Google is a hugely successful company but there is one area they haven’t done so well: social networking. Google Plus died the other day, Google Allo too but it seems Google is not giving up yet on social networking.
According to Android Police, Google is working on a social networking site which has a funny name: Shoelace.
Google’s Area 120 group is testing Shoelace and it is quite interesting. Google Area 120 group was created to house the company’s experimental projects and this is sure an experiment.
Shoelace focuses on current relationships between people. it is geared towards meeting new people and growing your social circle. It also matches users based on their interests and makes it easy to plan and meet for events. That makes it sound like Facebook in a way, but it is a system that has been tried and tested.
The problem is that this is currently being beta tested right now. It is currently invite only and will launch in New York City and partnering with select communities. Interestingly, it is also limited to mobile apps where it supports Android Oreo and later and iOS 11 and later.
Apparently, the app relies on a substantial input of human curation since it promises hand picked activity suggestions. Activities called Loops (interesting choice there) and apparently this feels similar to an app they had back in 2011 (Schemer).
We wonder whether this will go beyond the experiment stage and roll out to other countries, so we have to keep our hopes low on this one.
