New app helps people make friends, not dates — really

Fights social awkwardness, 'loneliness epidemic'

April 17, 2017 By Mary Frost Brooklyn Daily Eagle

A new app launched on Thursday in New York City designed to help people create real friendships (as opposed to dates). Most of those signing up on Thursday live in Brooklyn. Photo courtesy of Me3

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There are apps to help you find parking spaces and apps to connect you with the perfect date, but now Brooklynites (and their fellow New Yorkers) have an app to help them create actual, old fashioned friendships.

On Thursday evening, CEO and co-founder Julian Ilson (his partner is CIO Emanuel Petre) traveled to Brooklyn to launch Me3 in New York City. Me3 (www.me3app.co) uses social science and machine learning to help both young and old adults find real friends — as opposed to dates. Ilson says the app is like “a super smart Tinder/OkCupid for friendships.”

Me3 eliminates the awkwardness of making new friends as an adult, Ilson says.

“The reality is that it becomes increasingly difficult to develop new friendships as we grow older,” Ilson said in an email to the Brooklyn Eagle. “The result is a loneliness epidemic that is afflicting adults of all ages. So we’ve decided to build what we think is the easiest, most effective and scalable way to combat this trend.”

A Google search looking up the effect of social isolation on the health of adults resulted in more than four million results — none of them good — confirming Ilson’s instincts.

How it works

Me3 differs from dating apps in that profiles are never public (there’s no swiping through pictures); it matches people of the same gender in groups of three, so it can’t be misused for dating; and a self-learning algorithm that considers more than 150 factors — like personality, lifestyle, beliefs, interests — does the matching.

The app connects users that are “highly likely” to become great friends through three-person group chats (called “Tribes”). Tribe members “have a whole lot in common,” according to Me3’s website.

“I think we matched under a thousand users last night,” Ilson told the Eagle on Friday. “But the tribe formation is now automatic; every time a new user completes various levels and then changes their ‘availability,’ it creates a Tribe with two existing users.”

Most of Thursday’s NYC sign-ups live in Brooklyn, he said.

NYC is not the app’s first launch site. Roughly 10,000 people have signed up in other cities, Ilson said. Me3 will be starting to match in Hyderabad on Saturday. “London, LA and Toronto are getting close,” he said.

Ilson, 30, a native of Canada, explains in his press kit that the app fulfills a personal need for him, as he found it “incredibly difficult to make meaningful new friendships after university” despite being an outgoing person. The friendships that he did manage to cultivate would often leave to a different city for career- or relationship-related reasons.

The company has posted a humorous “Trump-splainer video” that shows how the service works. (Trump fans might not approve, but that probably won’t be a big problem in Brooklyn.)