A NEW SOCIAL NETWORK THAT’S JUST FOR COUPLES SOUNDS LIKE AN OXYMORON. IT’S NOT.
Any established couple has their own language. It’s built upon countless hours of shared experience--meals, parties, and encounters with strange people--and ultimately becomes a vast network of allusions that only one other person in existence can grasp.
You can’t speak in that language with anyone else. Relationship memes don’t make it outside a sphere of two. And so, you can’t talk to your spouse with most modern social tools--like Facebook--because even if you were willing to be open in front of onlookers, they’d never understand what you were really saying.
Pair iPhone app for couples screenshots (Click Image To Enlarge)
Pair is an iOS-based social network for just two people. Yes, that’s a bit of an oxymoron. Yes, it could be developed into an SNL sketch (though maybe a social network for one person would work better). The best way to describe the app is like Path, but only for two people, or maybe SMS with a lot more media involved.
PAIR development team, from left-to-right, Jamie Murai, Michael Petrov, Oleg Kostour, Anton Krutiansky, Aswinkumar Rajendiran (Click Image To Enlarge)
Oleg Kostour, one of Pair’s five creators, tells Co.Design.
“When we first moved to Mountain View, we found ourselves very disconnected from our significant others back home. Our girlfriends were in Canada, and we were trying to stay connected with them using Skype, SMS, Facebook, and email. The communication was scattered across many products, and we always felt like there was something missing.”
So Pair consolidates all of these functions, and the app purposely limits their reach. You can share thoughts, photos, video, sketches, and your location in an ongoing timeline, plus you can do a few obnoxious couple-style things like draw together or even *groan* thumbkiss by lining up your fingerprints on each of your screens. When they touch, the phone vibrates.
Pair iPhone app for couples screenshots (Click Image To Enlarge)
But all of this potential cheese is okay, as it’s an app constructed from the ground up specifically to accommodate those sappy, insider-only moments of your relationship. Pair is streamlined to bring out more of those interactions in your relationship, even when you and your better half aren’t together in person.
Kostour writes.
“By having an app only associated with one other person, you no longer have to go through your contact list or multiple apps to share things with the person you speak to most often. Being able to see when your partner is online makes your conversation feel more real time, and it makes it easier to catch each other to Facetime (which you can activate from within Pair).”
Of course, Pair’s design strength may also be its Achilles’ heel. Privacy is the number one concern in social networks today, and Pair is built around the premise of, not just sharing 140-character jokes, but of letting your guard down. Sure, you can only connect to one other person, but what you say and photograph is out there, on the servers for a new company using a model that’s yet to be monetized. And I was never shown a privacy policy when signing up. (I did inquire about their policies but have not yet heard back on that point.)
UPDATE: you can find the privacy policy here. Kostour assures me that "no one can view the accounts and we don’t retain ownership." After studying the privacy policy for myself, I’m not sure this is spelled out as clearly as it could be.
Knowing that Pair is still small actually makes me a lot less likely to use it earnestly. I feel like I’m at a table for two at a quiet cafe--a very quiet cafe. It seems intimate, until I realize that my personal conversation is filling the room as a spectacle to the wait staff.
All of that said, Pair is a well-built piece of software. And its premise is clever. By removing everyone on the globe that technology enables us to talk to, only the most important person in the world is left.
COMMENTARY: PAIR was founded in February by five former classmates from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, the app has become the latest Silicon Valley sensation. After launching it onstage at a startup showcase, the quintet scored strong applause and meetings with venture capitalists. In the first week of April, Pair was close to raising about $1.5 million in a round of funding that would value the two-month-old business at approximately $10 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction who declined to be identified because the terms were private. Judging from the above image, the quintent of young Canadian entrepreneurs are happy campers.
Once two partners download Pair on their iPhones (a version for Android devices is in the works), they can send text messages, photos, and videos to each other without worrying about interlopers viewing their intimate exchanges. Couples can also draw doodles and broadcast their locations to each other. Then there’s that special thumbkiss, ideal for a long-distance good night. Pair co-founder Jamie Murai, 28 says.
"It results in some sort of dopamine release in your brain. You feel connected to the person. It actually makes you feel happy.”
In some ways, Pair is the logical extension of a trend toward privacy in online social networks. Facebook garnered early acclaim because, unlike Myspace, it let users limit their online sharing to a select group, such as other students at the same university. As Facebook grew bigger, many users found themselves with hundreds of connections. Facebook executive Dave Morin quit in 2010 to found Path, a social network that limits users to 150 online friends.
It may be a challenge for the young startup to move past the hype and build a real business. For one thing, Pair is yet another social tool at a time when many people feel their relationships are hypermediated by technology. Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg says.
“There are so many ways to get in touch with one individual and maintain a one-to-one relationship that you have to wonder what kind of void this is filling.”
Since Apple (AAPL)introduced multimedia messaging to its customers last year, two iPhone users already have the ability to send private videos and photos to one another for free, he says. Then there’s the problem of getting the word out: Unlike Facebook and Path, which spread virally, Pair can’t count on fans telling more than one person.
The Pair guys say the app is not another social network. It’s “a different space for you and your partner,” says Oleg Kostour, the 23-year-old chief executive officer. No other app lets couples share to-do lists and a calendar of anniversaries or search through a history of their interactions. Although Pair has no immediate plans for making money, it’s considering selling virtual goods or activities within the app, letting couples collectively tend a digital plant, for instance. Chris Silva, an analyst at Altimeter Group, thinks jewelry brands such as De Beers and Blue Nile (NILE) may want to advertise to Pair’s users. Silva says.
“You could probably time the advertising to the stage of the relationship.”
The app’s emphases on romance and secure sharing make it a perfect way to send, um, titillating messages to your partner, but Murai doesn’t worry about that becoming the norm. He asks.
“Is it more compelling to sext your partner or is it more compelling to feel close emotionally to your partner? We definitely think it’s the latter.”
Still, there’s something vaguely sensual about that thumbkiss. At a coffee shop in Palo Alto, Kostour does a demonstration. He lets a reporter touch his thumb to the phone while his girlfriend in Vancouver, Evelina, creates a kiss on the other end. He takes the phone back. “She just asked me, ‘Is that cheating?’ ”
It's a unique idea, but PATH, another mobile iPhone app social network, tried limiting social networks to a close circle of friends (150), and it did not fair very well. And, as I reported in a blog post dated December 1, 2011, PATH recently reinvented itself into a "smart journal" with the ability to automatically make posts to your news stream.
PAIR adds another social network that users need to keep track of. If you want privacy, my advice is to use your smartphone for exchanging pictures and sending short messages. You can then delete your message stream if you don't want others to know what you said or images you exchanged.
PAIR consolidates Skype, SMS, Facebook, text-messaging, and email if partners are far apart, but couples shouldn't be communicating like this forever. Instead of bring them together it might make them slaves to a smartphone to build a relationship. That's a big negative.
I love the idea of "smooching" the tumbprints, but why not use real lips? Who brings thumbs together? How about butt touching, or xxxxx. forgettaboutit. Sorry I mentioned it.
Face it people, that $10 million valuation is just pie-in-the-sky. This is the sort of thing that can get out-of-control real fast. I bet you that in six months it will be $50 million, and by the end of the year the co-founders will claim PAIR is worth $100 million, and still no sustainable business model or monetization strategy.
I do see the potential of PAIR as an add-on app for an online dating service similar to BADOO which claims to be a social networking dating service.
Although PAIR claims that they provide privacy, what's to prevent a scrupulous and gifted hacker from hacking into PAIR's servers and stealing pictures and finding out what couples are talking about. On December 7, 2011, I reported that someone hacked into Mark Zuckerberg's private Facebook account and stole several pictures, then posted them all over the internet. If it can happen to the "Boy CEO" Zuck, it will happen to PAIR, trust me.
For now, I will give PAIR the benefit of the doubt, but I believe it will join the pile of failed social networks and useless iPhone apps that have been launched.
Courtesy of an article dated April 8, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Design and an article dated April 5, 2012 appearing in Bloomberg BusinessWeek
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