Learn Where Friends Are By Talking To Them
Twitter's cofounder proposes that we use an app to learn about our friends' plans and whereabouts.
The Teardown
Thursday :: December 19th, 2024 :: Approx. 5 min read
👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how we interact with technology that powers our day-to-day lives.
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Quick note: I wanted to publish twice this week but was wiped off the productivity map with stomach flu on Monday night. I’m behind.
I will try to send another tomorrow and otherwise resume my normal schedule next week.
End Of Year Social Reckoning
The end of the year often places this reminder on a person's radar: it’s time to renew or shed friendships. Who do you care to keep in touch with to support your lofty new year resolutions?
If your life is roughly like mine, you travel elsewhere for the holidays, opening opportunities to strengthen, maintain, or mend relationships with friends in other states.
But how do you know who is where? Do your friends from last year still live in the same place? Will they be in town when you’re in town? What about your yearly [optional: hungover] greasy bagel sandwich tradition?
One simple solution: call people. On the phone!
That solution sounds far too inefficient, doesn’t it. Some friends don’t answer the phone. Some friends don’t check voicemails. Some punt you to text, or email, or something other than ordinary verbal communication.
What if you could, I don’t know, update an app to describe your happenings and whereabouts to your friends?
They would do the same. A simple phone tap would whisk you to a dashboard view of your friend's lives.
A New Digital Status Wallet
Enter Mozi, from Twitter co-founder Ev Williams.
Mozi’s goal is simple: make it easier to organize with close friends. Each friend promotes this goal by adding their plans to Mozi, allowing you to see all those plans in one place and decide when or if to organize something. The New York Times provided some extra detail in a recent profile about Ev Williams and his new app:
It lets people tell their friends about upcoming plans that may overlap. Those who join the app will see a private friend list based on their phone contacts. They get notifications if a contact plans to visit their city or attend the same event. Profiles include user-supplied information like dietary restrictions, relationship status, family members and pet names.
Organizing contacts by location and travel plans may appeal to a certain type of jet-setting tech worker whose friends are spread around the world. Mozi’s founders hope it will be just as useful for people who don’t travel but want to know when their friends are in town. The company also plans to promote itself around events like music festivals and business conferences.
The app is slick. It’s simple. You can't like or salivate over status updates - none exist. And kudos to the team for avoiding all those addictive features on purpose.
But I’m irked by one fundamental question: do we need Mozi to be more on top of our friends and plan things with them?
Mozi feels a bit like a solution in search of a problem. A nice solution, yes, but a solution that doesn’t address a real problem. And maybe it doesn’t need to do that.
Some of the best products (e.g. iPhone) iterated on existing ideas or behavioral processes. The iPhone wasn’t the first cell-phone. Mozi might be a better Contacts app; I’ll be the first to admit that I hate Apple’s existing implementation (iPhone owner here)
The New York Times closed with Ev Williams’ reflecting on his relationships:
Mr. Williams said he decided Mozi was worth building after reflecting on the importance of relationships. Looking back, he said, “everything that had gone really well, even in work, was about relationships, and everything that went poorly was mismanaging relationships.”
He added that he was not raised with good relationship models. “I learned late in life what a healthy relationship and conflict resolution looked like, and that was a cause of a lot of my pain and suffering,” he said.
So, to be a cynic for a moment, the billionaire cofounder of Twitter decided to strengthen relationships and had to build an app to achieve that goal. The article doesn’t state whether he also did more to visit people in person or call them on the phone.
I suspect those tactics would have worked, too.
There’s one other problem here: the cold-start. Mozi works only when you have enough friends on it. You choose that number. But it's more than zero. Likely more than one.
I downloaded the app and synced my contacts to corroborate the point. It’s not surprising that none use the app. To be fair, Mozi is new. A mere infant in the social world.
That confluence means the app will sit unused for quite a while. At least on my phone. I’ll check it.every so often to see what’s changed and if any friends are users.
But I won’t invite them because I can already text or call or email. They all know how to navigate those channels.
What do you do to stay in touch? How do you know what your friends are up to? Spill the beans in the comments.