Sasha Cagen, the author of books Quirkyalone and To-Do List, has founded (with co-founder Adam Souzis) something astonishingly addictive -- StyleMob. A very nice SFist reader sent us an invite during the "invite-only beta" -- which comes to a close today! If all goes as planned, today will start the "public beta," so cruise on over and join the 6,000 current members.

StyleMob is an online community "for street fashion inspiration" where you can see "how real people put together their outfits." There are all sorts of voting, networking, and community tools. We're confident it'll be a time-suck for fashionistas and not-so-fashion oriented alike.

Sasha took some time out of her hectic schedule (trying frantically to get those last-minute bugs out) and answered a few questions for us.

1) We must confess: we've a total StyleMob addiction. What do you see as the primary appeal/selling point/application of the site? How flexible do you plan on being with your vision? We'd note that when we spoke to Yelp's founders, they revealed that the review aspect was basically an afterthought -- and look at it now!

For us, StyleMob is about fashion inspiration. It's a site where you can find your fashion muses--real-world trendsetters who inspire you to reinvent your own look. It's fairly addictive--once you rate one outfit, you're basically hooked. We're unique among a lot of fashion sites because we're focused on real people rather than celebrities. We're fascinated by the "trickle-up theory of fashion"—the idea of fashion coming from the street. We also like the idea that the site is for anyone; no matter what your budget or body type, you can create a jaw-dropping look. Ultimately, StyleMob can be a whole way of life, it makes you more creative when you get dressed in the morning.

We're definitely flexible about how StyleMob evolves. We built StyleMob with very few resources and we have big ideas that we've yet to implement. We just introduced a new feature called the StyleCouncil that allows users to create teams of personal stylists to advise them on their look. We want to focus on personalization, making StyleMob easy to find people who share your taste. We're really interested in bridging real-world and online—we want to create ways for people to be able to be out shopping and send a photo back to friends to get feedback--yay or nay. And we're building style-spotting teams who will snap pictures of the most stylish pedestrians they see on the street.

2) Can you share with us the genesis of StyleMob -- how'd it all
get going? And why?

My friend Adam and I were talking about websites last Halloween at a pumpkin-carving party at my house. Basically, we thought, this is such an obvious idea and no one is doing it really well. People love to check out what other people are wearing and the Internet is the perfect venue for it. Plus, I always want to know where people got what they are wearing. We felt like this was an idea worth exploring. We started meeting in cafes and then working on the site in earnest in January.

3) So, you've been beta testing for three months. Even in
invite-only beta, you have more than 6,000 registered users active in the community. What has so much online social interaction taught you about people? Fashion? Anything else unexpected?

One interesting trip for us was developing and refining our voting system. There's a lot of psychology in voting. Even though fashion always inherently has its catty, judgmental side, ultimately people want a positive, supportive community. Nobody wants to get an email saying, "You're a fashion don't!" We want StyleMob to be a positive force in people's lives, especially the people who put themselves out there with their style.

We started with a system of emoticons that ranged from "disaster" to "genius" with "yawn" in the middle but everyone was coming out "yawn" because the votes averaged. People were not happy about being "yawns." So now we have a more mellow system of "not for me" to "wow" with the "wows" being displayed so you know who likes your look. The new system feels more fun and uplifting, which was our original intention.

Thanks for the time, Sasha! Can not wait to see if this catches on with SFist's readers, who are always good for an opinion or three!