Yes! The event will be on Tuesday. Would be great to see anyone there that is up for discussing this.
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Hey everyone 
Thought you might be interested to know that weāre holding our first ever Sphere Hackathon next week! Weāve split the company into 5 multi-disciplinary teams, cancelled all meetings and the only goal is that each team ship something new to our app by next Friday 
On Friday, weāre holding a community event where all the teams will give a short presentation/demo of what theyāve shipped, and the attendees will pick a winner! So if you want to see what happens when a bunch of community tech nerds get unleashed to build and ship quickly, join us at the event and help us pick a winner 
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Do the Mr Men know they are on your graphics?
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Mr Horrific-incident-involving-industrial-machinery in the top right
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I used to draw these in Paint when I was younger 
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I was thinking those Word shapes/design elements from 2003 that you could insert into documents
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Hackathon Results are today at 6pm if anyone is free. I donāt know what the other teams have built, but my team is in it to win it with our idea
Our CEO Nick DāAloisio will be hosting the event and Zoom attendees will be able to vote for the winner 
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A big day for us today! First, we launched our new website - take a look!
Second, we went live with our latest feature, Zen Flow - an all new feed that keeps active conversations at the forefront, so you can focus on what matters. Inactive conversations expire after 24 hours of no activity (but can be reactivated from the All Chats page) - meaning you can focus on just whatās important and not be bogged down by an endless feed of old, dead chats. Check out the blog post for more info. Weāve also dropped a teaser in there for our next big feature, Appreciations, which is launching in the next few weeks!
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Just saw this thread. Sphere is a great idea imo, Whatsapp is terrible for group chats and organising things. And itās Facebook.
Might see if I can convince a few groups Iām in to move over. The main barrier will be getting people to download a new app especially after my repeated failed campaigns to get people onto Signal and Discord. But I can try 
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Thank you so much! We just added some new onboarding upon sign up too to help users understand the feature set. Let me know if your groups have any questions, as we plan on adding more stuff to the website once we learn what kind of information people want to know - thereās a preliminary FAQ there, but we can always add more. Weāre really proud of Zen Flow, as thereās no other messengers doing this - even smaller Discords that Iām in just have so many dead channels being shoved in your face all the time and itās tough to know whatās what.
Appreciations is going to be fantastic too - itās like a combination of Discordās custom emojis but with Redditās reputation system, except all Appreciations are tailor made and named by the group creating them. I suspect we are going to see some hilarious Appreciation names pop up once it launches!
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Must admit, I was dubious of sphere at first. I didnāt understand where it would fit in the market, or if itās even something Iād consider worth using.
But Iāve been using it for a good few months now and really quite like it, it has a nice little community going for it already. For me itās like a happy medium that sits somewhere in between my messaging apps and forums like discourse and subreddits. Plus it has @Dunsford!
Iāve never used Discord, but given what I know from friends who do, I think itās more of like a birth child of discord and Reddit.
My only qualm (aside from the issues surrounding encryption and privacy; though having now used it, I understand why that stuff is omitted), is that thereās something of a double edged sword. The groups I follow are either quite inactive for the most part, which means thereās little reason to use it. But then some instances, like when thereās an event as was the case for WWDC, it can be a little too active. The activity isnāt bad, itās great, what I didnt like was the notification spam any time Iād swap over to iMessage for a few minutes to chat to my friends, or when I stepped away from my phone for a bit when the pizza arrived. It just kept pinging for every new message, and there doesnāt seem to be any nuance to control that in the sphere app. Please add some options there!
Digging this update though! Apply this same logic to push notifications, in that you donāt keep notifying if I havenāt read previous notifications, and youāll have an awesome experience.
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Super helpful feedback @N26throwaway - thanks so much! Maybe we can do a Do Not Disturb mode, or notification bundling when thereās bursts of activity. Have passed it on to the PMs to figure out 
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Iām looking forward to being able to try this out with my friends group.
Currently we use a WhatsApp group chat for planning upcoming trips or get togethers but a lot of the important dates, times, questions etc. can get lost among the general chit chat, song/movie/tv show recommendations and whatnot. I think Sphere could solve some of the frustrations here.
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Website looks really nice and clean, especially the font.
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I used to feel the same way, and still do to extent with some aspects. Iād recommend you give it a try and get a feel for what it actually is, and their decision in this aspect will make a little more sense, at least in the context of Sphere One.
At the base level, itās an app that effectively has a bunch of public chat rooms that anyone can make, and anyone can join. Not dissimilar from starting a topic on a discourse forum, or on Reddit. But itās a chat. Itās a very public thing, so thereās no reasonable expectation of privacy in that sense.
Thatās Sphere One in a nutshell. Where I think there should be greater expectations are in the Spheres you can create yourself, as those are private, so thereās a reasonable expectation of privacy here. The spheres themselves I believe should be end to end encrypted, with only those who are invited capable of decrypting and reading the content. Else, Iāll be sticking purely to Sphere One, which I enjoy thoroughly.
Sure folks may use that tool to do bad things. But that should never be a reason not to do something. Especially when that something has real quantifiable benefits for everyone.
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The difficulty with messaging apps is there is too many (as mentioned by others).
We used to have open platforms where everyone was contactable (a phone number). Now it is so decentralised that you have group chats on a dozen different platforms.
If you could build a tool to connect all the messaging services you would be on to a winner. open banking for communication?
Circa 20 apps on my phone just to talk to friends 
Trillian used to do this. As did plenty of others. Were they winners? I thought so. The rest of the population evidently did not, leading to them all either dying out or becoming abandonware. Or in Trillianās case, pivoting after many many years.
Thanks to mobiles and push notifications, and the fact you no longer need to be online to be contactable or prompted, an app that combines them all makes little sense anymore. The demand for end to end encryption complicates things further too. The issue of still needing several different accounts with several different services to keep on top of still remains an issue even if an app could combine them all, and people donāt want that.
From my experience, people have often tended to gravitate towards one service. In the case of the U.K., that used to be MSN, and in the US we used AIM. I was one of two people I knew who used both, as I had friends and family in both countries. Facebook eventually usurped them both, then real smart phones arrived and WhatsApp eventually took over.
Now thereās a lot more fragmentation, and so many different services. They all serve their niche, and some communities will gravitate towards others. The U.K. likes WhatsApp for some reason. Korea use Line. Some European countries like Viber, and gamers use Discord. Grandparents still think Skype is the hip service to be using.
I think having so many options is a good thing in many ways, even if the fragmentation isnāt, and I donāt oppose the idea of using multiples of them if they serve a purpose and fill a role in your life. Iām an essentialist, and have gotten on just fine sticking to iMessage, SMS, and Signal. Iām always hesitant to use more than that, but sphere has a place on my phone after using it. For me, itās not for messaging my friends, itās for the Sphere One community and the chat room spin that has on the sort of stuff you go to Discourse or Reddit for.
I think a large part of my liking of it, is that I was onboarded at the perfect time, so my first experience with Sphere was an event (WWDC), and that was awesome.
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This is great to hear and glad you enjoyed the event! We will be doing more. I think this is really key in that ācommunities that do eventsā is our target audience more than friend groups. We have seen people set up friends and family groups on Sphere, so thatās why we included it as an example on the website, but ultimately itās not who we are directly building the product for.
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I would love to stick to a few but entirely reliant on what others use. As you say WhatsApp is popular in the UK but still a lot donāt use it. Either I donāt stay in contact with them or I use another service?
There will certainly always be a place for niche services, but I struggle to see how a platform doesnāt make sense in the long term. For sure there a number of tough hurdles to overcome with E2E encryption, monetisation, etc.
Meanwhile I will continue to have all the comms apps on my phone (txt, phone, iMessage, whatsapp, messenger, snap, zoom, FaceTime, viber, signal, Skype, etc, etc.). And donāt even get me started on business communication software 
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For me, SMS is the fallback that fills gaps, and is typically free and unlimited as standard these days. I donāt use WhatsApp, and not all of my friends use iPhone or have Signal. But 100% of them are able to send and receive SMS messages. Not sure with Android, but SMS lives in the same app as iMessage on my phone so Iām really only using two apps to keep in touch with people. I could probably forego Signal, but I like it because itās the only way I can have private and end to end encrypted conversations with my otherwise green bubble buddies.
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