
Another Social App? - mmaccou
What are your thoughts on the ever increasing number of social apps out there? Wish they would stop? Keep them coming? Do you think there is something that most are missing?
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colept
I remember before Yik Yak arrived on the scene, anonymous ephemeral
communication wasn't popular. Sure there's Craiglist, but part of what made
Yik Yak popular is that it not only adapted to the way people wanted to
communicate, but it refined it. It created a space that was participation only
and had an agreed-upon code of conduct.

Hundreds of social apps enter the market every month, but the reason so many
fail is because they try to keep up with the standard. Bumble and Happn both
tried to replace Tinder, but couldn't because the value of communication
hardly changed. Bumble surely gives women more power into the dynamics of
online dating, but women not having power was hardly an issue given Tinder's
match process. The saturation of refinement has already piqued in that market.

Social apps don't necessarily miss the mark, but rather they fail to predict.
We are in an age of ephemeral messaging at the moment but it's a false premise
given the increasing control of the police state governments. The next
revolution in communication and social apps is going to be off-the-grid
communication, where there are no networks or carriers - just end points. Mesh
networks and Tor-like nodes are below the surface at the moment, but once that
technology moves from software to hardware I predict it's going to bloom
(permitting encryption is not outlawed) into dongles you attach to your phone
which eventually are sold as features.

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mmaccou
Do you mean like the bitcoin of communication?

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colept
No, I mean communication over mesh networks similar to Nintendo DS' social
features and recently, GoTenna
([http://www.gotenna.com/](http://www.gotenna.com/)) (I'm not affiliated).

Back when I was a kid there was something like this in a handheld gameboy-like
device that had an antenna you could use to chat with anyone nearby that had
the same device. The only problem was nobody else in the nearest five mile
radius had one.

When this kind of technology is baked into our phones, without the need for
carriers or network providers, this kind of communication would be facilitated
by devices instead of software. This kind of communication exists now in the
software realm (ie. Yik Yak, FireChat - with closed participation) but once
that layer transitions from software to hardware visa vi dongles or built into
our phones, that participation will become more open and face less scrutiny
against surveillance.

