Today’s smartphones offer apps for pretty much anything you’d want, but at their core they remain communication devices. I guess you can call them portable social hubs because they don’t just provide essential functions like calling, texting and email.
You can dating apps like Tinder, chat apps like Whatsapp and Snapchat, the social giants such as Facebook and Twitter and so on. Bottom line – there’s a billion ways you can connect to people using a smartphone.
Google decided to add one more. It’s a new app called ‘Who’s Down’ and its purpose is to let you know which of your friends are available for what activities with no need for exchanging words. You basically have to toggle on a switch to let people know you’re available. Because that’s what being social means right?
Irony aside, we live in a world where everyone is desperately trying to multitask and we’re all failing to a certain degree. So lets see how ‘Who’s down’ can ease things for us when it comes to planning social activities.
As you can see the whole app relies on a toggle you can enable whenever you want to show yourself as available to meet your friends.
Also, you can add what activity you feel like doing and see what other friends are free and the activities they’d be interested in. Of course this can’t work unless you have a bunch of friends that use the app too.
The app also has a built-in chat function because you’re definitely going to need it to get in touch with someone that’s also ‘down’ so to speak.
‘Who’s Down’ is not a bad concept, although it does need to become popular. Otherwise you’d be the sole user of the app and no one (or almost no one) would get to see your current status and actually want to meet up.
If you’d like a more functional app focused on group interaction I definitely recommend you check out Begroupd (iOS only, for now) that was featured in my roundup of unique messaging features. It’s not exactly popular, but it does have a nice set of features for scheduling events and making group decisions.
‘Who’s Down’ is currently invite-only, Google often likes to do this for new, experimental apps. If you’re interested you can head off to the official webpage and request an invite from there. You’ll simply have to fill in the form with your email address and school name and submit the information.
Just keep in mind adding a school is optional – I’ve seen some users complaining about this and they’re right to a certain degree, since it doesn’t seem optional. And once you do get an invite, you can download it from here:
Who’s Down for Android (Google Play)
Who’s Down for iOS (iTunes)
The fact that the app asks for you to enter school information is a clear indicator they’re aiming it towards a younger audience. We didn’t get our hands on an invite yet, but if you do let us know what you think of ‘Who’s Down’ in the comments section below or by sending us a message on Google+, Facebook or Twitter.
