Mayday, Mayday!
We live in a world where the big tech companies are fighting for our data and our constant attention. That’s why they have developed sophisticated algorithms to show us the most addictive content based on our profile and records. Algorithms prioritize the most controversial and exciting content because that is what catches our attention the most, thus feeding our minds with toxic and sensationalist content. This can cause an addiction -especially among the most vulnerable population-, misinformation, stress and even psychological problems that lower our quality of life as depicted in the documentary The Social Dilemma.
Part of this quest for your attention is done through notifications. Notifications tell you that you have something yet to solve, that you need to open the app again. The truth is that most of these notifications are not important.
Solution: turn off your notifications
Hold on a second! What about messaging apps?
Messaging apps use notifications as a way to let you know that someone you know wants to tell you something. It is a great tool for asynchronous communication. The problem starts when we start receiving messages that do not require your immediate attention. Most of our notifications are active and we tend to deal with them right away reducing the advantages of asynchronous communication. We spend a great deal of time and energy trying to stay up to date. This constantly breaks up our day, concentration and peace of mind.
Alright, but that’s what calls are for, isn’t it?
Calls are unpredictable and intrusive. Unpredictable because it can be a very important message or something trivial. Intrusive because it makes you stop what you are doing to pick up the phone.
What can we do?
In The Agile Monkeys we have developed Mayday, a free mobile application to send and receive really important or urgent messages. It is not your regular chatting app and its purpose is for you to spend as little time on it as possible, only when there is something really important. It aims to give you peace of mind by sending and receiving maydays in an agile, private and safe way.
Mayday is different
As an app focused on productivity and matters of urgency, Mayday has a series of characteristics that set it apart from other messaging apps.
- Each mayday allows only one message (sender) and its reply (recipient)
- You can continue the conversation on a different app if necessary.
- If your mayday has not been read after a reasonable period of time, we will notify the recipient again in case they missed the first notification.
- You can mute users who will know you will not receive any notification. You will still be able to read their messages in the app.
- Once the mayday has been dealt with, it will be deleted automatically on both chats after 24 hours.
- Mayday respects your privacy. Maydays are encrypted, we don’t do data mining and we never store your contact list on our servers.
- You can send a mayday via SMS or iMessage or invite your contacts who are still not using Mayday.
We are working on new features that make Mayday more efficient and stand out.
In order for this protocol to work properly and receive quality notifications, we strongly recommend to turn off the notifications of the rest of your messaging apps and introduce Mayday to your family, friends and coworkers. Maybe let people know you are using Mayday on the status of your other apps.
If you don’t know how to turn off the notifications for other apps:
Keep calm, and Mayday!
Mayday is and always will be free. There are no ads and we don’t sell your data. You may ask yourself, “then, what’s the business model of this app?” We developed Mayday following the life and work philosophy at The Agile Monkeys. It is simply a contribution that we want to make to the rest of society. We are currently financing this with other company projects and we may offer paid features that will help its development and maintenance while the essential features will remain for free.
For more information: https://www.maydaymessaging.com
