People love being able to quickly look up and have a single source to see what’s happening around them.
Social media is built upon the past. What’s the perfect place to post about all the incredibly boring things you’ve done in March? Facebook. What’s the perfect place to post all your unwanted opinions on how cool superhero movies are? Twitter. What’s the perfect place to piece together a slideshow of all the seductive, unsavory photos you snapped last week? Snapchat.
Here’s some great unsolicited advice, which doubles as my area of expertise: leave the past behind and move towards the future. That’s the driving force behind Suggest It, a brand new app from co-founders Tom Klein and Andre Refay that focuses users on what’s ahead, rather than behind.
“Social media is very much past-oriented, Instagram and Facebook are posting photos of what we did,” said Klein. “There’s very little future orientations about social media. So we went on this journey to create Suggest It and make it entirely based on future actions, what people or businesses are recommending to do in the future and make it local.”
Suggest It arose based on a series of questions from Refay’s father regarding social media: Why is it so concentrated on the past? Why does everybody post things they’ve already done? Why can’t social media concentrate on what people will be doing?
Klein and Refay have spent the last 14 months building a social media app that does indeed concentrate on the future, specifically built for the localized market of Park City and providing a place for users to stay up-to-date on everything happening in the area.
“We’ve gone about designing an entire experience around local suggestions,” said Klein. “Essentially, you choose what you want to see. Your feed is a very Facebook- or Twitter-like experience and your feed fills up with suggestions based on those topics you are interested in. It’s a very clean, elegant way of looking at things.”
Suggest It concentrates on 12 areas of interest in Park City: education, entertainment, family, food, get involved, health/fitness, networking, open houses, pets, retail deals, sports/recreation, and yard sales. You select the areas that interest you, all information is crowdsourced by the community, and the next thing you know, your Suggest It feed is providing you with a bevy of information on what to do in Park City.
“People love being able to quickly look up and have a single source to see what’s happening around them,” said Klein.
So what’s the vision for Suggest It? After fortifying the community in Park City, the hope is to build a Suggest It app for a nearby university in the coming months. After that, expansion to other cities begins in earnest.
“We don’t like to use the term events because we’re not about events,” said Klein. “We’re about activities, deals, offers, random things to do. It can be very granular in nature, it could be a family going sledding down a certain hill and they want to post that publicly or privately.”
Published 3/23/2016
