The rise of social networks has shown just how much people like to express themselves. Feelit, as the name implies, is one social network that takes people’s feelings very seriously. Saudi co-founder Mohammad AlQadi feels strongly about feelings: “they are a global language in a world filled with tech and politics,” he says, “so we want to connect emotions to every day things.” So he followed his feelings all right, dropping out of college to launch Feelit in September 2013, with co-founders Dima AlOthaimeen, AlBara' Hakami and Omar AlEisa. The iOS app, which recently won the ArabNet Startup Demo in Riyadh, is easy to use. After signing up and choosing a gender, users will have to pick a feeling from the wheel. Whether it’s sad, happy, bored, sleepy, angry, or in love, they then choose to either squash that feeling or embrace it. If they squash ‘bored’ for instance, they’ll get funny videos. A problem, though, arises from the fact that the content is crowdsourced. I noticed while testing, for instance, that when you choose to embrace boredom you’ll get nonspecific content about boredom that are less engaging than the funny videos delivered if you want to squash boredom. In other examples, you will only get one or few results, or even give you the results for an emotion you haven’t chosen. Users will also be able to send hugs to someone who’s feeling sad. The team came up with this idea after a Free Hug video went viral on YouTube in Saudi. The guy giving free hugs in the video was arrested later. On Feelit, he jokes, “you can get free hugs without getting in trouble.” The app has attracted around 15,000 active users in the two months after it launched. Back then, Feelit was mainly focusing on young Saudis between 12 and 25 years old, but its most active users turned out to be young girls between 18 and 25. To cater to this category, the company started working on a newer version that will include stickers for girls as well as an Arabic interface. The new version will also eliminate the option of squashing and embracing, replacing that with the option of clicking a trending bubble emotion (shown below), rather than embracing a negative emotion like anger. Each bubble is for one feeling and the more people click on a bubble, the more it grows.
To market the new version, the team will target teenage girls by running offline campaigns in schools and universities, where he will pick five girls (or ‘ambassadors’) from each school and university and train them to market Feelit there. “Then we'll do a competition between schools and universities, with each group doing their own marketing campaign in their school,” he says, “and the school group that gets the most followers on Feelit will be the winner.” This is all good news for Feelit, but with its new focus, how will the team be able to differentiate between real profiles and fake ones? How can they guarantee an appropriate use of the app or filter their crowdsourced content?
