My good friend and former neighbor Ryan Goldberg did something very cool recently: created an app. We chatted about it several months ago, and the next thing I knew it had taken root. I’ve never known anyone else that has done this, and it’s been fascinating to hear how Ryan, a New Jersey physician by day, came up with the concept and then worked with a developer to feed and water the idea through from creation to launch.
The app is called enroot, and Ryan describes it as a “collective consciousness project.” Here’s more:
enroot encourages a different kind of sharing compared to the traditional self-advertising of social media. Sharing that goes a bit deeper into who we are and what it is like living the human experience; an anonymous anti-social network not looking to make friends, but to share understanding.
Being somewhat social media phobic until I decided to publish a book and had to get comfortable with it, the idea of an anonymous anti-social network was intriguing to me!
Here’s how the app works:
enroot starts with asking users to anonymously sign in. No identifying information is collected. The next step is providing some information about yourself–gender, age range, religious background, political leaning, etc. The app is broken down into three main screens: Listen, Tell, and Watch. The Tell screen is the posting screen. Any sort of post is welcomed. As a user posts their message they are asked to identify an emotional state to go along with the message. This emotion is represented by a color that goes along with the message to the Listen screen, the screen where anonymous messages are read. The emotion color is also dropped as a pin on a map in the Watch screen that is geolocated to the users area. The Watch map was designed to be able to develop an emotion map to get a sense of how an area is feeling. In time, with enough users, the map would become an ever-changing, almost living creation of users contributing to enroot. What is completely unique to enroot is the ability to filter posts by the demographic information entered by the users. Users can filter posts by using one or all of the demographic categories asked at login. Messages can be heard to notify the writer that their sentiment was understood. The Tell screen keeps a diary of Told messages that also keeps track of how many times a message was heard.
I’ve been playing around with enroot, and it’s kind of addictive. One of my favorite aspects is the map Ryan describes that shows the color-coded emotions of people as they post their Tells. As users are added the map could eventually show the collective moods of wide swathes of the world. Imagine how a country might look after their national team won the World Cup, or on a more somber side, after a tragedy. Very cool idea, no?
I asked Ryan to tell me more about how he came up with the concept:
My inspiration for enroot grew out of the hopeful ideal that as individuals we all have the same basic hopes and fears. We all experience the same reality; it is our interpretation of events that shapes it into our own. I wanted to develop a platform that would allow for the anonymous sharing of an individual’s daily reality. How they see the world and interact within it.
Life is made up of large and small moments. There are several outlets available, both in traditional media and mobile social media, that allow us to share these moments. Most of these outlets encourage a self-advertisement type of sharing—pictures of a vacation, job promotions, weekend adventures—which satisfies a lot of our desire to let others into our lives. Would we be willing to share these unplanned, more personal, and intimate times as we experience and feel them? Not all of these times are attractive or self promotional—they are our inner thoughts and dialogue—but they are common experiences which, over time, help define what it is like to live today.
enroot definitely has a psychological underpinning to it that I love. The anonymity of the app seems to allow people to feel free to share the negative emotions that are often carefully edited on platforms like Facebook or Twitter. I’ve been touched by the users I’ve seen on enroot struggling with sadness, loneliness, and disappointment. Of course there are also funny, angry, and mundane posts—they really run the gamut.
New users are needed to help enroot reach its potential! Please give it a try if it sounds like something you’d, er, dig. I’ll meet up with you there . . . anonymously, of course.
**enroot is free in the Apple App Store. It’s compatible with several versions of the iPhone, iPod, and iPad and requires iOS 5.0 or later. Here’s a link to it: http://www.sharesomethingdifferent.com/
I was lucky enough to be invited as an panelist in the author track for this year’s Denver Comic Con over the weekend of June 17-19. I didn’t know what to expect, other than crowds, cosplay, and crazy fandoms. I thought it might be exhausting. Comic Con was all of that, but unexpectedly more, too.
