Making “Social” Social Again
One of the things I have tried to do over the last several years, is reach out to people when I am traveling somewhere. It’s awesome to meet up with friends when I travel, but difficult when I have so many people I need to reach out to.
Recently, I was in the same city as someone while I was traveling, and we didn’t know, so we couldn’t connect while we were there.
I am sure that most of the good things in my life — whether I appreciated it at the time or not — would not have come to be had I not happened to meet certain people and develop chance connections into relationships. Friends, collaborators, connectors.
(I also know that most of the stress and anxiety I’ve experienced has come from poorly managing relationships or associating with people I shouldn’t have.)
via Ev Williams
To solve this problem, Ev created a new social app called Mozi, with the promise of actually connecting people.
They say they will keep your information private, and people can only see what you’re up to if you both have each other as contacts in your phones.
This sounds like a great idea.
But here are my concerns.
- How are they going to make money to support this? First, they could charge events to be listed on Mozi, but I imagine the events would want contact information of those who attend, and that would violate their privacy-first approach. Sure, I give my email, but that doesn’t mean I want the vendors to all have my phone number!
Sure, Ev Williams created Twitter and Medium, so he personally doesn’t need the money, but the company has to be run, servers, developers, etc., so there has to be some way to make money.
And the reason social media companies became social media and not just social networking is because they needed money!
- Do I want someone else to have all my contacts’ contact information? Sometimes, yes, I don’t want to have to manage that! I love the feature on iPhones that someone can update their contact info and have it update their info on your phone! I don’t ever want to have to manage contacts. it’s so tedious and annoying.
That being said, that doesn’t mean I want to outsource that to some other company mining for data and connections!
- What is the half-life on a tool being useful and then becoming unusable? I don’t know the answer to this, but I’ve seen lots of companies come and go promising something amazing that turns out to be not profitable, so it gets canned. Or, it starts with a reasonable fee, but then balloons into something that is just not worth it. (See also people ruin the internet.)
These days, I’m much more hesitant to jump on a tool than I have been in the past. That being said, this app scratches an itch that I have had for a long time.
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