Ourglass

@bentossell ha! i only have 9 friends in Ourglass. But that's the whole point. No one can see how many friends you have; no one can see how many likes your posts get. It's just a private space where people can people themselves, and share with a small group of people who genuinely care about how your day is going. Currently there's just one inner circle of 12 in the app - keeping it real simple for now. Separate groups are a good idea though - something we're working on ;)

@tsunaze The app is plenty cool with less than 12 people as well; i only have 8 :) The point of the upper bound is to avoid the generally indiscriminate friending (and ensuing popularity contest) that tends to take place in social media. I love Facebook, instagram, etc. but they've fundamentally geared themselves towards a really wide social graph. As a result people can keep up with the Kardashians, connect with people they met 4 years ago, virtually watch the sunrise from a hot air balloon in Cappadocia .... But not see what their best friends are up to. People become understandably restrained about what they're sharing when hundreds, or thousands, of people are watching, counting the number of likes... So we built a little safe zone to share what you're really up to with the people who really care :)

@philipkushmaro I'll let the Maker chime in here but there's quite a bit of research around 12 (or so) being the maximum number of people you can be *very* close with. This is based on evolutionary psychology where 12 (or so) was the average size of our nomadic tribes.

@joshuapinter I love tid-bits of info like that. Thanks Josh. 12 it is ;)

@philipkushmaro Here's a bit of background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du... Digging in, a person's closest circle is around 5 people; the next layer is 15. 150 is the maximum of relationships a person can handle. Naturally there is variation among people. Since we really want to create a safe spot where people can be themselves without hunting likes, we're keeping it pretty tight. The number 12 came out as a good limit in our betas (and it fit the UI :)