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p/kindred-3
Friends for when you travel
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Steven Rueter

Kindred — Friends for when you travel

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Steven Rueter
Maker
This is the new and improved version of Kindred (released 5 Jan 2017), rebuilt from the ground up. After the last iteration, it became very clear that people are just not that open to meeting random people through an app while traveling. It just doesn't feel safe. After a trip to the hometown of a friend from college and meeting his awesome friends, the realization came that the key to building a trustworthy network of travelers and locals was directly through friends and friends of friends. Kindred aims to emulate the experience of an in-person introduction and establish a basis of trust with someone wherever you decide to go next. It's a concise feed of friends and friends of friends traveling or local to a certain city, with personalized recommendations on places to go, things to bring, and the additional option to connect with chat for more advice/to meet up/etc. Traveling is not so much about the journey or destination, but rather about the people you meet throughout. Check it out at 🌎🌍🌏.ws Happy Hunting! UPDATE (9 Feb 2017): You may now opt in to contact and be contacted by the greater Kindred community.
Graham Gnall
@rueter Nice job! Can you tell us a bit about how the friend discovery works? Upload contacts to determine people 1 step away? Do you friend people right away or when you are looking at a particular destination?
Steven Rueter
Maker
@ggnall thanks for your message. It's very simple. You must have at least one other friend on the network to be able to access their friends on the network (not necessarily mutual friends, just friends of one degree of separation). If you have just 10 friends and they each have ten other friends, that's over 100 trustworthy people to potentially connect with when you travel. Once you connect with a friend of a friend, you have the option to contact the direct mutual friend to verify their legitimacy (if you think it's necessary). Essentially, you are in control of your own network's effects, because you decide how large to grow your direct and extended networks by inviting your immediate friends.
Chris Messina
Top Hunter
@rueter I don't trust everyone in my address book. How does that impact your model?
Steven Rueter
Maker
@chrismessina hi Chris, thanks for your comment. Like all things Internet, we try to do our best when it comes to establishing trust. To one extent, it is on the user to decide who their friends are on Facebook (currently the only login method available). To another extent, a user of Kindred has the option to block any user, including direct friends, should there ever be a chat established. It may be necessary down the line, should the issue arise, to create a filterable list of direct friends that you can choose to block preemptively. The initial hunch, though, is that in limiting the network to your friends and friends of friends, we filter out a lot of potential for abuse from the onset.
Dmitry Prokhorov

Simple yet powerful app

Pros:

Very very simple UI :) good experience overall

Cons:

I found a few bugs