|
There's another part of the trend that is less obvious: the social giants haven't focused on making it easier to hang out with friends IRL. On the surface that statement might seem counterintuitive; after all, if I want to message a friend for lunch, I can just DM them with messenger/imsg/snap/insta. When I want to invite a bunch of friends to my super bowl party, just create a fb event. Simple right? Not quite. There are a million opportunities in between to have genuine, in-person connections with friends that don't necessarily fall into those two categories. Just to prove it, here's a thought exercise. Take your top 5 friends, local people you'd be most inclined to hang with on any given day. Now ask yourself, what are they doing tonight on this random Wednesday? If you had trouble answering this question, you're not alone. We're all so busy nowadays, it's become harder to line up those fleeting moments of availability that we do have. Now think about how many intersecting pockets of free time amongst your friends that were probably missed in the past month. Some of these opportunities could've been a quick cup of coffee together, swinging by to watch Isaiah's debut with the Cavs, or last minute studying for mid terms. Coordination has to become easier, because everything else competing for your free time has become easier. This is one of the primary reasons why I left Yahoo and founded a new startup called Blink. We're creating an app that bridges the gap between your phone and your real life. We are eventually planning to do a "Show HN" to give folks a preview of what we're building, but I couldn't help but notice quite a few here (westmeal, ktta, joaomacp, julianh95 and others) who are both young in age and have quite a sophisticated understanding of how our social trends are evolving. If you're under 25, we'd really love to get your feedback on where we are going with Blink! You can check it out here (iOS only): https://blinkwith.me/hn-teens-dont-party We're also looking for a junior iOS engineer who's as passionate about this stuff as we are, but that's also an entirely different HN post altogether! |