Social networks: getting back to basics
On average, we spend 145 minutes per day on social networks (1).
They are time consuming because they are built on very strong narratives: Egotrip, Fomo (fear of missing out) and/or Loneliness.
I’m not going to lie,
The more likes ♥️ I get on my IG pics the more I feel cool,
The more I know what my friends are up to 😜 the more I feel connected,
The more I have friends / followers 😍 the more I feel accepted.
Why?
As human, we are all driven by our ego at some point, we may be too curious (stalkers I see you🕵️♂️) and we all want to be socially accepted.
Social networks are the one place where we try to refill our glass of happiness by satisfying those needs.
But who do we fool?
They manage to satisfy us but in ways that are superficial and short-lived, making us missing a very important point:
⇒ They are humanly meaningless, PERIOD.
Here comes a HUGE opportunity.
Human & happiness
Many researches including a unique and amazing 75 years long study (2), conducted by a Harvard Lab reveal that:
Good relationships keep us happier and healthier
The study shows that social connections are very good for us and loneliness kills.
It turns out people that nurture true bonds with their families, friends, communities are happier, they are physically healthier and live longer than people who interact less than they’d wish to.
And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic. People who are more isolated are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely.
The second big lesson of that study is that it’s not just the number of friends you have, and it’s not whether or not you’re in a committed relationship, but it’s the quality of your close relationships that matter.
The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. And good, close relationships seem to buffer us from some of the slings and arrows of getting old.
Wait what? Having 1K likes on my photos or plenty of flames isn’t going to make me happier?
The answer is obviously no.
So why are we looking for this kind of rewards?
Well, we’re human. What we’d really like is a quick fix, something we can easily get that’ll make our lives good at the moment and keep them that way.
Relationships are messy, they’re complicated. And the hard work of tending to family and friends, is not sexy or glamorous. It’s also lifelong. It never ends.
But over and over, over these 75 years, the study has shown that the people who fared the best were the people who leaned into relationships, with family, with friends, with community.
Think about it for 20 seconds. You’re reading this post on a screen right now, at your office, home, in the subway, on your scooter (careful!)… Do you really take enough time to cherish people that matter to you day after day? When was the last time you called your parents? Played cards with your grandmother? Had drinks with your childhood friends?
In other words, do you really feel close to your friends and family right now? Yes, you are… but do you feel close ENOUGH to them every single day?
Where our mission begins
Strong relationships that matter are the ones that make us happy.
I could not agree more with this study’s statement.
Every year after Christmas holidays, I go back to work happier than never, boosted thanks to all the awesome moments I spent with my family and friends.
These moments are gold, and all these people are the ones making my life so amazing.
But the thing is, some of my cousins live in others countries, my sister’s just moved 800km away, my brother works 100 hours a week, some of my friends are very busy with their 2 or 3 kids, some live around the corner but are very busy,…and so I surrendered, and fatally know I will get few news from everybody over the next months.
It makes me sad.
Maintaining strong relationship is hard, very hard!
For the last 3 years, we have been working in the mobile app consumer space on 3 different versions of our photo app.
We have conducted several ethnographical studies interviewing hundreds of people in order to understand how photos played a big part in human relationships.
And after 3 years, we got incredible insights.
It turns out the people we interviewed told us the same things as the 75 years long study, but in a different way
- Reminiscing happy / funny / emotional memories together makes us feel stronger and belonging to a community
- What makes us deeply connected and reconnects us over and over with our friends and family are the memories we share together
- We believe capturing happy shared moments with thousands of photos will help us in the future achieve the two points above… but we do nothing with all the pics in our galleries, and after few days, they just slowly die there
⇒ so here’s our opportunity, using the emotional power of this lost treasure — all our forgotten photo memories — to make us feel connected to the most important people in our life.
The future of social networks
Let’s say it again :
The good life is built with good relationships
— Robert Waldinger
And good relationships live through all the associated memories of our life.
The strong link between memories and relationship is obvious.
At Zyl, we believe using the power of memories in a photo app is a huge opportunity and that bringing back memories between friends could be a great way to maintain strong relationships.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a social network, that wouldn’t be a “clout network”, but a place to celebrate the people that truly matter in your life and personal development?
That’s what we do!
Zyl seeks to bring people closer by reviving happy past memories.
Everyday, our AI pops in on your phone and shows you a funny, happy or hilarious memory
Everyday, you share it with your family and friends to keep in touch and make them smile
Everyday, you feel valued by the ones that you love
And it works!
We have just rebooted Zyl and launched a brand new version of the app on September 25th, 2018
After 3 months, we have a tremendous engagement and it’s just getting started.
So yes, it seems that giving people a way to reconnect to each other using their own memories is more than just a huge opportunity, it’s a painkiller.
Many people ask us how do we manage to find the good memories of our users. Soon, our CTO Aurélien is going to give more information about our patent-pending technology that is the only one in the world scoring the emotional aspect of photos instead of their aesthetic.
We are still at day 1 for Zyl so stay tuned for more information about the next steps.
♥️ Thank you so much to our community of 200 beta testers helping us to improve the product everyday and to our thousands of users using the app to spread love around them ♥️
If you want to give Zyl a try ⇒ https://zyl.app/download
