The Free App – Are your Friends Available to Hang Out Right Now?
Are you sick of lonely nights? Now here is an app that will ward off your loneliness. The new Free app tells you which friends are free and can meet you up. Free lets you announce your meeting plans or if you’re flexible with the timings, and you can group chat to call your friends anywhere. Your real-life availability is what is great about this free app!
Free is co-founded by Path’s Danny Trinh, and his idea has raised $1.9 million from top-seed funds to fill the emptiness in many people’s lives. Spending time together in real settings is one big advantage that this free app promotes.
Gathering few pals can turn any time of the day – lunch, weekend, or even late night meets into something memorable. Free nails the nuances that many apps tried but did not succeed.
Reaching out with Free
Most social sites and platforms implemented location identification features but never about what we were doing. A friend checking in at a place is never an invitation for other friends to join them.
Browsing feeds on the web makes many people stuck up with the laptop miserably. The virtual world has made many hide their uncool parts of life to share their coolest moments to garner plenty of likes. Free is devoid of egos and actually strives for a real connection.
The manual, tedious process of finding friends who are available to get them them together is the idea for Free.
One can add some text, location, period, or tag friends and call them on for an event or get-together. This aspect gets into Free’s feed and quickly flicks through to all friends’ plans. You can delete the status at any time if plans change.
Notifying your Availability
One can choose from a status of Going Out or Flexible which would issue push notifications to friends along with phone contacts or Twitter. You can notify subset of your friends as required or even keep your status mute if they are busy.
Keeping status “Flexible” would not mean you’re not doing anything, which would be embarrassing for many. It would mean that they are flexible enough to meet up and keep their time open for their friends.
There are a few pre-populated decline messages which would indicate that you are not likely to join. But they are not offending in any way. Statuses like “Miss you” or “Hang soon!” will indicate that though they are busy right now, they can be invited in the future.
One can drop a location pin, submit a photo with an emoji sticker or even send a video like an auto-looping GIF to indicate what you are doing at the location.
People who do not have a smartphone or the free app, also receive messages. If you send an invite to such a person, they will get text messages with Free status.
Free App In Comparison with Cal-buddy
Cal-Buddy allows users to create and share social calendar with friends and even plan events, outings and the like at a convenient time. This app which came up two years back, is similar to Free app, since it also allows your friends to know what period you are working and you can plan events around your busy schedule.
Even parents are updated on their child’s class schedule and always take up time to meet them in the interim.
Here are some of the features of Cal-buddy that are similar to the new Free App:
- Add friends to let them view and access your calendar schedule
- Choose from 4 pre-defined icons to add to the calendar
- Create/ edit icons with letters and emoticons to portray the nature of your activity
- Invite friends to events that you create
- Create alerts for events for any period
- Mark events as private when busy
Both apps deserve a wide following and sure to create a sensation if marketed effectively. At least these apps get people out of the virtual world to meet their real one!
Dhruvil is a Writer & Marketeer for Nimblechapps, joined in December 2014, based out of Sydney, Australia. He has worked briefly as a Branding and Digital Marketing Manager before moving to Australia. At Nimblechapps, he worked on Social Media Marketing, Branding, Email Marketing and Blogging. Dhruvil studies Business at University of Western Sydney, and also handles Operations for the company in Australia.