IN THE ERA OF THE OVERSHARE, BANG WITH FRIENDS ALLOWS DISCREET CONVERSATION (AND SEX) WITH YOUR ENTIRE SOCIAL NETWORK.
Its three creators are anonymous college students. They claim to have built the app in just two hours. Yet Bang With Friends is the simplest, most disruptive app Facebook has seen in a long time.
The premise is so obvious, you’ll kick yourself for not thinking of it first. You install the app, then the app lists your Facebook friends of the opposite sex. You click if you’d like to “bang” them, and no one ever knows . . . that is, unless one of those friends installed the app and elected to bang you, too. Bang With Friends makes finding a mate as easy as window shopping on Pinterest.
Bang With Friends homepage (Click Image To Enlarge)
One of the creators tells Co.Design.
“We wanted to keep it simple. See your friends, choose your potential bangs, and then get notified privately via email when you have a match. Wham, bam, thank you new friend with benefits!”
With my wife’s permission, I took Bang With Friends for a spin. After installing the app, I was greeted by a Pinterest-y wall of potential hook-ups: An old co-worker. A friend from high school. A cousin. A minor. A dude. My wife. Lots of my friends’ wives. My mother-in-law, but, thank god, at least not my mom (apparently, there’s at least one filter at work here). With the touch of a button, my vote was cast. I opted just for my wife--really! Part of me hopes she accepts. Part of me hopes she never experiences the oddity of seeing her friends and relatives as a list of potential DTFs.
A few smarter filters would no doubt, make the app less inherently awkward (it’s hard to believe that family members should make the list). But then again, filters imply a certain level of judgement. And if Bang With Friends is anything, it’s a nonjudgmental corner of your social, digital life in which you can let your basest impulses run wild. For however frat-boy-centric the app may be marketed, it’s solving one of the biggest problems in social networking: How do you have an intimate conversation in a room full of your relatives? And how do you leverage all this amazing connectivity to take a leap of faith, without leaving a permanent, devastating trail of evidence?
Click Image To Enlarge
Since launching about a week ago, the team claims to have matched 10,000 couples, and due to overwhelming user demand, they’re working on an update that will bring LGBT matching. A mobile app is in the works, too, but they wouldn’t comment as to their current state of funding.
COMMENTARY: Although many people have laughed at Bang With Friends idea and its shameless, frat-boy marketing, its premise of one-button interaction has struck a chord. Since launching a few weeks ago with no marketing budget to speak of, half a million users have clicked their “down to bang” button 9 million times (or about 15 times apiece). The app has facilitated as many as 100,000 hookups.
A developer who goes simply by the name of C told Fast Company Design.
“As much of a joke and an unabashed, risque approach as we’d taken, there’s a larger vision. We really think this is a much more realistic way of how the younger generation is working.”
Even still, in an interview earlier this week, C was quick to point out his platform’s big shortcoming. Once users have created their bang list, most people have no more use for the app. There’s nothing else to do but refresh Gmail for the notification of a match. So the team is rolling out a series of new updates focused on the product’s long tail. And its pièce de résistance is every bit as intriguing as the app’s original premise. C says
“It’s like a Klout score for your weekly sexiness.”
As part of the update, Bang With Friends is adding richer profiles, pulling several images from your Facebook feed. Along with all these clicks comes the opportunity for analytics. While viewing data will remain anonymous, Bang With Friends will be providing a weekly score for each user, generated from the sorts of pageviews they’re drawing. C says.
“If nothing else, it gives you an idea that people were at least curious about you, that they didn’t get over the hump--no pun intended--or that maybe they’re viewing a certain photo of yours more than others.”
Bang With Friends now features a Klout-like bangability score. Colbert and Stewart are apparently the app’s flagship users. (Click Image To Enlarge)
Scores are sharable, but going public with your number is an opt-in scenario. (Or it was supposed to be. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart both have staggeringly large public numbers at the moment that they probably didn’t authorize. Also, see your invite, Jon. Thx.) The idea is to add a feature that you can boast about, but if you strike out, no one is any the wiser. In this regard, your bangability score is actually a lot more humane than Klout. But checking your score is just the hook of a larger vision for the platform, C tells me, that morphs the hook-up service into a more legitimate dating site. C says.
“We see it as being more than Bang With Friends. We want to redefine ‘bang’ so it can be something like, ‘I want to meet up, I’m down to hang rather than just down to bang.’”
So moving forward, the app will actually have a “down to hang” button alongside the “down the bang” button. A skeptic might say that Bang With Friends is selling out before landing their first major investor, trading in their social media key to become another Match.com. But C disagrees.
He maintains.
“We’re not trying to form it into something that’s more socially acceptable, we’re trying to expand the use case. We’re definitely not getting rid of the bang part. We’re not at all ashamed of that.”
The more I consider the potential of Bang With Friends as a quasi-legitimate dating site, the more the idea actually makes a perverse amount of sense. It’s going to attract a certain cohort--just like a ChristianMingle or eHarmony does--and even when that cohort generally wants to hang, you’ll know that they’re like-minded in being open to bang. But whether or not their users will still be so likely to click that “down to bang” option with another, more conservative choice in sight? That’s the question. And if that’s lost, so is the strangely alluring id-scratcher that is Bang With Friends.
Courtesy of an article dated February 4, 2013 appearing in Fast Company Design and an article dated February 15, 2013 appearing in Fast Company Design
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