💪🙂 — Headstrong

tl;dr Headstrong is an app that imports your Twitter data and shows you Snapchat-like emojis next to your followers to visualize your relationships

Edit: The emojis in the title are the strong arm and smiley face for browsers that aren’t rendering correctly

This week — my second and penultimate week of employment at my first job — my coworkers and I were lamenting songs from middle and high school that shouldn’t have ever tortured our ears. Among these songs were Cigaro by System of a Down, and Rockstar by Nickelback.

The winner, by far, was Headstrong by Trapt. In case you forgot the song or are fortunate enough to have never heard it, your luck runs out here.

Being a diabolical group of guys, we began to discuss how we could revive the song. The possibility of creating a viral meme in which we blasted Headstrong in enclosed areas like elevators or linked hands and surrounded innocent bystanders while jumping around and singing headstrong while headbanging crossed our minds.

We even considered rebranding the popular Atlanta genre “Trap Music” with covers in the style of Trapt — Trapt Music.

Ultimately, we decided against each of these ideas and turned to applying for real jobs in the wake of our recent news.

But the question lingered in my mind: What does it mean to be Headstrong?

Isn’t that exactly what I needed, right now, to be headstrong and take on anyone?

I decided I’ll work on a new app idea everyday, leading me to Medium, the original place I went to vent my frustrations. I created the publication App A Day to chronicle the ideas I come up with each day. Some will be fun, trivial concepts that merely explore social applications, but others will be more fleshed out ideas with mockups and research.

I’m not going into this believing any of the ideas will be the next Snapchat or Facebook, but I do need to relieve my anxiety and I’ve always turned to writing, and more recently designing, to put my mind at ease.

So introducing the first post in the App A Day series: 💪🙂 Headstrong.

The little emojis next to my Snapchat contacts are a fun way to visualize my relationships with my contacts. Often, data visualization is only considered as a line graph or some complex, interactive map that communicates or correlates big data.

But visualizing the communication habits between two parties can be an insightful method for understanding the depth of relationship between friends, lovers, or coworkers.

Every 😏 reminds me that I’m not being responsive enough to one of my friends, but it might indicate that I don’t have as a deep relationship with another person as they believe they have with me.

🔥127 remind me who I can turn to during times like this or even who will be most excited to talk with me when I find out about a new promising opportunity!

The biggest shortcoming is that if my Messages app could show 🔥, I’d have a 2 year streak with some friends that I have merely 😏 relationships on Snapchat.

The idea of 💪🙂 is that you’d be able to visualize your relationships as concisely and effectively as with Snapchat agnostic of the ephemeral platform. I’m not exactly sure how the app might work, but I imagine I’d import Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook and analyze the interactions between users and their friends to uncover 💪🙂 insights to help foster deeper relationships or build upon relationships that aren’t quite as robust as they seem.

The interface would simply be a list of imported contacts with appropriate emojis next to each.

There’s my first App A Day post. I think I can develop even more exciting ideas if I just keep posting daily and press myself to think outside the boundaries of a corporate job. This will keep my mind fresh even if I end up desk jockeying doing QA.

I hope you enjoyed the post and there will be many more to come!