Private network to share your day with up to 12 best friends and family – Ourglass | Hacker News Reader

Private network to share your day with up to 12 best friends and family – Ourglass

2 pointsscarymonstergt4 comments

Co-founder @ Ourglass here.

Curious to hear what people think: [app] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ourglass-12-best-friends/id1020881577?mt=8 & [web] http://app.ourglass.co

The app lets people share their daily lives’ events with loved ones in private network.

It avoids the anxieties of trying to accumulate more friends, followers, and likes. This is just for your inner circle; there’s no like-counter, no pressure to get more followers. Subsequently people can feel comfortable frequently and authentically sharing their daily lives - not just the spectacular highlight once a month that thousands of 'friends' can see.

This is not meant to discredit other social networks - they are great for discovering all kinds of stuff on a global level. The thing is just that, when you open instagram, twitter, or Facebook, you get no real updates from the people you really care about.

I've started using a private slack team for sharing with my partner and it's been brilliant. I'm not sure I really want a service where the communication channel is any less about integrating other services and rapid communication.

I'm curious, how is this different from Path's original concept, or Life360, or eFamily, or Close etc? What's different about Ourglass?

Good question. Pardon the long response :)

Path never had a friend limit consistent with a personal social network. As far as I know, Robin Dunbar's research suggests a person's inner circle is up to 15 people. Path's goal for a user's friend number of 50 - this put it in a murky spot that's not quite intimate and not quite open.

There a lot of UI nuances (such as not showing the number of likes or views, and not having a feed as the main screen) between the apps. These make big differences in how people use products. (Consider that you can basically post the exact same stuff on Facebook, twitter, and instagram, yet they are used in very different ways.) We really tried to create an experience that is as low pressure as possible, so people can feel comfortable sharing even seemingly mundane moments with loved ones. The goal is to make people feel closer to their loved ones. I feel that's a more important venture than letting people share funny videos or keep up with the Kardashians, which is seemingly what every social network with a broad social graph (d)evolves into.

Considering external factors as well, the way in which people use prominent social networks has changed a lot from 4 years ago. No one shares live status-style posts of what they're doing anymore.

Much of our underlying philosophy is shared with the original Path concept. I think their founding theory is super cool. The personal social network is a great goal, but it's a really tough nut to crack. I don't know if we cracked it either. We'll see!

Life360 and eFamily are more heavy duty family management or VPN-style tools. Ourglass is a very quick and simple experience in comparison.

Nothing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com