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The 'tapping phones' gimmick strikes me as something that sounds cute but will become an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of. Particularly giv

The 'tapping phones' gimmick strikes me as something that sounds cute but will become an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of. Particularly given various unintended side effects -- I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network. And either way, it's not the core feature that will draw users to the site If you want to differentiate as an alternative to toxic behemoth platforms, the framing of "Facebook but with chores" isn't it. The idea of spending time on the platform itself should be appealing -- I am not that interested in knowing how to connect with someone on the platform before knowing why I would want to be there in the first place. See e.g. how Nextdoor doesn't lead with "you'll have to verify that you live in the neighborhood", instead it's "Connect to your neighborhood with Nextdoor"

skybrian 5mo ago
Perhaps "remember when you met with your friends?" But taking a photo (possibly a group photo) is a more natural way to do that. Maybe it should integrate with photo-taking somehow? It would be annoying if you met up, forgot to do the ritual in person, and had no way to fix it.
- al_borland 5mo ago
  While this probably could only be done with the cooperation of Apple/Google, something like what they did for contact tracing during the pandemic would be ideal. Picking up that you were in the proximity of various friends without any active effort. https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing
  - skybrian 5mo ago
    That sounds creepy to me. Taking a photo together doesn't seem like friction to be removed?
    - al_borland 5mo ago
      Doing it via a photo implies facial recognition, which can potentially be more creepy for people. Is it happening on device or in the cloud? Do I need to register my face when joining the service? What happens to that data if the service is sold at some point in the future?
      - skybrian 5mo ago
        I wouldn't use facial recognition. The idea would be that you take the group photo and share it with everyone using the phone-bumping ritual, and it shows up in your profiles. But that only works if the social network has enough privacy safeguards that sharing personal photos on it makes sense. Maybe the network just shares the photos encrypted? And if you can't share photos with your friends on it, it seems kind of limited as social networks go?
- resident423 5mo ago
  I don't really like the idea of an app telling me how to manage my friendships, my view is that people can handle their relationships without intervention. I'm not sure what problem it is trying to solve.
  - dgellow 5mo ago
    It gives you one way to experience your friendship. It’s not telling you how you should manage them. You can use it for just a few friends. Or ignore it completely
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- lossyalgo 5mo ago
  How about "friend-request-by-mail" where you pay Friendster a token amount to send a postcard with a unique QR code?
paulnpace 5mo ago
> I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network. It seems like a feature could deal with this specific case, such as marking a friend as deceased. Possibly, other friends doing the same thing puts the profile to be in deceased status until the user logs in and changes the status.
- card_zero 5mo ago
  Much bullying potential. "You're dead to us" ...
- modo_mario 5mo ago
  People just shouldn't look to the online digital world for connection with dead loved ones. It's entirely impractical and one day after a bankruptcy or when it's no longer profitable it may just disappear. It can take years or weeks.
SamBam 5mo ago
I think the tapping phones feature -- for initial friend creation, not upkeep -- is THE killer feature of the app. Do I want my teens on any social media apps? No. Would I let them be on Facebook of 2006, when you were just connected to your friends and family, and not influencers and "the algorithm?" Sure! That and early Instagram were great ways to keep up with real-life friends. If you made this as easy and pleasant to scroll through as 2011 Instagram was, with only-real friends allowed, I might even return to social media myself. It would beat having to WhatsApp my family my vacation photos. (And heck, if this got big enough that celebrities were bumping phones with fans, heck, at least that's a more intentional connection than Insta forcing the latest wellness guru on my teen girl.)
- jdyer9 5mo ago
  My thoughts as well, I love this! Easy to do, easy to implement but hard to bypass. Also it tells me something about the network that is not vying for a slice of the attention economy and isn't going to do everything it can to keep me on the site.
  - darkwater 5mo ago
    Don't underestimate the stubbornness of "get rich easy" people when it comes down to cheating etc. Even if it's not easy or cost effective, if this was going to be actually viral, they would tap real phones in click-farms to game the system. And do it once a year.
    - vintermann 5mo ago
      It's true that there are people who pay a premium for thinking they got one up on you, and will waste $1000 of effort to get $100. But it wouldn't actually work well. It doesn't even need physical invites, keeping track of the invite graph is a great way to kick scammers out. It works. It's been demonstrated to work well since at least 2004. The reason social media sites don't do it is not that it doesn't work - it's that growth trumps those concerns. Making onboarding as easy as possible is more important than keeping scammers out.
  - 5mo ago
incompatible 5mo ago
How does it work? Bluetooth?
- m-i-l 5mo ago
  I'd imagine Friendster uses NFC. I developed a proof of concept of a tap-to-connect social network a couple of years ago which used NFC - on both phones you had to have the app open and press a button in the app to put it in both broadcast and receive mode, which seems like what is shown here. Some notes: - It had to be an app because the web NFC API[0] only allows a browser to act as an NFC reader rather than emulate an NFC card. Nothing stopping other functionality outside of the tap-to-connect working in a browser of course. - Permissions to act as an NFC card were fairly easy to set up on Android, but needed specific developer permissions for Apple[1], which had to be applied for[2][3]. Worth also noting that other proximity techniques such as QR scanning and geolocation are much more easily spoofed than NFC, making them much less useful as a proof-of-human validation. [0] https://w3c-cg.github.io/web-nfc/ https://w3c-cg.github.io/web-nfc/ [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc/cardsession/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc/cardsessio... [2] https://developer.apple.com/support/nfc-se-platform/ https://developer.apple.com/support/nfc-se-platform/ [3] https://developer.apple.com/support/hce-transactions-in-apps/ https://developer.apple.com/support/hce-transactions-in-apps...
  - incompatible 5mo ago
    There's a comment below, "I just signed up and it’s super fast. Download the app, put in your name, allow Bluetooth. No email, no password, nothing." I suppose getting special "NFC card" permissions when they already struggled to get the app in the store would have been a bit much.
    - m-i-l 5mo ago
      Interesting. Android has a Nearby Connections API[0] which "uses a combination of Bluetooth, BLE, and Wi-Fi technologies" and appears to allow interoperability between Android and Apple devices, and Apple has a Nearby Interaction[1] which "use[s] the high-frequency capabilities of the UWB chip" but is restricted to Apple devices, so I guess it could be one of those rather than NFC. [0] https://developers.google.com/nearby/connections/overview https://developers.google.com/nearby/connections/overview [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/nearbyinteraction https://developer.apple.com/documentation/nearbyinteraction
spiralcoaster 5mo ago
[flagged]
- xp84 5mo ago
  If that happens, just steal their phone and keep tapping it monthly. It's what they would have wanted.
  - rahkiin 5mo ago
    Once this is actually needed, they can add a feature for marking someone as deceased. It could freeze the relationships, disallow new ones, disallow any new content, mark person as dead.
- delis-thumbs-7e 5mo ago
  You are saying you would kill yourself if you could not see you dead friend on some app? On the contrary it should be easy for a relative to remove a deceased individual from social media, especially so that they are not captured to be zombie-bots liking some far-right posts years they have been gone. Meta doesn’t give a shit about this, but tapping phones would actually solve this problem by itself. If you are not online nor tap phones with anyone for say a year, your account dissappears.
  - KolmogorovComp 5mo ago
    You missed the tongue-in-cheek.
- jamespo 5mo ago
  I think you meant this snark for reddit?
jasonkester 5mo ago
It’s interesting to read the comments here. People seem to be either strongly for, or strongly against this tapping feature. I bet the split correlates to whether all your friends live in the same town as you. For me, I already know what the handful of people who live in my little town are doing. I see them all the time. An app like this is for keeping up for the rest of my friends who live out of town and I might only see in person every few years.
Elucalidavah 5mo ago
> 'tapping phones' gimmick strikes me as something that sounds cute but will become an annoying chore That 'tapping phones' could also be used to facilitate key exchange verification, making that chore technically useful. Then again, that would be better done in an open-source app and not tied to any particular domain.
__d 5mo ago
I have a heap of family and friends who live in a different country to me. I'd love an old school Friendster / early Facebook-style social medium where we could share posts, but the tapping mechanic makes this impractical for me.
- j3th9n 5mo ago
  Maybe pay them a visit.
  - Broken_Hippo 5mo ago
    I shouldn't require international travel - over an ocean - to talk to my siblings on the internet on a social app. Visits are great and all, but they require money and planning with more than one person. And I'm lucky - I can travel. Some folks can't go home - war sucks, poverty sucks, sickness sucks, busy work times suck, etc. If I were still in the US, I might not even get a chunk of time off work. Travel is probably getting a little less likely considering the current situation with jet fuel as well.
  - filleduchaos 5mo ago
    Maybe "get up and travel to a different country" is not as simple as it sounds.
    - lossyalgo 5mo ago
      Feature request: friend-request-by-mail: Pay Friendster $1 to send a postcard with a unique QR code. I've seen something similar for user/address verification on a local community website (but it's free to send the postcard).
  - lossyalgo 5mo ago
    "Hey I'm coming to visit you so we can be friends on Friendster 2.0! The flight was 1k so I hope you don't mind if I crash on your couch!"
  - __d 5mo ago
    If I could afford that I wouldn’t need a social media app.
DeathArrow 5mo ago
Actually I met people on Facebook and other websites and after that I met them in real life. The tapping phones feature wouldn't allow me to do this.
moondance 5mo ago
As others have mentioned, “Bump!” did it 15 years ago and it was little more than a novelty, despite its Google acquisition. iOS has also had the tapping-phones-to-connect feature baked in for years (NameDrop) and no one uses it. Curious how that OS-level functionality might conflict with the app-level bumping. That aside, w all respect to the poster, it strikes me that they took that comment and ran with it before doing any research. There’s definitely a better solution to the problem, and I hope they find it.
- karel-3d 5mo ago
  I have used NameDrop about 4-5 times (in 10-ish years of using iPhone). It's not nothing! But it's also not that much.
- kristopherleads 5mo ago
  Funnily enough, I only use the phone bumping feature when AirDrop is broken and won't detect I'm literally right next to my spouse.
- ghostly_s 5mo ago
  > iOS has also had the tapping-phones-to-connect feature baked in for years (NameDrop) Well that's just because I have no idea how to find it. The "share contact?" prompt when you text a new number accomplishes the same I guess but it would be nice to skip the number part.
dgellow 5mo ago
> The idea of spending time on the platform itself should be appealing Optimizing for time spent on the platform is exactly what results in the current social platforms. The idea that the platform itself should be appealing and not a tool to connect with each others is in itself toxic IMHO
hbn 5mo ago
I don't see the issue with making a social network that's more focused on real-time, current irl connections. Snapchat has already used a similar model with decaying content to great success. I think you're likely of a generation that's attached to the Facebook model where a social network is an ever-growing photobook/history of interactions with all your friends. Maybe that has a place, but I think it's worth being open to other ideas. And yes, maybe when someone dies, they're no longer part of this network in the same way they are no longer part of many other things in your life. I don't think that's inherently bad.
- vector_spaces 5mo ago
  You move to dismiss what I have to say by framing me as closed to new ideas because of how you infer my age, in a roundabout way -- what an ugly, uncouth, and mean-spirited rhetorical move. Either way, you badly mischaracterize generational differences in grieving and digital life. Gen Z and younger millenials are vastly more inclined towards memorialization of deceased loved ones and (physically & digitally) archiving their content than any generation. See also the uptrending of stated preference in burials over cremations in the same generation. There are many reasons for this but at least in part it is probably a reaction to the ephemeralization of both digital and physical life. Also, my post was largely motivated by how OP brands their product. From their app store page and the blog post, it seems they will support photos, longer form content, and DMs. In such a setting, ephemerality needs to be in your face, otherwise you are setting up users for unpleasant surprises. It's common sense.
kube-system 5mo ago
I don't think it's an unintended side-effect. The entire point is to mimic the dynamics of in-person interaction.
munificent 5mo ago
> an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of. You could say the same thing about leaving the house. Maybe we should have a little more of this annoying but ultimately healthy kind of friction in our lives.
andirk 5mo ago
Heck no. There was this app "Bump" that exchanged info between 2 bumping phones. Google bought it and immediately buried it forever. There's ZERO reason exchanging info is still a chore. There are currently bumping features baked in to the OSs, so there is value.

skybrian 5mo ago

Perhaps "remember when you met with your friends?" But taking a photo (possibly a group photo) is a more natural way to do that. Maybe it should integrate with photo-taking somehow? It would be annoying if you met up, forgot to do the ritual in person, and had no way to fix it.

al_borland 5mo ago
While this probably could only be done with the cooperation of Apple/Google, something like what they did for contact tracing during the pandemic would be ideal. Picking up that you were in the proximity of various friends without any active effort. https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing
- skybrian 5mo ago
  That sounds creepy to me. Taking a photo together doesn't seem like friction to be removed?
  - al_borland 5mo ago
    Doing it via a photo implies facial recognition, which can potentially be more creepy for people. Is it happening on device or in the cloud? Do I need to register my face when joining the service? What happens to that data if the service is sold at some point in the future?
    - skybrian 5mo ago
      I wouldn't use facial recognition. The idea would be that you take the group photo and share it with everyone using the phone-bumping ritual, and it shows up in your profiles. But that only works if the social network has enough privacy safeguards that sharing personal photos on it makes sense. Maybe the network just shares the photos encrypted? And if you can't share photos with your friends on it, it seems kind of limited as social networks go?
resident423 5mo ago
I don't really like the idea of an app telling me how to manage my friendships, my view is that people can handle their relationships without intervention. I'm not sure what problem it is trying to solve.
- dgellow 5mo ago
  It gives you one way to experience your friendship. It’s not telling you how you should manage them. You can use it for just a few friends. Or ignore it completely
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
lossyalgo 5mo ago
How about "friend-request-by-mail" where you pay Friendster a token amount to send a postcard with a unique QR code?

paulnpace 5mo ago

> I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network. It seems like a feature could deal with this specific case, such as marking a friend as deceased. Possibly, other friends doing the same thing puts the profile to be in deceased status until the user logs in and changes the status.

card_zero 5mo ago
Much bullying potential. "You're dead to us" ...
modo_mario 5mo ago
People just shouldn't look to the online digital world for connection with dead loved ones. It's entirely impractical and one day after a bankruptcy or when it's no longer profitable it may just disappear. It can take years or weeks.

SamBam 5mo ago

I think the tapping phones feature -- for initial friend creation, not upkeep -- is THE killer feature of the app. Do I want my teens on any social media apps? No. Would I let them be on Facebook of 2006, when you were just connected to your friends and family, and not influencers and "the algorithm?" Sure! That and early Instagram were great ways to keep up with real-life friends. If you made this as easy and pleasant to scroll through as 2011 Instagram was, with only-real friends allowed, I might even return to social media myself. It would beat having to WhatsApp my family my vacation photos. (And heck, if this got big enough that celebrities were bumping phones with fans, heck, at least that's a more intentional connection than Insta forcing the latest wellness guru on my teen girl.)

jdyer9 5mo ago
My thoughts as well, I love this! Easy to do, easy to implement but hard to bypass. Also it tells me something about the network that is not vying for a slice of the attention economy and isn't going to do everything it can to keep me on the site.
- darkwater 5mo ago
  Don't underestimate the stubbornness of "get rich easy" people when it comes down to cheating etc. Even if it's not easy or cost effective, if this was going to be actually viral, they would tap real phones in click-farms to game the system. And do it once a year.
  - vintermann 5mo ago
    It's true that there are people who pay a premium for thinking they got one up on you, and will waste $1000 of effort to get $100. But it wouldn't actually work well. It doesn't even need physical invites, keeping track of the invite graph is a great way to kick scammers out. It works. It's been demonstrated to work well since at least 2004. The reason social media sites don't do it is not that it doesn't work - it's that growth trumps those concerns. Making onboarding as easy as possible is more important than keeping scammers out.
- 5mo ago

incompatible 5mo ago

How does it work? Bluetooth?

m-i-l 5mo ago
I'd imagine Friendster uses NFC. I developed a proof of concept of a tap-to-connect social network a couple of years ago which used NFC - on both phones you had to have the app open and press a button in the app to put it in both broadcast and receive mode, which seems like what is shown here. Some notes: - It had to be an app because the web NFC API[0] only allows a browser to act as an NFC reader rather than emulate an NFC card. Nothing stopping other functionality outside of the tap-to-connect working in a browser of course. - Permissions to act as an NFC card were fairly easy to set up on Android, but needed specific developer permissions for Apple[1], which had to be applied for[2][3]. Worth also noting that other proximity techniques such as QR scanning and geolocation are much more easily spoofed than NFC, making them much less useful as a proof-of-human validation. [0] https://w3c-cg.github.io/web-nfc/ https://w3c-cg.github.io/web-nfc/ [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc/cardsession/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc/cardsessio... [2] https://developer.apple.com/support/nfc-se-platform/ https://developer.apple.com/support/nfc-se-platform/ [3] https://developer.apple.com/support/hce-transactions-in-apps/ https://developer.apple.com/support/hce-transactions-in-apps...
- incompatible 5mo ago
  There's a comment below, "I just signed up and it’s super fast. Download the app, put in your name, allow Bluetooth. No email, no password, nothing." I suppose getting special "NFC card" permissions when they already struggled to get the app in the store would have been a bit much.
  - m-i-l 5mo ago
    Interesting. Android has a Nearby Connections API[0] which "uses a combination of Bluetooth, BLE, and Wi-Fi technologies" and appears to allow interoperability between Android and Apple devices, and Apple has a Nearby Interaction[1] which "use[s] the high-frequency capabilities of the UWB chip" but is restricted to Apple devices, so I guess it could be one of those rather than NFC. [0] https://developers.google.com/nearby/connections/overview https://developers.google.com/nearby/connections/overview [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/nearbyinteraction https://developer.apple.com/documentation/nearbyinteraction

spiralcoaster 5mo ago

[flagged]

xp84 5mo ago
If that happens, just steal their phone and keep tapping it monthly. It's what they would have wanted.
- rahkiin 5mo ago
  Once this is actually needed, they can add a feature for marking someone as deceased. It could freeze the relationships, disallow new ones, disallow any new content, mark person as dead.
delis-thumbs-7e 5mo ago
You are saying you would kill yourself if you could not see you dead friend on some app? On the contrary it should be easy for a relative to remove a deceased individual from social media, especially so that they are not captured to be zombie-bots liking some far-right posts years they have been gone. Meta doesn’t give a shit about this, but tapping phones would actually solve this problem by itself. If you are not online nor tap phones with anyone for say a year, your account dissappears.
- KolmogorovComp 5mo ago
  You missed the tongue-in-cheek.
jamespo 5mo ago
I think you meant this snark for reddit?

jasonkester 5mo ago

It’s interesting to read the comments here. People seem to be either strongly for, or strongly against this tapping feature. I bet the split correlates to whether all your friends live in the same town as you. For me, I already know what the handful of people who live in my little town are doing. I see them all the time. An app like this is for keeping up for the rest of my friends who live out of town and I might only see in person every few years.

Elucalidavah 5mo ago

> 'tapping phones' gimmick strikes me as something that sounds cute but will become an annoying chore That 'tapping phones' could also be used to facilitate key exchange verification, making that chore technically useful. Then again, that would be better done in an open-source app and not tied to any particular domain.

__d 5mo ago

I have a heap of family and friends who live in a different country to me. I'd love an old school Friendster / early Facebook-style social medium where we could share posts, but the tapping mechanic makes this impractical for me.

j3th9n 5mo ago
Maybe pay them a visit.
- Broken_Hippo 5mo ago
  I shouldn't require international travel - over an ocean - to talk to my siblings on the internet on a social app. Visits are great and all, but they require money and planning with more than one person. And I'm lucky - I can travel. Some folks can't go home - war sucks, poverty sucks, sickness sucks, busy work times suck, etc. If I were still in the US, I might not even get a chunk of time off work. Travel is probably getting a little less likely considering the current situation with jet fuel as well.
- filleduchaos 5mo ago
  Maybe "get up and travel to a different country" is not as simple as it sounds.
  - lossyalgo 5mo ago
    Feature request: friend-request-by-mail: Pay Friendster $1 to send a postcard with a unique QR code. I've seen something similar for user/address verification on a local community website (but it's free to send the postcard).
- lossyalgo 5mo ago
  "Hey I'm coming to visit you so we can be friends on Friendster 2.0! The flight was 1k so I hope you don't mind if I crash on your couch!"
- __d 5mo ago
  If I could afford that I wouldn’t need a social media app.

DeathArrow 5mo ago

Actually I met people on Facebook and other websites and after that I met them in real life. The tapping phones feature wouldn't allow me to do this.

moondance 5mo ago

As others have mentioned, “Bump!” did it 15 years ago and it was little more than a novelty, despite its Google acquisition. iOS has also had the tapping-phones-to-connect feature baked in for years (NameDrop) and no one uses it. Curious how that OS-level functionality might conflict with the app-level bumping. That aside, w all respect to the poster, it strikes me that they took that comment and ran with it before doing any research. There’s definitely a better solution to the problem, and I hope they find it.

karel-3d 5mo ago
I have used NameDrop about 4-5 times (in 10-ish years of using iPhone). It's not nothing! But it's also not that much.
kristopherleads 5mo ago
Funnily enough, I only use the phone bumping feature when AirDrop is broken and won't detect I'm literally right next to my spouse.
ghostly_s 5mo ago
> iOS has also had the tapping-phones-to-connect feature baked in for years (NameDrop) Well that's just because I have no idea how to find it. The "share contact?" prompt when you text a new number accomplishes the same I guess but it would be nice to skip the number part.

dgellow 5mo ago

> The idea of spending time on the platform itself should be appealing Optimizing for time spent on the platform is exactly what results in the current social platforms. The idea that the platform itself should be appealing and not a tool to connect with each others is in itself toxic IMHO

hbn 5mo ago

I don't see the issue with making a social network that's more focused on real-time, current irl connections. Snapchat has already used a similar model with decaying content to great success. I think you're likely of a generation that's attached to the Facebook model where a social network is an ever-growing photobook/history of interactions with all your friends. Maybe that has a place, but I think it's worth being open to other ideas. And yes, maybe when someone dies, they're no longer part of this network in the same way they are no longer part of many other things in your life. I don't think that's inherently bad.

vector_spaces 5mo ago
You move to dismiss what I have to say by framing me as closed to new ideas because of how you infer my age, in a roundabout way -- what an ugly, uncouth, and mean-spirited rhetorical move. Either way, you badly mischaracterize generational differences in grieving and digital life. Gen Z and younger millenials are vastly more inclined towards memorialization of deceased loved ones and (physically & digitally) archiving their content than any generation. See also the uptrending of stated preference in burials over cremations in the same generation. There are many reasons for this but at least in part it is probably a reaction to the ephemeralization of both digital and physical life. Also, my post was largely motivated by how OP brands their product. From their app store page and the blog post, it seems they will support photos, longer form content, and DMs. In such a setting, ephemerality needs to be in your face, otherwise you are setting up users for unpleasant surprises. It's common sense.

kube-system 5mo ago

I don't think it's an unintended side-effect. The entire point is to mimic the dynamics of in-person interaction.

munificent 5mo ago

> an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of. You could say the same thing about leaving the house. Maybe we should have a little more of this annoying but ultimately healthy kind of friction in our lives.

andirk 5mo ago

Heck no. There was this app "Bump" that exchanged info between 2 bumping phones. Google bought it and immediately buried it forever. There's ZERO reason exchanging info is still a chore. There are currently bumping features baked in to the OSs, so there is value.