Talking to contacts
Imagine you could have a conversation with a natural agent that has deep knowledge about the side projects, hobbies, rare skills, and passions in your extended network.
For example, you realized you want to pick up riding a bike again. You cycled before and know what the difference is between mountain and road bikes, but you would like a conversation with someone who is in the current state of bicycling in Hong Kong and would love advice on what and where to buy, where to ride, and is just eager to chat with somebody about your renewed passion.
With social media, you may publish a shout-out like “Hey, any of my friends into biking?” and with luck, someone will mention someone else who is. It may work, but you may also end up with a few likes and nothing. Because social media today is all about viral content from influencers, it is not about you and your network anymore.
You may vaguely remember somebody mentioning it… but you forgot the name, and search just does not work. You cannot type “bicycling” and get a list of people in your network who are into it. The infrastructure to enable you just is not there.
After years of gathering data about you and selling it to recruiters and business developers, LinkedIn still has no idea who you are.
The situation was a bit better with early Twitter, but still, your interests were harvested and sold to advertisers. No social media has an incentive to empower you to find the right people.
Now, how does it work with People App? It starts with introductions. As part of the onboarding to the app, it asks you to introduce yourself. You may answer a set of questions if it is easier, or just type a short bio and mention what you care about.
We are smart enough to take what you said and put it in a vector database to enable search. Now your interests and needs are part of the trusted network. You actually can be found by people you let into your network.
Even cooler, you can “talk” to your network and discover people you need in a conversation.
Let me show you what I mean with another example. Recently I became curious about bucket list: why it called that. So, naturally, I checked with ChatGPT, it explained me about kicking the bucket, and then suggested to help me make a bucket list.
I was in a mood to experiment and said yes. In a few minutes we had a wholesome conversation about what I really care about (not a list of tourists traps) and the large language model put to memory my preferences and helped me to formulate better. On top of my list is to have good relationship with my growing kids.
Now, take the same conversational capability, but in the context of your network. Planning a wedding?
Ask your network for photographer, venue recommendation, and ideas for how to make the day special. At some point someone in your network mentioned they love calligraphy for wedding invites and shared the contacts of the artist. Maybe you never read that update… you were busy, and honestly who have time to scroll whole day through a feed? But AI now picks it up for you and brings to the forefront. Suddenly you have a connection via you network with recommendation of a person you know trust.
I feel like we loosing this: the trust networks. A lot of our social media consumption became about influencers… well… influencing. Instead of getting genuine advice from people we know we often get bombarded with engaging, but disheartening content.
My goal with People App is to give you trusted network back. Help you to find people you need when you need them. Get more successful and happier. Get empowered with weak ties.
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