Have you ever been stuck in a position where you don’t have plans and you want to hang out with some friends but you’re not sure which friends are available? You can’t just send out invites to your friends anytime you’re free, aside from some of your closer friends, so how do you set things up? That’s where a new app known as Free can be of assistance, as it lets all of your friends know you’re free to hang out.
Danny Trinh calls it the “blinking cursor” problem. It’s Friday night, you don’t have plans, and you’re wondering who to text. There are a handful of close friends you can shamelessly spam, but beyond that, things are more complicated. Should you message that new friend from work, even though they said they were busy the last two times you tried? Is it weird to hit up that one sort-of-friend from college? Some will dismiss these as trivial concerns; others will know exactly what Trinh’s talking about. “At the acquaintance level, it can be really stressful,” Trinh says of making plans. “You’re spending social capital to ask them to hang out.” Free is Trinh’s attempt to solve the blinking-cursor problem. The iPhone app is meant to fill what the designer sees as a small but critical hole in our digitally mediated social lives: the ability to broadcast and communicate around availability. It makes hang-out intentions a little more visible in both directions: You can see if friends (or acquaintances!) are doing something, or looking for something to do, and vice versa. Trinh has another way of explaining it that folks of his generation—millennials—are sure to understand: He wants to build the modern, mobile version of the green dot from AIM.
