How to Turn Your Apartment Building Into a Tight-Knit Community
As people spend more of their time working on relationships through screens, real-world communities are suffering -- but a new social media app aims to turn that around.
According to a 75-year study recently completed by Harvard researchers, it is relationships, not possessions, that are the key to a happy life, according to the Washington Post. In a world increasingly governed by technology, however, forming meaningful connections is not as easy as it might seem.
Although friending someone on Facebook is as easy as pressing a button, it has very little to do with truly becoming friends. Likewise, while a right-swipe on Tinder might provide a much-needed confidence boost, it does nothing to guarantee in-person chemistry. That being said, there’s no doubt that social media is here to stay -- while the user bases of particular platforms might fluctuate, their collective cultural influence is undeniable.
A Personalized Social Media Experience
With the profound influence of social media, but the lack of any one platform that wholly addresses users’ needs, now is the time for up-and-coming apps to break new ground -- and Netaround is doing just that, bringing social media back to its roots. Millennials are rebelling against the all-consuming, insular world that social media has created, and instead are looking for a platform that will facilitate the creation of relationships and experiences in the real world.
This is where Netaround comes in, giving users what they really want from social media: the capacity to design their own social network, highly adaptable to their needs and the needs of their communities.
Netaround Fosters Communities
Take, for example, the incredible number of millennials who are moving to large urban areas, according to Gizmodo. Moving into large apartment complexes, these transplants are often unsure of how to meet their neighbors, feeling totally alone despite being surrounded by people.
Luckily, Netaround is designed specifically to facilitate geo-targeted connections. The app is incredibly user-friendly -- in order to start socializing, just join existing zone or create your own. A zone can comprise any group of like-minded tenants within your apartment building, from concert enthusiasts, to gardening aficionados, to film fanatics. Since Netaround is a location-based app, these zones are all geo-fenced and can extend up to one square mile.
Rather than creating an elaborate profile, users are given three tags to explain who they are and why they’re in a particular zone. The logic here is that while a personal bio gives users a cursory introduction to each other, the ultimate goal is to interface in real life, not through a little glowing screen.
What happens once our solitary protagonist creates or joins a zone? That depends, in large part, on the kind of community he wants to foster. If he wants to stay up to date with the entire building, he can join a general purpose apartment zone and chat with neighbors online, giving them much more to talk about during long elevator rides. If he is hoping to connect with neighbors who share common interests, he could create any number of special interest zones -- book club zones, dinner party zones, Game of Thrones watching zones, and so on.
Netaround facilitates the creation of an online space that enables tenants to pursue genuine interests while building sustainable connections. Rather than simply joining an obtuse online community, Netaround users can take these online connections and turn them into real, meaningful relationships.
