Friended is a new social network that wants to get real
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
1) where did they get the prices of $4.99 a week? Facebook's average revenue per user per quarter is ~$25. That's approximately $1.50 a week, for their most profitable section. Elsewhere, FB makes $6 ARPU per quarter, or around 37¢ a week. I'd be willing to pay $1 a month for a social network if it manages to get around the network effects etc. but ~$20(!) for something Facebook enables at no monetary cost? Yikes. But, I suppose that may just be the patreon effect.
2. Why is this iOS only? Limited resources excuses can be answered with 'do a mobile web so all mobiles can'. Is it the 'sometimes iPhone users tend to pay more for the same things Android users are too cheap to'?
I know the above can come off as somewhat harsh, but I do really like the business idea overall, I just want to discuss the implementation challenges.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
$35 in US/Canada, $11 in Europe seems like a startling difference! I wonder if advertising and privacy restrictions are the cause, or something else...
These costs are not something that Facebook does not suffer - all these infrastructure, development, maintenance and other expenses exist for every online service.
In case of Facebook, though, these expenses are paid by you being not also the user, but also its main product. And, as much as I would like to think otherwise, Friended - as a VC-backed service - will also go in the same direction once it finishes its "growth" stage and enters the "milking" stage.
There's always a delta of capabilities between HTML5+Javascript mobile web app vs native iOS/Android. (E.g. native app has more API access to device hardware like camera video, GPS, accelerometer, multi-touch pinch zoom, etc.) Even if HTML5+Javascript standards get the new capabilities in 2019's iOS 13 and Android 10, both Apple and Google are still adding new features to the native APIs (iOS 14+, Android 11+) which means that standard web apps will always lag behind in some way.
The question is if that delta of capability between web vs native matters for an app like Friended.
You are not limited to browser technologies. There's React native, Flutter and some other cross platform frameworks. What super new OS level features a social messaging app needs?
Yeah, I don't make many calls, usually I just ring someone that I'm there or schedule a meeting.
That's not what they're selling people. They're selling people a solution to loneliness.
I'll one up you, they are selling hope. Odds are this will be seeded with a bunch of bots, and these lonely people may or maynot get some sense of temporary relief thinking they are interacting privately with someone else, when its really just a bot.
>Today, a new social app is launching. Called Friended...Friended has raised a $500K seed round from investors...
That is what it is all about.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/25/ftc_match_fake_user...
The question I'd really like to find out the answer to is will average net trolls pay real money to troll?
Remember when IG was iOs only ?
Even simpler... Progressive Web Apps will install on both and I believe you can have a PWA in either app store... Code once. Run anywhere...
Reimplementing something of the complexity of Snapchat as a PWA would be impossible: seamless camera usage, real-time AR filters, smooth animations, swipe gestures, usable built-in maps, video without buffering, and it’s fast for their target audience (recent iPhone users).
Check out: https://proxx.app/
That's a broad statement. I find a lot of utility in social networks like FB to keep me in close contact with my family on the other side of the country.
Yes I value the fact that it's free - there's a low barrier for folks in my family to join. There's no way in hell I'm going to convince my grandmother to pay for a social network; she has no interest in yet another subscription that offers no marginal value over the free services like FB or even Twitter.
Well...she _might_ if that was the _only_ way to contact me, but I personally wouldn't put her through the hassle of memorizing yet another account/password login.
Nope, it really can't. It takes a lot of effort, and can be a major pain in the ass, to develop a web app UI to look good and work well on both mobile and desktop. Every single time I do it, I end up regretting it.
The TC article says this is the cost if you want to post a conversation starter more frequently than once every 8 hours, or for other advanced features. That sounds like a power-user feature to me (I post very infrequently on social media).
Generally the answer is that the founders / designers use iPhones, so it's what they prioritize.
My understanding is that people willing to pay for apps use iPhones
Adults need to learn how to handle rejection. It's so essential to learning how to be happy in the real world.
People who are lonely because they fear rejection need to fix the fear of rejection part before they will actually experience a real friendship. Being open with each other is essential to friendship, and being open risks rejection.
Friendship isn't a individualistic pursuit, it involves multiple personalities and is full of risk and rejection. No reward without risk, contrary to what you might be sold on to mask your social anxiety.
There's a difference between someone rejecting you, and a bunch of anon/pseudonymous trolls piling on.
Myself probably included.
You shouldn't have to deal with people being assholes, so when they are you should let yourself get hurt? You shouldn't have to deal with drunk drivers, so you shouldn't wear your seatbelt?
No, but you're suggesting that we should all armor our cars. I'm suggesting that we should work to change the system so that instances drunk driving are dramatically decreased.
Getting to know yourself better, and understanding how bullying is a projection of others, and not related to who you are as a person is immensely practical.
Why should we just accept this as a state of the world?
I don't understand why the founders think "this time will be different". The disconnection of digital communication makes it easier to be abrasive, even if real names are used and the comments are private. We have ample evidence of this from other platforms with direct messaging and identifiable individuals.
The majority of the messages will still be "kill yourself, you [expletive, slur]". The rest will be spam.
If you left for a long time, you'd come back to a friendless universe, sure, but only on the network. I guess that the ultimate goal of a network like this would be to get people off of it, which would be healthy for the individual, and bad for the company.
Oh well, there goes that idea.
> The idea is to give people a chance to share how they really feel in a vulnerable, one-to-one setting. In playing around with the app, I had conversations with people about how to make friends in NYC and why it sometimes feel like others don’t care about us as much as we care about them.
I'm a moderator for a city-specific subreddit, and we get _a lot_ of posts by people bemoaning the lack of personal connections, and seeking _deep friendships_. And I always tell them the same thing: It. Takes. Time.
That's it. There's no shortcut. There is no short conversation you can have that'll turn a stranger into the kind of friend they're seeking. You can pay your five dollars a week to bare your soul to anonymous or pseudonymous users, but you need repeated human contact to form the basis for a friendship.
I'm glad they're trying to solve a real problem, but I don't think that "penpals - but with money" is it.
I'm actually not sure this is true. And I say that because I'm actually not sure this is true:
> It. Takes. Time.
And I say that because of things like [0], which seems to say that connection is more about vulnerability and depth of understanding than anything else, and achieving that depth can be accelerated.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616729723400...
Outside of the lab being vulnerable carries significant risk. For one, you risk being taken advantage of. This happens all the time, people are manipulated for sex, financial gain, and sometimes just for social status gains (clique shunning etc.).
It's pretty common for vulnerable bonding to be misused by one or both parties. This can be in the form of using inside knowledge for blackmail or negative gossip/social shaming of some form.
People can be horrible. Finding good friends takes time because you have to learn to trust each other. Fast friends in my experience do not last.
Some people decide to get married after knowing each other for a few weeks. Some of those marriages even end up healthy and lasting long term. If anything I think it’s maintaining a real relationship that takes time not forming it.
This is a high risk scenario. Being vulnerable early demonstrably can accelerate a relationship, but as I mentioned this is a high risk approach that most people would not recommend as the norm.
The question is: how quickly and how can you tell if a relationship will be lasting?
What are the signs?
What if its just a numbers game? Meet enough people. Some of them will last.
That said I'm "too trusting." I get burned all the time. Taken advantage of. I have a scarcity of natural love in my life and thus an abundance to give. Makes me a target for the narcissists.
Those who do love me think I'm brave for loving so freely -- everyone. Even those who hurt me. They know it's driven by a deeply personal isolation within my soul that waters my eyes in this moment. But they can never empathize and am happy for that.
Survival bias.
Most of those "relationships" don't even get past the first date.
I also don't think it would feel very fun, and is probably not good for you.
Forming relationships is a pain in the ass no matter how you slice it.
I'm sorry if you've had a bad experience, but for the most part, I've enjoyed making friends.
Friend dates. My gf and I have started double dating those we like. You can listen while the other two talk. Being quiet with someone can be very comfortable or unnerving.
So there's clearly multiple paths.
The obvious unsympathetic suggestion "go do some social stuff" ignores that lonely people often experience a non-negligible inertia that keeps them from doing exactly that. Sometimes it's better to say "now what" than "stop doing that".
I don't dismiss the possibility of a technological solution to the problem. Even if you don't get a real friendship out of some platform, maybe you get something that's good for you anyway. I personally like the idea of "cold call" one-on-one talks.
There is - being in deep shit together for a brief time. The deeper the shit the shorter the time needed for a true friendship.
You pay me $1000, and I will put you, alongside two other people, through a miserable grind of an experience. One of you will not survive; the other two will form a long-lasting bond.
(minus the death part)
In a way — strange though it seems — one of the things I miss most about school is just being in a group of people forced to do things that we really don't want to do and that give us no pleasure, because one of the magnificent side effects of this rather masochistic endeavor is that it forms bonds with your peers.
It's actually pretty fast actually. 200 hours is nothing.
What really happens is that grown up don't invest the required hours because their days are already filled to the brink.
200 hours would be 1 hour drink 4 time a week during a whole year. Once you word it that way, for sure, you got a friendship running !
Or as someone said below being in deep shit. First, while in deep shit, you spend many consecutive hours with your partner(s) adding toward the 200 hours theoretical threshold. Second, helping each others is a very fundamental dynamic in friendship, I suspect it's happening at reverse here : rather than becoming friends, thus helping each other, people who starts by helping each other then are friends (monkey brain power).
So maybe you should advice people wanting to make friends to join charities and other helping works : several time a week, selfless environment.
Yeah. There's ways to force or speed up the process. I think a lot of corporate team-building activities are basically this; "let's go do something miserable to simulate closeness."
Usually I take that as "you annoy me" and just refocus on other relationships. Then he comes out of nowhere and invites me to a BBQ six months down the line, or to hang out with him at his place.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think one of the things about modern life, especially urban life, that makes things most complicated is that it is increasingly harder to mix friends so instead of some stable group you hang out with when you're feeling like it, you end up having to juggle multiple individual friendships and your own personal time.
Woah.. That's really expensive...
uploaded a picture.
made a mistake of putting email instead of name.
Tried to change it - can't
contacted support
got a notification: "people think you might be bot"
uninstalled.
Hats off / kudos to anyone that can run something like this successfully at scale, as it is a lot of work and you can't make everyone happy. I hope it turns into something great.
Of course as a community it was much derided - teens and young adults finding their way in the world looked naive and emotionally immature from the outside - but it's interesting seeing someone trying to bring that pre-Facebook sense of sharing with a small and sympathetic group back.
Fundamentally, I believe we _can't_ solve this problem through technology. I think it can be used to initiate the friendship, but never sustain it. I feel the problem is you can't be vulnerable on a screen, it just never replicates the face-to-face interaction with someone else.
I've been there for many years looking for that online substitute, it just doesn't ever fully work. However - I wish you luck on your network.
Of course, the corollary is the suggestion that any social medium starts out good, but inevitably becomes corrupted.
I thought about various mechanism to implements but nothing comes to mind that is good enough.
Example: Force user to maintain happy sharing vs sad sharing to at max 2:1 but now how do you figure out which ones are happy post and sad post.
Did anyone else see this? They can't promise to not hand over info about you to interested 3rd parties if your account validation and login is based in Facebook. Right?
In addition to the inevitable harassment, this could be it's big money maker.
Would probably be better off Re-using Blind’s pitch
slaps face for real?
yes
slaps face again really for real?
yes
Ok then