Not many people on Peeple
If you haven’t heard of the app Peeple, it announced its intention to launch early this year to much controversy. Basically, it’s a Yelp for people. That’s right. People.
You gives reviews to your friends, your enemies, and people that you know. You can rate them on their personal skills, sense of humor, use as a contact, and for those that are more than friends, their romantic and dating abilities. As you can imagine, this did not go down well at all. In days, the internet was full of posts about how the app would serve only to increase cyber bullying, how people would try to sabotage exes and former colleagues by deliberately giving them bad ‘reviews’, and a whole myriad of other complaints.
Well, it seems to have worked. The people over at Peeple have removed many of the functions that were controversial. Most notably, a user has full control over what ‘reviews’ get published and shown, and which do not. This may have solved the bullying problem, but has really ripped the core out of the app for me. If people have complete control over what others say about them, why would they ever allow bad (but quite possibly true) comments to be published? I can’t imagine anyone on Peeple having less than a 5-star profile. I mean, would you invite people on LinkedIn to write anti-recommendations for you? Almost certainly not.
Lonely, I am so lonely…
Anyway, as an app addict, I gave it a try anyway. The problem: no one else I know is on it yet. I have connected Facebook and my phone contacts, and yet no one pops up as a suggested ‘friend’. This means it’s unusable for me, but adds another angle of worry — what about when one friend finally pops up? Even if the reviews remain anonymous, that friend will probably be like me in having very few people in his/her Peeple friends list. Thus, by simple powers of deduction (or maybe no deduction at all), they will know that it was me that wrote the review!
Since social networks’ biggest advantage comes from the ‘power in numbers’ of large numbers of your contacts being there, their growth depends upon users encouraging non-users to come and connect. But in an environment like Peeple, I struggle to see it happening.
I wish them the best of luck, but there are many folks out there who will be delighted if ‘people power’ wins out over ‘Peeple power’.
This post was imported from my Medium, which I used for blogging between 2015 and 2019.
