Cloak App Launches the Era of Anti-Social Media
We've entered a new era of social media -- the anti-social media era -- with the introduction of a new iOS app called Cloak. Cloak uses the information you can gain from "friends" on social media networks and turns it on its head -- allowing to you avoid seeing those people in real life.
There have been other apps in the past that got the "anti-social media" label. Among them include Whisper, a messaging app that emphasizes privacy and anonymity that labeled itself a "private, anti-social networking app, Nextt, a private networking app that helps you plan offline events with your "real friends" outside of Facebook, Anti-Social, which blocks social networking services, and Hater, an app for sharing your hatred of anything with others.
But those "anti-social media" apps and software are all actually just quirky alternatives to the big social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, with the exception of Anti-Social, which is more of a productivity tool than anything else. They all still cater to people who are social, but who are tired of the Facebook/Twitter nexus.
Cloak is something entirely different. It actually caters to loners and introverts, by using social check-ins and geolocation data from social media to actively help users avoid running into people you don't want to. It's the true "antisocial network" that bills itself as "incognito mode for real life."
Cloak works by connecting it with popular location check-in app Foursquare and Instagram. Once connected, it plots the points nearby where your contacts are, giving you a map of the locations of people you flag -- exes, co-workers, or anyone else you find obnoxious and would rather avoid. Cloak will even give you an alert if they move outside a certain area and update their location.
The app was created by Buzzfeed creative director Chris Baker, who has a history of making anti-social networking services and apps, and programmer Brian Moore. Peronally, I think we've seen the crest of the big social network," said Baker to the Washington Post in an email. "Things like Twitter and Facebook are packed elevators where we're all crammed in together... I think anti-social stuff is on the rise. You'll be seeing more and more of these types of projects."
The co-creators say that Cloak will hopefully add Facebook to its arsenal of antisocial information soon, upping the ability of misanthropes to avoid people by several degrees. "We feel like we've reached the point of social fatigue -- too many networks with too much information, all the time," Baker said to CNN, stressing that Cloak isn't intended as a parody app or only for users who really hate other people. "It's OK to turn off and pick up a copy of 'Walden' and just be alone."
Cloak isn't the first app to provide a FourSquare-tracking avoidance service, though it may be the most successful -- especially if it manages to integrate Facebook data into the app. Hell is Other People, an appropriately named web app that does the same thing as Cloak, but not on a mobile app, was created by NYU graduate student Scott Garner in early 2013. The web app similarly connects with FourSquare to provide which locations to avoid, as well as suggestions for "safe zones" where no one will bother users.
You can check out the original Hell is Other People here and Cloak (currently only for iOS) here.