Noplace: Social media between MySpace and the old Facebook
The best of both worlds: With Noplace you can design your profile, just like with MySpace. The structure is reminiscent of the early Facebook.
Screenshot Noplace App Store.
(Image: Noplace)
Lilac background, orange and yellow lettering. If you want, you can design your Noplace profile entirely in pastel colors, but you can also choose bright colors or black and dark like Emos. The new social network is reminiscent of them. There are design options, almost like MySpace used to be. And like all new social networks these days, Noplace also wants to put the social back in the foreground. To help: AI. In the USA, the app is already the number one most downloaded app.
(Image: emw)
You can use an invite to register. Such invitations are now also commonplace. With Clubhouse as a role model, it should probably fuel the hype, but also simplify onboarding. Invites can be shared and synchronized with all friends, including your own contacts. Zack Noplace has access to the phone book of the smartphone - but they promise not to share it with third parties.
When you register, the app asks you about your interests. Suggestions include "My little Pony", "Percy Jackson" and "Adventure time". The target group is therefore likely to be young. You have to select at least three topics. There are also tech news, AI and other fields of interest that are more likely to appeal to adults.
Gamification and a Gen-Z whisperer
Now it's time to design the profile. This is divided into individual sections that can be edited. Everything is pretty intuitive, you could say foolproof. You can enter your age, gender, relationship status and more. There is a status message where you can write something about yourself that others can see. This part is very reminiscent of Facebook in the early days. Gamification is a new feature. Once you've spruced up your profile a bit, you get a badge: "Level 1 achieved!". Badges can also be collected.
(Image: emw)
The social character is the feeds. There is a feed where you can only see the posts of your friends or people you follow. And there is a feed with suggestions. We also know this from X, Tiktok and Instagram. However, Noplace is limited to text - neither photos nor videos can be posted. The suggestions and order of the posts shown are not decided by algorithms, but by artificial intelligence. Where exactly the difference is supposed to be and how it works, however, remains an open question.
Noplace was founded in 2023 by Tiffany Zhong. She is actually active in venture capital in San Francisco and describes herself as a "gen z whisperer" on LinkedIn. She has had the right instinct here so far, Zhong is said to have bet on musica.ly - today's Tiktok - among other things. Noplace aims to bring back all the fun that social media once brought - "before algorithms and ads", according to the app store. The app explicitly 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 intends to finance itself in the long term. So far, the venture capital has apparently been sufficient.
In recent years, numerous services have set out to become the new social network. Scandals at Facebook, the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk and concerns that the Chinese government could be behind Tiktok have given founders hope that they will be able to exploit any gaps that arise. So far, however, no service has been able to assert itself in the way that its predecessors have done or continue to do.
(emw)