Another Social App?
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?
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.
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.