An App That Wants To Help Friends Catch Up In Person — Not On Facebook
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The inherent flaw in having a name that requires explanation.
Before you name anything, practice saying it out loud, imagine explaining it to your grandma. It's already hard enough to make a service sticky, why add the name as another barrier?
"If you want more control than that, Ketchuppp lets you block certain people who you never want to have spontaneous catch ups with. If that’s the case you should probably just delete them from your phonebook."
So you're saying every random person I have in my phone I should want to randomly hang out with? Absolutely not. There are only a handful of people on my phone I would want to spontaneously hang out with.
The use case where I see this being fun is having 10 or so friends on my "ketchuppp list" and being notified when I'm out drinking and they're nearby.
The thing that none of the ambient-social apps (this, Highlight, etc.) get is that literally no amount of social data is going to make hangouts happen spontaneously.
Once you get the context right (networking events, dating) to motivate people, that's when the location-awareness and social data make a huge difference.
But when I'm at CVS buying toilet paper at 11pm, there's no amount of social data that could make me wanna hang out with a person, no matter how close we are.