What is Society-Friendly Software?
Society-Friendly Software by TBA!™
In 2017 we won a $50,000 grant to build a safety feature in one of our apps. The city of Newark, NJ (the political birthplace of Cory Booker) were looking for tech solutions to help protect women and teens from domestic abuse and street attacks. My company The Blast App Inc pitched an idea to add a safety button in our social chat app. You can check our winning pitch video here.
When we were interviewed by NJ.com, the one question they asked was “What separated us from other tech companies that makes software?” The first thing I told them was that we are more grounded than most software companies. Meaning, we live amongst members of our society. Having spent most of our time in New York City, we were able to make relationships and hear stories from many people with different backgrounds and experiences. This helped us develop an approach to product making that is deeply rooted in maximizing empathy and understanding.
I went on to say “We make society-friendly software!” They then asked what society-friendly software was and I had no definitive answer because it was the first I had ever said those words together, society, friendly and software. Off the top of my head I had told them it meant software that makes our world a better place. In theory, I guess it was a solid answer but after spending the last three years developing my company and the SFS concept, I finally am able to provide a more durable definition of SFS.
Society-Friendly Software or SFS is computer software that is designed to make our society operate more effectively, more efficiently, or more authentically. It is “friendly”, meaning the software does not cause harm to our society and it is designed to encourage users/other software designers to try to make our world a more comfortable place for us all.
Efficient: Time is the most valuable thing that we all have and building software that makes peoples lives more efficient may be beneficial to our society. Many software products today are designed to keep you hooked and addicted. But society-friendly software is designed to save you time that can be used on more important things like family, hobbies, or personal wellness.
Effective: Many of the software products that we use today are creating more problems than it solves. In fact, most of the most popular software was designed to exploit a human weakness. Everything in our society is going or has already gone digital and there are many problems in our society that software can help solve. So society-friendly software is software that is designed to solve a real problem and not create new ones.
Authentic: As each year passes the line between the real world and the virtual word gets blurrier and the days of creating virtual personas that are different than your real life personas are dwindling. As a society we are starting to gravitate towards individualism over group think but most software today is designed to encourage group think. So society-friendly software is designed for all users of that software to be their true authentic selves.
I guess this makes The Blast App Inc the first SFS company. We hope to see many more SFS companies in the future!
Keep the vibrations high people,
Jhamar Youngblood (Thinker, Founder, and CEO of The Blast App Inc)
