Information Technology & Services - New York, New York, United States
Texting is an incredibly convenient way to communicate, but the act of writing messages can be strenuous; we often feel pressured to filter what we say, spending several minutes auditing texts that are rather short in length. These moments of inhibition disrupt the momentum of conversation and cut off what would otherwise be a free exchange of meaning.At Flare, we believe that this problem is rooted in preview — the process of writing an entire message before sending—and that conversations would flow better if we allowed our speech to emerge live, word-by-word.We tackled this problem backwards by first establishing a chat mode in which messages are sent and received word-by-word by default, then reverse engineering an environment where people feel comfortable typing live. This meant reconstructing the display of messages as well as the rules of storing messages in history (our model of "temporary history" threads the needle between the existing paradigms of ephemerality and permanent saving).Collectively these elements form the basis of a new medium that brings natural conversations into the digital world so that people no longer need to trade between the convenience of texting and the connectedness of talking.Join us in our mission to help people speak freely.