Innovative design—Describe your new design, app, service, product, etc.

My idea for a new piece of technology is a new type of social media that focuses on being connected with your closest friends and family without any of the filler that other social media sites have. The name I chose for my new social media platform is: Connect to really emphasize that this site is used to connect friends and family members that you don’t see often. How this new platform differs from other existing social media is that instead of AI predicting what you want to see next, when you first download the app you can check off things you are interested in and it will base  what you see off of those things. So instead of feeling like you’re being spied on, everything you see is based on things you chose. The next difference is having a follower limit of 200 people, because realistically nobody has nearly that many close friends or family. This prevents people from getting an inflated ego by having a ton of followers when in reality they don’t know the majority of their followers very well. Also this platform doesn’t allow you to see how many followers somebody else has. This will prevent the constant comparison of follower count between two people. The last difference is the removal of the like button, because the whole point of this site is to be connected to people you’re close to, so I assume if you post something that everyone that sees it is interested in what you’re up to. Removing the like button prevents the anxiety people experience when posting something new. Now you don’t have to worry if what you post will get a lot of likes or if it will get more likes than somebody else’s post.  

Upgraded criteria—state your criteria and why you picked it. Why is it important to you & your community?

I think I covered multiple criteria but the one I wanted to focus on was Social Reasoning, because that one describes connecting safely and authentically. The whole point of my creation is to connect with those that you are close with, so that is the connecting authentically portion. I believe my creation also connects people safely, it limits anxiety and depression caused by people comparing themselves to others and by having what they see not based on a prediction but on what they chose to see. What inspired me to create this was seeing just other regular college students like myself with over 1000 followers and knowing that they can’t have that many friends, certainly not friends that they would consider close. 

Supportive context—describe context or world/community that will support this

Dropping this new social media into the modern day tech landscape wouldn’t work. There’s far too many other platforms that offer more addictive content. So I’m picturing this being implemented before Facebook is released. I think this would work because it’s similar to the original goals of Facebook, to create a platform that makes it easier to interact with friends and family that you might not see in person too much and to tell them what’s going on in your life. 

Weigh Costs—Evaluate expected costs—materials. labor, etc–this is not a number or monetary figure, but rather a description of the expected costs to the environment, people etc.

Just like every other social media app nowadays this one will also be free to purchase, but obviously there needs to be some way to bring in money. I think the best way to solve this problem is through personally chosen advertisements. Basing the advertisements you see on the interests you check off when first downloading the app. So instead of getting a bunch of ads that you have no interest in it will show you advertisements that actually have a chance of working on the user.