The tap is the part everyone wants to see. Phones meet, there’s a small confirmation, both profiles are just there. It photographs well, which is why every walkthrough starts there and why the picture does so much of the explaining. It isn’t the product. It’s the doorway.
Getting two phones to notice each other is a solved annoyance. A near-field tap, a short-range radio when the tap sulks, a code when the room is hostile, a manual fallback when none of that wants to work. Dap’s exchange can take those paths, including the boring ones, because a room full of phones is a rude place for a single radio. None of them are the reason to build the thing. Proximity only gets you as far as a record that still has to be true on Thursday: who you met, where, and why you’d want them again three days later, filed under the event instead of under a letter of the alphabet.
The question the gesture creates is almost immediate: where did that contact go. The hoped-for answer is the phone’s address book, in a list, beside the dentist. That’s the old destination. A clean transfer into a list like that is a meeting that already started forgetting. You did the part that looks like magic and stored the result in the place that drops context for a living.
Events are the missing folder.
You didn’t meet them in the abstract. You met them at a dinner, a demo day, a hallway that smelled like carpet cleaner. The event is the cue your memory gets for free. When the connection is saved against that, “who was the person from Tuesday” has a shelf. When it’s saved against nothing, you’re paging through names and doing archaeology on your own week. I think the shelf matters more than the radio. I’m less sure it matters to someone who meets a few hundred people and only needs the ones who can buy. Their problem is sorting. Mine, most nights, is not losing the one conversation that wasn’t a transaction.
A note field doesn’t fix a missing shelf by itself. You can type “funny, send the essay” under a name and still have no idea which room the essay belonged to, or whether you already sent it, or whether “funny” was them or the person after them. The event is the first line you shouldn’t have to type. Everything else you add is a second line. If the first line is missing, the second line is a scrap floating in a drawer.
I keep coming back to how small the mechanic is allowed to be. Phones find each other. Profiles move. The event is already known, because you didn’t wander into a stranger’s pocket on the street. You were at the thing. Saving “the thing” should be the default, not a tag you remember to apply while you’re trying to say goodbye. The products that ask you to categorize the person afterwards have already lost. You won’t do it. I wouldn’t either. Not after the eighth conversation, and not in a taxi.
The profile should be dull on purpose. A name, what you do, the links you actually want a person to have. Not a deck. Not a pitch you rewrite before every event and then forget in the taxi. On the web you can claim that page now, and it’s live. The in-room tap is the app. The app has not shipped. If you’re picturing two phones in a lobby tonight, that part is still ahead of us. The page is the thing that exists, with your name on it, on a URL you can already send someone. The tap is how it changes hands once the app does.
People will ask for the store link. There isn’t one, and I don’t want a post that winks as if there is. What you can do today is claim the page, the same page a tap will hand over once the app exists. The doorway isn’t installed. The thing it opens onto is. I’d rather say that flat than write a demo of a night you can’t have yet.
I also don’t want the tap to grow a personality. Some products fall in love with their gesture and then go hunting for a reason to keep performing it. This one is allowed to be dull. If the Thursday record is right, nobody needs the story of how the phones found each other. They’ll tell the story of the person. That was the reason for standing in the room.
I care more about the morning after than about the gesture, which is an awkward thing to admit when the gesture is the frame everyone wants in the photo. A tap with no event attached is a business card that buzzes. Fun the first time. Same pocket problem at breakfast. The work is making sure the buzz leaves the room and the reason behind, not only a name you could have gotten by asking.
Easy is the phones finding each other. Thursday is the test. If you still know why you let them have the page, the tap did its job. If you don’t, it was a party trick with better hardware.
