Mozi
New app, spearheaded by Ev Williams:
Mozi is a private social network for seeing your people more, IRL.
Add your plans, check who’s in town, and know when you overlap.
iOS only at the moment, with “Sign in with Apple” as the only supported authentication method. One clever idea is that you can share travel plans and your location, and Mozi will coordinate when you might be in the same area as a friend. From their FAQ:
Why do you need access to my contacts? Will you ever contact
people in my phone book?
Never. We ask for access to your contacts so that you can connect
with the people you already know on Mozi. In order to see someone
on Mozi, you have to both be on Mozi and both have one another
saved as iOS contacts. We never send, sell or share any of your
information, and we will never contact your people on your behalf.
And instead of storing any actual phone numbers, we hash (encrypt)
them. This ensures both your number and all your contacts remain
anonymized and protected.
I’m in, and so far only have three mutuals. But — all three of them are people whose in-person company I truly enjoy. We’ve all, correctly, got our guards up regarding new “social” platforms that want our personal information, but we’ve collectively become so cynical that I worry people don’t even want to try fun new things like Mozi. Ev Williams is uniquely placed to make something like this happen in a trustworthy way.
I’m mostly rooting for Mozi to succeed because I think something like this could work in a way that has nothing but upsides, and there’s nothing like it today. But I’m also rooting for Mozi to take off just to burst the absurdity of Kevin Roose’s October piece in the New York Times trying to make the case that Apple “killed social apps” by increasing the privacy controls for our iOS contacts. I gladly shared my whole contacts list with Mozi, based on the track record of the team and the FAQ quoted above.
Speaking of the NYT, Erin Griffith wrote a profile of Williams for the launch of Mozi:
“The internet did make us more connected,” he said in an interview
in Menlo Park, Calif. “It just also made us more divided. It made
us more everything.”
Mozi is meant to be a utility. If a user wants to message a friend
in the app to make plans, the app directs them to the phone’s
texting app.
★
New app, spearheaded by Ev Williams:
Mozi is a private social network for seeing your people more, IRL.
Add your plans, check who’s in town, and know when you overlap.
iOS only at the moment, with “Sign in with Apple” as the only supported authentication method. One clever idea is that you can share travel plans and your location, and Mozi will coordinate when you might be in the same area as a friend. From their FAQ:
Why do you need access to my contacts? Will you ever contact
people in my phone book?
Never. We ask for access to your contacts so that you can connect
with the people you already know on Mozi. In order to see someone
on Mozi, you have to both be on Mozi and both have one another
saved as iOS contacts. We never send, sell or share any of your
information, and we will never contact your people on your behalf.
And instead of storing any actual phone numbers, we hash (encrypt)
them. This ensures both your number and all your contacts remain
anonymized and protected.
I’m in, and so far only have three mutuals. But — all three of them are people whose in-person company I truly enjoy. We’ve all, correctly, got our guards up regarding new “social” platforms that want our personal information, but we’ve collectively become so cynical that I worry people don’t even want to try fun new things like Mozi. Ev Williams is uniquely placed to make something like this happen in a trustworthy way.
I’m mostly rooting for Mozi to succeed because I think something like this could work in a way that has nothing but upsides, and there’s nothing like it today. But I’m also rooting for Mozi to take off just to burst the absurdity of Kevin Roose’s October piece in the New York Times trying to make the case that Apple “killed social apps” by increasing the privacy controls for our iOS contacts. I gladly shared my whole contacts list with Mozi, based on the track record of the team and the FAQ quoted above.
Speaking of the NYT, Erin Griffith wrote a profile of Williams for the launch of Mozi:
“The internet did make us more connected,” he said in an interview
in Menlo Park, Calif. “It just also made us more divided. It made
us more everything.”
Mozi is meant to be a utility. If a user wants to message a friend
in the app to make plans, the app directs them to the phone’s
texting app.