HeyThere!
Facebook has made it somewhat easier to be in contact with friends and relatives. If not directly talking or sending messages, than at least seeing what your friends have been up to lately has turned out to be quite an important way to stay in touch for many people. The profile itself tells people a lot about their friends – maybe even more than they have ever known. The profile eases the “getting to know” –phase also when the user meets new people. This, leads to another point of view, which happens to be important for the idea of mine: would it be possible to get to know people before actually meeting them at all?
I think this would be fascinating to see in action: for instance, when travelling in a plane one could use a smart phone to use “HeyThere” and seeing who else in the plane has a profile. The profile would include personal information, and the amount of info would largely depend on the user. Since the profile would act as a sort of a “shop window” for other users, and also as an extension of one’s personality.
Furthermore, it would partly be compared to internet dating sites. One major problem with those sites is that people may not feel they can truly rely on other persons saying who they are, since they cannot be directly seen. In HeyThere people could check that the people really are who they claim to be with their own eyes. This would encourage them to possibly send a message or go talk to the person. For most people asking a strange person out just doesn’t work, this would lower the threshold of approaching that person.
One feature would encourage people to find friends from the application: As well as viewing unknown persons’ profiles nearby, the user could also check if there are friends nearby (in a metro, in a night club, abroad).
Many questions still exist: what is the revenue model? Should it have ads or something else? The application surely needs to get a lot of users before it would turn out to be interesting. It could be assumed that the application with most people in it would be a killer. How can we achieve that? What can we offer for people to get interested in it in the first place? It would have to be free of charge to sign in, to begin with. Using it would also be mostly free. Like in LinkedIn, you would be able to pay for an improved version of a profile. In this app it would make sense, for instance, to set a price to see who has viewed your profile. In the free version you would only see how many times during the last week your profile has been viewed.
Moreover, should it include some games, or would that make the app too vast and out of focus? Lastly, are there other similar services available / under development and for what reasons people would choose this service instead of them (business model)? All these questions need to be answered, which means: time to get to work.
