Since this week Instagram revealed that it’s developing a “Friends Map” feature, it was interesting and timely to come across a startup during Mobile World Congress that plans to take this even further. wobbly is an iPhone app launcher that lets you share not your drift location, but yours next predicted location. This could be either a few hours in the future, or even weeks or months away.
So why would anyone want to do this?
Well, as a founder Daneh Westropp told me, the advantage is that instead of having to “constantly check in with your friends via texts or phone calls, the app lets your followers know where you’ll be Next and lets them know if they can ‘co-locate’ with you.”
You can also post your future location to groups you curate. This could be just one or two members of your family, a specific set of friends, a group of work colleagues, or just the general public in general, or rather, anyone who is also in the app (because Swayy doesn’t have an audience- a web version that can to be accessed by the entire Internet).
Again, I asked, why bother? People coordinate via text messages and shared calendars these days. So what’s the point?
“Swayy allows for more spontaneous outings and random encounters,” claimed Westropp, who previously worked at a dating startup. “You have complete control over who can see your future location.”
“Say I want people to know I’ll be in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. I post it on Swayy, specify which part of town I’ll be mostly in, and then my friends can passively see that I’ll be in town. It is much more fun and exciting to have the possibility of more “lucky coincidences”. It could create more spontaneity in life,” he said. He added that right now the app is about users, before building some sort of business model, such as advertising spaces for meetings.
A surprising post. Image Credits: Mike Butcher
Believe it or not, it’s clear that the app has a chicken-and-egg problem. Without more users it cannot create the spontaneity it promises. I managed to get a few friends on the app to kick the tires on her, but they were all in London, so my attempts to create random encounters in Barcelona were pretty limited.
That said, if I could get more friends into it, and some kind of critical mass, and they did the same, maybe we’d all have more random encounters sharing where we’d be next? The app creates a sort of news feed of where my friends will be in the future, not where they are now, and that’s much more useful if I wanted to retrace their difficult location and grab it “usual-hard -arrange-random-drink.”
In other words, Swayy is an app ideally suited for people in big cities where there is a critical mass of users who wouldn’t mind seeing each other more often, for work or play. As Instagram is sure to learn, knowing where my friends are right now isn’t really that useful. Because wherever they are, they should usually stay put long enough to allow time for me to get to them, or vice versa. And there is no obvious “invitation to join”. In Swayy, you can be clear about whether you want others to co-locate with you or not.
I also liked how the Swayy app allows me to create custom groups. This overcomes the privacy problem. Being able to publish my next location to only, say, one or two users, or maybe five, or maybe 10 (and more), is much better than having it be either super private or super public.
As Westropp pointed out, as a female founder, she knows full well that being able to control exactly who can see her future location is something she built hard into the app.
Additionally, when a user posts a “Sway” others in their network can “join” it (if they can “see” the post) and a group chat can be created for all people who “Swayy” at that location , Westropp explained. A user is also reminded to confirm that they are, in fact, on their way to where they said they would be.
Of course, Swayy is likely to struggle against tech giants that are already playing with location as a feature. As we learned this week, Instagram’s Friends Map would more or less copy a popular feature from Snapchat and the “Find My” feature on Apple devices. It will also be an opportunity for Instagram to reach out to people who were fans of Zenly, a social mapping app that Snap acquired and then shut down in 2022.
However, according to the screenshots released so far, the Instagram Friends Map will only be visible to a “Close Friends” list or to no one. It’s a very blunt on or off switch.
Swayy’s ability to create much more curated lists of users could be its most useful and privacy-preserving feature.
