A new app dropped a couple weeks ago, called HalloApp, which appears to be an attempt at a do-over by some of the WhatsApp founders and big wheels. It seems as if someone took WhatsApp and tried to engineer it closer to a social media tool than a messaging app – you can still do individual messaging, but the focus largely appears to be on group chats with the added ability to post “publicly” to everyone on your contact list or a fixed subset of same.
This is intriguing. Sure, it’s relying on your contacts, but at the same time, the world is only as big as your contact list. If you immediately go in and set it for “only these people”, you’ve essentially created an allow list that you can then expand. Anyone who wants to follow you needs to be in your phone book. This is not unlike what WhatsApp did with its “status” feature – you know, when Facebook decided that everything they do has to rip off Snapchat – but this time it’s built in from the start and those “public” messages are no different in content from the group texts.
Couple of thoughts here.
1) It would be the easiest damn thing in the world for Apple to slap this over top of Messages, or Signal to do the same, but it’s difficult to square “truly secure messaging client” with “public social media app”. Especially since…
2) This requires you to have each other’s phone number. One prospective user of this app was wary of this, since anyone she’d ever given her number to would be able to see her on the app (and thus would require the allow-list focus above). And I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to upload their contacts to match against everyone else’s in some as-yet-unknown application, but then, I’m not sure how else to make this work. Which means…
3) …that this app is not for parasocial relationships, where you’re following The Rock, or Rebecca Lowe, or the local pizza and beer joint – this is for people you actually know. Which is fine, kinda sorta, but it also makes it difficult to make those casual acquaintances or friends of friends. I don’t know how you’re meant to allow for the serendipity of meeting people without opening the floodgates for abuse and toxicity.
Which brings me back to…Twitter. Because without really meaning to, Twitter has made it possible to do this, kind of sort of, as long as you’re willing to lock your account and be judicious about who you allow to retweet into your timeline (so you don’t get overloaded with a ton of political stuff that you totally agree with but which is wearying to digest daily)…and as long as you use Tweetbot, which means you don’t get the worst of Twitter. You know: ads, promoted tweets, a non-linear algorithmic timeline and the constant intrusion of what your friends liked or followed even without retweeting. At the end of the day, as much as I moan that I can’t quit Twitter, I don’t yet need to, because these specific tools make it feasible.
The other thing is…I’ve been on Twitter in some form since 2007. Their shitbaggery has forced me to jump through some hoops from time to time, but the practical upshot is that most everyone I would need to see my updates can – only a handful of people from my high school or from DC are not there. And the other problem is that you’re never going to get people to move to a new app, not now. Unless we put a torpedo at the waterline of Facebook, because let’s be honest, what was the last thing everybody ran out and signed up for? Instagram. And that was a decade ago. It’s singular that the only two things that have cracked the shell since then are Snapchat and TikTok, both of which are explicitly targeting a far younger generation than mine; the people who I want to stay close to are never going to be on what is essentially an even more do-it-yourself YouTube. And that’s not how we do things. Text, still pictures, occasional rare video.
I was told previous that at my age, the easiest way to make new friends is to connect with your old ones. Similarly, the only way to get the new social media app you want is to engineer an old one into working for you. And to be honest, that Twitter account and one Signal group chat can just about cover everything, if I’m being honest with myself.
Now if only those sons of bitches would give me my original four-character name back.