My Friend Will Hate SeeYoo, An App To Say OMW

SeeYooNo matter how far or close by, a good friend of mine always texts to say he’s “20 minutes away” when he’s running late. SeeYoo, which calls itself a ‘pre-meeting app’, is almost certainly not for him.

Available for iOS and Android, the app lets you alert friends that you are OMW (on my way), chat with them during your journey, and continually share your exact whereabouts on a map.

In addition, SeeYoo includes “push-to-talk” voice messaging, whereby you tap and hold on the microphone on-screen button to speak. All conversations are ‘ephemeral’, too, so that they are deleted once you close the conversation.

Specifically, SeeYoo pitches itself as combining the messaging functionality of something like WhatsApp, with the location feature of Apple’s Find My Friends for iPhone.

It’s the latter part my friend would hate, and, I suspect, so might others. In fact, I can’t help wonder if SeeYoo is another social location-based app that is a solution looking for a problem.

The ability to share your location in real-time with friends isn’t exactly new — Google’s defunct Latitude springs to mind — and almost all attempts have disappeared with barely a trace.

Perhaps that’s because — beyond simply being creepy — letting others track your exact location, unlike, say, tracking an Uber, jars with a certain, subtle and arguably illogical social etiquette.

My friend knows what we all know but never explicitly acknowledge. He’s rarely, if ever, “20 minutes away”, but he is OMW. And, by not seeing his precise whereabouts in realtime, I never know exactly how late he’s running or how little effort he made to be on time in the first place.

“See you soon,” I nearly always text back.

For the sake of friendship, sometimes ignorance really is bliss.