rrripple is a recently launched site that organizes your digital life in a new way. Along a vertical time line, your stored and shared media is arranged in a way that makes sense. Your contacts and groups can be found on either side of your time line, giving you easy access to those with whom you share your media. Having your contacts separated from the groups makes it a seamless action to incorporate privacy into your sharing behavior. This makes rrripple an interesting and thoughtful application. Below is an interview with Heather Hiles, co-founder and COO of rrripple.

Kristen Nicole: How would you describe rrripple?

Heather Hiles: rrripple is a comprehensive, centralized lifeflow publisher with social tools that enable private, meaningful sharing of media and files with relevant audiences of real-life contacts. A unique combination of tools and messaging capabilities makes it easy and convenient for users to share relevant content and information with a wide variety of small, private, relevant audiences.

Unlike “social networking” sites, rrripple’s lifeflow service is focused on the chronicling and sharing of meaningful information with a closed group of real-life, relationship-based contacts, and creates an interactive setting where all the members of a particular “group” can share, engage and discuss.

What challenges have you had to overcome in creating a service for organizing content-sharing around both groups and individuals?

The greatest challenge has been organizing the site so that it is most natural for sharing with other groups. We have prioritized establishing new groups very easy and then being able to drag and drop new friends to those groups and then sharing media with these groups really easy.

Our DNA is coded for group sharing, and then we are solving the problem of how to publish back out to FB and other public sites.

The next wave of challenges that we are facing right now is how to best filter and search within a “wall” or within a group, and then how to maximize options of organizing media on our timeline interface.

Developing a comprehensive service for both group and individual sharing is a challenge in and of itself. Developing the right features, with the proper organization, to both appeal to and provide proper function for both groups and individuals was certainly our first hurdle.

However, our goal of providing a LifeFlow (for individuals) and BusinessFlow publisher – almost an anti-lifecasting, where members exercise much more control and discretion over what content is shared and with whom – has functionality and appeal to both demographics.

Our continuing challenge will be to stay ahead of the curve both technologically and with our feature set to ensure that we’re offering our members exactly what they’re looking for – before they realize that it’s something they’re looking for.

You mentioned there would be some upcoming integration with several sites and services, including Facebook. How are you looking to incorporate this and where do you see this trend going in general?

In general, the trend is that people are inundated with media and communication from all sorts of sources, both on the mobile devices and on the web ( 3 email accounts, Skype, Tweets, SMS, a photo site like iphoto, etc). So the next wave of sharing is about how to organize and bring all of the media in one place. We are bringing the control over media and communication back into the hands of the users.

One of the critical ways of putting the control back in the hands of the users is making the importing of media (videos, photos, documents, ppts, messages) automatic, or one keystroke away. We are bringing the cloud to the fingertips of our users and making it as easy as possible to import photos, other media and profile settings from sources like Facebook, Picasa, Flckr, iphoto. We are building our API for these features now and will be sure to preview the features with you when they are complete.

What will the upcoming iPhone application entail?

The upcoming iPhone application will make it even easier for rrripple members to post, store and share content – regardless of where they are. With more and more users turning to mobile solutions – and particularly iPhone and other smart phone applications – to connect, share, and communicate via email, SMS and content sharing, the development of a mobile rrripple application is a logical extension of our comprehensive Web application.

The primary use case for the iPhone app is that you take photo (or video) from your iphone and send it directly to your group then and there. A copy of the image will also go to your wall on your site, as a digital diary or journal .

With an iPhone app you expand your demographic to include heavy mobile users. Where do you see mobile support fitting into your long term goals?

Many analysts have speculated that mobile applications are the future of media sharing and social services. Certainly, everyone from the busy soccer mom to the technophile has seen benefit from smart devices and mobile application for everything from checking up on their Facebook friends and Tweeting to searching for good local restaurants while away on business. A simple, fast, utilitarian application that allows our members to post, share, and access updates from their groups will make staying connected and up-to-date possible from anywhere. This application fits into rrripple’s goal of being a comprehensive media sharing and communications tool.

We know that there will be a percentage of users (perhaps 20%?) who primarily use the iPhone app and the Web app as a back up.