Noplace: Social media between MySpace and the old Facebook

Lilac background, orange and yellow font. If you want, you can design your profile on NoPlace completely in pastel colors, but also in bright colors or black and dark colors like emojis. The new social network is reminiscent of them. It has a lot of design options, almost like MySpace used to have. And like all new social networks these days, NoPlace wants to bring social back to the foreground. Should help: AI. In the United States, the app has already become number one among the most frequently downloaded apps.

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You can use invitations to register. Such invitations are now common practice as well. Clubhouse, as a model, is supposed to encourage promotions as well as simplify onboarding. You can share and compare invitations with all your friends, including your contacts. Jack Noplace has access to the smartphone’s phone book – but they promise not to share it with third parties.

When you register, the app asks about your interests. Suggestions include “My Little Pony”, “Percy Jackson” and “Adventure Time”. The target group is probably young. You have to choose at least three topics. There are also tech news, AI and other areas of interest that appeal more to adults.

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Gamification and a Gen Z Whisperer

Let’s start designing the profile. It is divided into different sections that can be edited. Everything is very intuitive, one might say it’s foolproof. You can provide information about your age, gender, relationship status and much more. There is a status message where you can write something about yourself that other people will see. This part is very reminiscent of Facebook from the early days. What is new is the gamification introduced. Once you improve your profile a bit, you get a badge: “Level 1 achieved!”. Badges can also be collected.

The social nature is the feed. There is a feed in which you only see posts from your friends or people you follow. And there is a feed with suggestions. We also know: from X, TikTok and Instagram. However, NoPlace is limited to text – neither photos nor videos can be posted as posts. The suggestions and order of posts shown are not decided by algorithms, but by artificial intelligence. Where exactly the difference should be and how it works remains an open question.

NoPlace was founded in 2023 by Tiffany Zhong. She is indeed active in the venture capital sector in San Francisco and describes herself as a “Gen Z whisperer” on LinkedIn. She is said to have had her nose on the right track by now; Zhong also relied on, among other things, today’s TikTok. The App Store says that NoPlace aims to bring back all the fun that social media once brought – “before algorithms and ads”. The app clearly addresses all NPCs (non-playable characters), main characters, Swifties (Taylor Swift fans), Barbs (Barbies), nerds and stans (Stalker fans). There is no information on how the service plans to finance itself in the long term. So far venture capital has apparently been sufficient.

In recent years, several services have cropped up to become the new social network. Scandals at Facebook, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and concerns that the Chinese government may be behind TikTok have led founders to hope they will be able to exploit the gaps that have been created. However, so far no service has been able to establish itself in the way its predecessors did or are still doing.

(EMW)