This App Tells You Who is “Free” to Hang Out

on June 16, 2015 at 1:44 pm

As the world digitizes, it get’s so much easier to contact people, but surprisingly, it also gets extremely easy to completely ignore them. There are nights when I, like many, have nothing to do and waste endless hours online or on Netflix and begin to feel alone because of it. Where are my friends? Do I have any that aren’t just “Facebook” friends?

Free is the first social networking app I’ve seen in a long time that I feel really is beneficial and progressive. We are becoming very much used to simply updating a status, or sending a snapchat to fill in the need to socialize, but we are straying from actually, physically socializing, which is important. Most of the time when I spend time with friends I often feel so much happier. I feel connected and not the artificial connection we get through the web, but an organic one that tells me I am not alone in the human experience of life.

The way Free works is it allows you to establish a status. You can announce your current availability such as; I am busy, or flexible to hang out in the downtown area, So that your friends can see whether you’re available to hang out or not. Or you can send a mass message to your friends to see which want to hang out. The people who join your offer to grab a bite, or catch a movie automatically get attached to a group message that allows you to send small gifs or stickers or the location you’d like to meet.

The goal of the app is to create a more physically social experience. It has become so easy to contact people that attempting that first step of initiating a hang out is often awkward. The most difficult part is arranging a schedule and the fear of being rejected. Sometimes I get so busy that rejecting friends offers to hang out scares me that they’ll stop asking me to. With Free, I’ll always know if and when they’d want to hang out and conveniently, who wants to hang out with me, completely simplifying the unbearably human thought, Are they really busy or do they just not want to hang out? Should I try to hang out again?

The app is currently only available on iOS, but we’re hoping for an android release soon. Would you use it?

Source | TechCrunch

Writer | Angel Damion Robles

Author

Angel Damion Robles

Angel started writing at a young age keeping a journal since he was 12 years old. By the time he was 15 he had a binder overflowing with ideas. His senior year of high school he received a scholarship for his writing in English and an award for writing and directing a full length movie for his film club. At 19 he went to film school in LA with a focus on screenwriting where he wrote a series of shorts. He is a futurist and keeps up to date about current tech, especially automation. He is currently studying Computer Science in Berkeley and interested in writing code and working with hardware. Some interesting facts: He knows too much about Google, loves cats, and has one white cat named Nasa.