40 | New Scientist | 28 March 2020
or move continents, you kind of lose touch
with people,” says Neil Wainwright, UpHabit’s
founder. “I decided to build UpHabit because I
wanted to help with that situation – I wanted to
help people stay connected.” When Wainwright
first uploaded his contacts to the app, he was
reminded of a colleague he worked with a
decade ago. “I reached out to him, reconnected
with him... and my wife and I actually went
out for dinner with him and his wife, and it
was a delightful time.” They are still in touch.Making it work
UpHabit is by far the most popular PRM on the
market, something Wainwright attributes to
his “obsession” with his customers. He says
the app is constantly revised based on user
feedback: in 2019, the team updated it 92 times,
including enabling birthday reminders, adding
a tab for recommended reading and allowing
users to tag people in bulk.
Another thing that changes occasionally
is the wording of push notifications, which
Wainwright says have been refined. Still,
compared with other apps, UpHabit’s
prompts have a slightly preachy tone: “Form
great bonds by offering to help someone”,
“Nurture relationships before you need them”,
“A simple ‘how are you?’ can go a long way”.
I didn’t just ignore the “Offer your
knowledge to others” notification, I actually
laughed aloud. It felt strange and clinical to me,
and the command seemed almost impossible
to act upon (“Hi Beth, I know we haven’tScroll down to
be a better friend
A flurry of new apps promises to help us better manage our
personal relationships. But do they work – and do we want them to,
asks Amelia Tait
I
T’S 8.18 am on a Wednesday when my
phone buzzes with a prompt to “Offer
your knowledge to others”. The push
notification also tells me that I have “three
relationships to reach out to”, including, in
brackets, the name of my sister, and “four
new people” to “discover” – here it mentions
someone I recently emailed for work. I ignore
it, then click snooze on several other reminders
to reach out to my friends.
The message is from UpHabit, one of many
apps that have launched in the past couple
of years to help people better manage their
relationships. They are based on customer
relationship management software, or CRMs,
which are now routinely used by companies
for things like compiling customer data and
offering up suggestions on how to retain
business. These new apps, personal CRMs,
offer similar services, but the relationships
they help you “manage” are with your friends,
family, colleagues and acquaintances.
In an era when people tend to move house
or job multiple times, making and neglecting
relationships as they go, these tools promise
to help us stay in touch – and be better, more
thoughtful friends. Yet how many people can
we genuinely stay connected to? And if I send a
message to someone because an app prompted
me to, is it less meaningful somehow than if I
remember myself?
To understand why so many personal CRMs,
or PRMs, have popped up since 2018, what that
says about our relationships and whether push
notifications can really make us better friends,I gave a few a try. It didn’t go quite as I expected.
If these kinds of apps sound tempting, you
are currently spoiled for choice. From the least
to the most inexplicably named, you can now
download Ntwrk, UpHabit, Plum Contacts,
Dex, Garden, Levitate, Monaru, Clay and Hippo.
They don’t just prompt you to “discover new
people” before you have had your morning
coffee. Most work in a similar way: you import
your contacts to the app, label and tag them as
friends, family or co-workers, for instance, set
reminders for when to contact them and log
the topics you last spoke about. In theory, this
means you will never forget the name of an
acquaintance’s kid or to ask your uncle how
his knee surgery went, and you will generally
have stronger, better relationships as a result.
“Everyone is very busy, and if you switch jobs>Features
“These new tools
promise to help us
become better,
more thoughtful
friends to others”