Is it loud in here, or is it just me? If apps had voices, they’d be shouting. Shouting about location. Shouting about ideas. Shouting about photos. I’m all for rocking out, but maybe we can turn down the volume just a bit?

Don’t get me wrong – I love what’s going on in the mobile app space. Today’s social apps are doing something really fascinating. By allowing people to interact with those around them (even those they don’t know), apps are helping people make the public sphere more personal. Privacy concerns aside, it’s hard to argue with this noble goal.

I would gently suggest, however, that this achievement – making the public space more intimate – can be accomplished with a little less shouting. When we’re talking about building new relationships, shouting is important – if you don’t know who you want to connect with, you have to broadcast to everyone. Hence Color and Yobongo apply the share-first, think-later approach. When we’re talking about maintaining existing relationships, however, a whisper might well suffice.

My point is based on a belief that we all share, in connection with the people close to us, a deeply personal understanding of the physical space around us. The bar you went to on your first date with your fiancée means something to the both of you; and it probably also means something similar, by reference, to your friends (who fondly think of you when they go to that bar). These feelings – call them location-based sentiments – are very powerful and permeate our daily experience of the space around us.

Without a doubt, we can greatly benefit from apps that help us preserve, re-experience, and share these unique location-based sentiments. But we don’t need to shout to do so. In other words, we don’t need to reach out to everyone in the public space to accomplish this preservation. Quite the opposite – we just need to touch those people who share these location-based sentiments with us. That's what Litr is all about - and what I mean by a whisper. Or, if you like it better, “quiet social.” 

This isn’t to say that shouting doesn’t have its place. It definitely does. But we can’t shout all the time. If we focus exclusively on creating new relationships and sentiments, we’ll risk losing the extremely valuable relationships and sentiments we already have.

Let’s give whispering a chance folks.