Introducing a little quarantine side project I've been working on: Tiny Talk.
Tiny Talk is basically ChatRoulette, but with your friends. The goal: to bring back social serendipity :)
Here's how it works: sort your contacts into groups (friends, family, work, etc.) -- or block a contact to prevent a match (other users won't ever know if you block them). Then, from time to time, you'll be invited to join a randomly-coordinated, 7-minute video chat with one of your approved, eligible contacts (or you can initiate a Tiny Talk to kick off the random matching process). Tiny Talks are double-blind, so neither you nor the person you connect with will know who the other is until you've both opted into the conversation. The only requirement is that you've both sorted one another into groups other than "Block". When the seven minutes is up, that's it! Need more time? Just call / FaceTime them back.
Tiny Talk is meant to be low-commitment (hard cap of 7-minutes), low-risk (pre-sort contacts + double blind matching) and fun (who's ready to break up the monotony of 9 to 5 Zoom?)
Available for iOS on the Apple App Store and Android on Google Play. Landing page / more info on the Tiny Talk site: https://tinytalk.io.
If you do check it out, definitely share any/all ideas and feedback!
I don't understand why would I use this? It just feels that I register to something that might randomly pop-up meetings/calls with people I know? I personally don't like unexpected calls in general or calling someone without having anything to tell. It feels that if I register I would just make my life harder with no benefit in return (I can already talk with whoever I want and contact them if I feel like it).
It's a great question -- we actually address that specifically in the FAQ on our site: https://tinytalk.io/faq ("... another social network app? Wait but why?").
The basic emotion we're hoping to leave our users with is that feeling you get when a friend you haven't talked to in a while calls you out of the blue, just to say hi and see how you're doing. We wanted to lower the barrier for those types of exchanges, where in Tiny Talk, getting to that is as simple as pushing one button. In addition to making it dead simple, we keep the interactions low-risk (sort those of your contacts who are registered on Tiny Talk via a Tinder-style swipe workflow), and low-commitment (conversations are seven minutes - when time is up, it ends - no run on convos).
Concretely, the value prop we hope to deliver (which we've so far gotten good feedback on from our first few dozen users) is creating a fun, low-commitment way to have the sorts of social run-ins you might expect to have when walking around your neighborhood, hanging at the park, walking the isles of your local grocery store, which are more limited during COVID quarantine days. It's not about replacing those interactions, just giving people a bit more 1:1 connectedness when they might not necessarily have an agenda or reason to call one another, but would enjoy the run-in nevertheless.
If you do end up trying it out, would love to hear any feedback!
Thanks for the explanation! I think my question was not clear enough.
From the app description, it feels like using this would make my life worse in every way, not better. I can't really imagine a moment in my day when receiving a notification from TinyTalk would be nice to see. The best part about the random friends saying hi is exactly that, they are random and they thought about you, not because an app told them to. I do think this might work with strangers instead (but then it will just be like ChatRoulette).
I wish you luck with your project, but I honestly don't think it can work with the current pitch. I think people want fewer commitments and notifications in their life, not more.
Appreciate the skepticism -- I'd challenge you to try it and let me know, although obviously if the value prop I laid out doesn't resonate, it's probably not worth the effort for you. Will let you know how it shakes out!
Apparently there's a company called Cassidy Labs that's bringing back (and in some cases, improving on) some of the Klutz originals (e.g foxtail, now with an LED so you can play at night). Hope they do well.
So glad to see this. My kids are getting into prime Klutz age now, so it was really depressing to go searching and see that Scholastic has basically killed it off...
