Echo — an idea
a new kind of communication app
What: A communication app to reach anyone who’s been where you recently were or currently are over a span of a few hours.
Why: Make a connection, solve a problem, navigate or enhance experiences in new places with the help of the people around you.
Have you ever found yourself wanting to talk to someone with whom you’ve recently crossed paths or that might know more about the place you’re currently visiting? What if there were an app where you could basically reach back in time to everyone that was in your vicinity a defined number of hours in the past? What if you could also reach out to people that recently were where you are now? This is the general concept behind Echo.
To cram it into some combo-box, it’s like a localized Twitter in the form of ephemeral messaging mixed with Craigslist’s Missed Connections and a little bit of chat roulette but without the nudity.
You could do things like return or retrieve lost belongings, say hi to the intimidatingly attractive individual that was staring at you in the airport, or ask questions about the place you’re currently visiting. You could even make new friends while traveling or out on your own.
Example Interactions:
Echo-er: “Is there a bathroom in this place?”
Other Echo-er: “I was just there! It’s super well hidden. It’s behind the deli way back in the back.”
Echo-er: ”I think someone stole my laptop out of my bag! Does anyone see someone carrying a macbook air with a rainbow dolphin sticker on it?!”
Other Echo-er: “OMG — your laptop is sitting on the table next to me all by itself! We’re at the coffee shop on 5th.”
Echo-er: “…oh maybe I just forgot to put it away. Be there soon!”
Echo-er: “Sooo… an attractive brown haired woman wearing a gray blazer and tan pants made eye contact with me several times at the airport a little bit ago. I didn’t have the courage to say hi at the time. But I’m really regretting the missed opportunity.”
Other Echo-er: “Assuming you’re the man wearing the sleeveless denim jacket with no shirt and jeans, I might be her! But I was staring at you because you have very noticeable deodorant marks on your jacket.”
Echo-er: “Oh… how embarrassing…”
Other Echo-er: “I’m totally into Canadians. Want to meet up for coffee? I have a 3 hour layover.”
Some key features:
• Users can only reach people that are currently or recently nearby. Due to the one-to-many nature, the noise would get overwhelming with a broad time or distance range.
• When posting a new message, the user can see how many people will be reached but not who. To assist adoption, there can be no fear in new users that strangers have too much access to identifiable info.
• Users are semi-anonymous with just first name and profile image pulled from social networks. Complete anonymity would invite abuse. Complete identifiability would violate privacy.
• New messages are visible to all people meeting the time / range criteria until someone responds. When someone responds, the message is removed from all feeds and a 1-to-1 chat is started. This will help avoid promotional messaging, spam, and keep feeds active and concise.
• Users in communication can choose to end the convo at any time. The chat is removed for both users. The original sender is then prompted with the option to re-expose their message to all other potential recipients again. Users will not have to worry about giving a stranger a permanent communication channel when responding to messages.
• Users can reward each other with “thanks” after each convo — the more unique “thanks” you have, the greater your reach in both radius and time. This simultaneously rewards healthy app usage and motivates users to communicate.
• Basic down-voting / abuse reporting taking “thank” volume into account. There will be a strong demand to catch abusive, vulgar, and offensive content quickly. Taking user “thank” volume into account will allow whomever is policing the network to more easily focus on higher risk users.
This write-up is intentionally concise and not intended to be a ‘pitch’ for this concept. If you’d like more info or have questions, drop me an email!
technicallyrobert[at]gmail[.]com
About the author:
Robert is an entrepreneur obsessed with invention, 3D printing, and technology. He has founded and scaled companies in social media, and mobile gaming. He is conversational in several programming languages and loves working with truly talented developers and engineers. Robert now spends the majority of his time tinkering on his own projects that he hopes will eventually change the way we interact with technology.
