ways they don’t even realize. A big chunk of the value we add with our social infrastructure offering is to give the user ways to navigate privacy issues in easy to understand and friendly ways.

Rhianna: Finally, look ahead for me 18 months, what will be the biggest trends in social?

Daniel: Two big trends are converging and we’ll see them in full force in the next 18 months: The explosion of interest-based social, and the power of the Open Graph. Interest-based social isn’t the same thing as the social graph we all know from Facebook. It’s way bigger and more powerful. It’s the connections we all share based on interests, regardless of ‘friend’ status. For example, interest-based groups include people of the same ethnicity, people who love zinfandel wine, co-workers, people who love to sail, and the list goes on. We are all comprised of a series of interests, and for the first time, technology (and mobile in particular) is enabling us to map all those interests and connections, and begin to monetize them.

The Open Graph is an initiative by Facebook to get everyone to share all of their actions – what songs they are listening to, what they are reading, etc. This confluence of mapping interests to people and sharing of all actions will mean the power and reach of social will be exploding in the next 18 months. More about this topic at http://go.danielodio.com/interestgraph and a screencast on why mobile is way bigger than most people realize is at http://go.DanielOdio.com/waybigger

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.