A cup of tea and two Pakistani brains made it possible to bring to life the new online social network, ‘Face2Face’ App Alerts Users When Their Online Friends Are Nearby

Less than six months after its launch, Face2Face crossed 100,000 users in January 2011 in North America alone. It has been featured in Mashable, The New York Times, the MIT Journal and Wired and hailed as an application inspiring genius and innovation. And its creators are on their way to much much more!

How Face2Face began

Everyone hates to miss out on an opportunity to meet up with good friends. We all love it when we bump into our best friends at the cinema when we go out to catch the latest flick – especially if we happen to be in the same cinema at the same time. But how do we ensure such a chance meeting occurs without coordinating with one another in advance??

Facebook allows us to stay up to date with our friends’ lives. It goes beyond that and lets us (those of us who are really nosy) stay up to date with the lives of people who are friends of our friends. Twitter lets us shout (or tweet) crisp updates to our network of avid followers. LinkedIn lets us expand our professional world. However, a key gap remains: how do we transport all our friends, followers and contacts from the cyberworld into our real lives?

Such needs of connecting sparked off an idea in Hameed Khan’s head. The CEO of Proximate Global met his college friend Umair Aziz, CTO of Creative Chaos and the idea clicked. This resulted in the development of Proximate Global’s flagship brand, Face2Face, being outsourced to a company with a decade of experience in development and design, Creative Chaos.

So, What’s All the Rage?

The magic of Face2Face is that it makes chance meetings with friends a near certainty! It allows real-time networking with friends who are in close geographic proximity!

Face2Face lets your friends know your location so that you never miss out on a chance to meet them. It doesn’t stop here though… It will only let them know you’re around if they are nearby in the first place. Hence, it maintains your privacy too! So my best friend would only find out about me being in the cinema if and only if I am actually at the cinema!

And guess what?  Even if my friend isn’t there, I still don’t have to watch the movie alone! Because a ‘friend of my friend’ might just be there and Face2Face would let me connect with them if I wish.

What Else Does Face2Face Make Possible?

Face2Face can be easily downloaded at zero cost to any smart phone and has led to a paradigm shift in social networking. Some of its features include the following:

  • Consolidates all Social Networks on one platform: so you’re just one step away from meeting your MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter network – the one step being entering your password.
  • Real-Time Status Updates: it allows updates to all networks in one go! Making it quick and simple to manage our social and professional lives!
  • Instant Messaging to all Networks: Through Face2Face we can chat with out friends from all networks at one time. This means multiple benefits through just one password and window

What’s next with Face2Face?

When I met up with Umair Aziz he was extremely excited about the future of Face2Face. The best part is that a brand new version is just a few weeks away.

During our meeting he described the newer version as ‘connecting with people, those who are important and even those who are consequential strangers’.

I guess that’s just a hint of what’s actually in store. For the exact details, stay tuned…