Asocial
IOS Developer, Designer (2017 Social Network Prototype)
In 2016 I started travelling and working as a digital nomad with the Remote Year community. As I was having these new formative experiences I was noticing myself hesitating from posting on Twitter and Facebook - it was as if the Australian guy who grew up in rural South Australia was colliding with this new world-traveller partying in Prague and Berlin. I became interested in the dynamic of social networks and the role of identity within them.
What emerged from this was an experimental social networking app that hinged on the idea of total anonymity. It used Apple iCloud services to post and share text content with no traceable author. With no usernames or avatars conversations and feedback took on a more ethereal quality. The timeline of floating posts were more like reading letters in a bottle.
I imagined the design being like that of a futuristic holo-deck, messages found in a nameless & deep space-time. I gathered a few hundred beta testers and let them run loose in this playground and the results were fascinating. Some people posted jokes, others shared deep secrets, others opined for community. It was a jungle of emotions and feelings that people would share and respond to with great ease.
There was also a notion of adding interests (ie, tags) to posts and others could subscribe to those interests and fill their timeline. This was over-engineered and it would have been better to stay flat, simple, and noisy.
Unfortunately the experiment had was a great problem with retention. It was fun to post and respond to a few bits of content, but there was no hook to keep you coming back. This gave me a valuable insight - identity is a story we are performing for the world. When I post something to Instagram it is a statement of my Selfhood, my role in an unfolding narrative. I am authoring myself. Take away the author, obscure the story, and there is little to tell.
After a few months I shut down the experiment, but what I learnt about social networks, retention, and the human melodrama has served me well.
We are our story.
Software and Tools:
Xcode (Swift 2.0)
Apple Cloudkit Services
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