I think it's important to point out this is foremost a decision-making app, not simply one to gather and offer opinion (hence our tagline, Everyday Decisions, Made Better).
We all have moments when we want to seek advice, second opinion, guidance, support in making a decision, from the frivolous to the serious, but we don't want to ask people we know given sensitivity and/or privacy, so Flotsm allows us to ask the web what it thinks.
Results from responders are not just popularity based, they're able to be filtered to consider the influence of age, gender and proximity - these can be toggled to reveal fun and informative insights, e.g. the opinion of local younger females could be the opposite of local older females.
There are lots of decision-making apps, opinion apps, but Flotsm has distinctive egalitarian ambitions to gather collective wisdom without the negative and disruptive influence of peer/celebrity/wealth, hence an incredibly powerful tool for making and assisting everyday decisions.
I started playing with Flotsm when it was in beta. What I've enjoyed most is applying the filters to different questions. Its both powerful and interesting to be able to look at anonymous answers to questions based on different characteristics of the people answering the questions (gender, age, proximity, etc).
I must admit, I have not been able to put the proximity filter to the test; because today is the first day the app is available in the US. That being said, I already started asking questions to get things started. 😺
Thank you Corley! By way of background, here's a previous post on Medium that explains my thinking behind Flotsm: https://medium.com/@sgodfroy/flo...
I'm happy to answer any questions anyone has!
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Neato, kind of like a lighter weight Quora or ask.metafilter?
@303 The Next Web have just likened it, in some ways, to Biz Stone's Jelly:
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/...
The big, deliberate advantage Flotsm has over the likes of Jelly, is that it harnesses the unique attributes of anonymity to create conditions required for harnessing collective intelligence. James Surowiecki's wonderful book, Wisdom of Crowds, talks a lot about the importance of independence voices, e.g. "the smartest groups are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other". In the context of social media, this translates to anonymity, ensuring voices are free from the influence of peers and status hierarchies. Flotsm removes identity and ego to promote a sharing of wisdom - it's not a platform to impress others or posture a public persona. The result is a fearless freedom to share the truth, to ask and receive hundreds of replies to something that you'd previously only asked yourself.
As we all know, anonymity has not had the warmest of receptions in the world of social media, given some of the 'wild west' environments that introduced the concept. However, Flotsm seeks only to utilise the positivity of anonymity. It does this by protecting the positivity from abuse by placing the authority, not with the question respondents, but with the question authors.
By allowing question authors to set the answer options, we're reflecting the everyday necessity of choosing between known options, rather than seeking unknown answers. The latter is something you Google. The former is something you Flotsm. The likes of Jelly does neither the best, hence 'falls between these two stools'.
Suffice to say, Flotsm is unique and not comparable, like for like, with anything preexisting. It defines a new and exciting opportunity for mobile social media to truly unlock the power of collective intelligence.
At this point, I should say the current version of Flotsm is pretty primitive - like many v1's, a 'proof of concept' more than anything else. Our plans for the next version take the concept forward considerably, creating a tool that promises to revolutionise the way we harness our mobile connectivity, e.g. removing the necessity to know the people you're travelling with in order to safely and rewardingly engage with them. But first things first. Having just launched, our immediate priority is ensuring the current app experience is enjoyable. Once that's under manners, we'll then look to bring onboard our first investor/s to make the next version of Flotsm a reality (Flotsm has so far been created with zero-funding). Exciting times. This is just the start.
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