Free? Your friends would already know

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IANS New York
Last Updated : Jun 21 2015 | 12:32 PM IST

It's weekend and you don't know who of your friends are free to hang out with. And those who are free may not call you, thinking you might be busy. It that's what happens with you mostly, here is an app to help you out.

You can overcome this quandary through this new app that would tell you about your friends' availability status (and to them yours).

Developed by Danny Trinh, former lead designer at inner-circle social app Path, the new iPhone app - named Free - is meant to fill what he sees as hole in our digitally mediated social lives: the ability to broadcast and communicate around availability.

Free makes hang-out intentions a little more visible in both directions: You can see if friends are doing something, or looking for something to do, and vice versa, Wired.com reported.

Trinh said he wanted to build the mobile version of the green dot from AIM - AOL's Instant Messaging (AIM) that came around in 1997.

"The AIM buddy list is the godfather of all social software," he was quoted as saying.

What Trinh thinks is missing is a way to advertise our availability, and quickly survey the availability of others.

"I used to live on AIM, and if someone was green, that meant they were totally up to chat. I was in love with that," he added.

"With smartphones, we're more connected than ever -- " there's Gchat, WeChat, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, and more -- "but as connection has become the default, we've lost ways to announce, 'I'm up to hang'," Trinh explained.

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First Published: Jun 21 2015 | 12:26 PM IST

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