Social productivity for real-world groups
BeLooped is…
Not Just a Contact Management System
BeLooped is a social productivity app that lets you keep all of your real-world groups in one place. Focus is on privacy, communication for group success and near effortless address book maintenance – all within a money-saving, ad-free environment.
Not Just a Contact Management System
A server is used to distribute each group’s data to group members’ devices. And since data is on your devices, you can use BeLooped even without an internet connection.
A big part of what what makes BeLooped viable is a fundamentally different way of looking at address books and contact management. Instead of a long list of people, with BeLooped you have a shorter list of groups. Many of BeLooped’s capabilities are only possible because the people in a group have something in common. These include:
- a reason to have personas (multiple profiles).
- automatic sharing of contact information between group members (this usually reduces effort by 90% or more).
- tabs that add group-specific functionality.
True Privacy
Many apps that give their software away for free are actually cashing in on your personal data. BeLooped values privacy, and that is why we don’t track, collect or sell any of your private information.
Privacy
You may or may not be aware of how deeply our privacy is invaded online on a regular basis. It is disconcertingly common for social applications and websites to routinely collect your private information, and then sell it to advertisement companies for profit. The user experience becomes polluted by ads, “private data” isn’t private at all, and the focus of being social is secondary at best.
Instead of selling your data, BeLooped chooses to sell valuable software. Your sharing environment is completely ad-free and without any form of data tracking/collecting/selling or other forms of misuse.
The Different “You”s You Are
BeLooped recognizes that we all have different facets to our personality and we “wear many hats” in our lives. We let you be the who you are in the context of the different groups in your life by allowing you to define a unique persona for each group you belong to. Your self-description, the phone numbers, emails and addresses you share, your picture and even your name can be different in different groups.
Personas
People are not one dimensional, yet most social apps force us to craft a single view of ourselves. This is convenient for companies that want your private information, as it’s easier to consolidate data if you only have one profile.
A side effect of a single profile is this: if you know that everything you do online is being captured by multiple companies, exchanged and used in unknown ways then the safest thing to do is: share nothing. You don’t want details of the party you attended being spread around the office.
This is called Context Collapse, and the only way to eliminate it – and make conversations safe again – is for each group to be independent, which is what BeLooped encourages. Since you know who the people are in your groups, you know what’s appropriate to share (and not share) in that group’s context.
So go ahead and be who you want to be.
Ad-Free
Some amount of tracking what you’re interested in takes place when you tap an advertisement. But there are also many other ways to grab user information for commercial profit: GPS tracking as you drive or walk around town, scanning the content of emails you send to others, downloading your address book contents to see who you know, and even surreptitiously listening through your smartphone’s microphone... to name just a few.
BeLooped does none of these things.
Ad-Free
We had other good reasons to not burden you with advertising:
- the time spent including advertising with BeLooped could be better spent making it a more useful product.
- ads are annoying (after all, they are designed to attract your attention away from what you were doing).
- ads can use anywhere from 15% to 80% of your data plan. YOU pay for their delivery through your data plan! Ads cost you money even if you manage to ignore them.
- ads make data downloads slower.
- the downloading of ads (and constant pinging of the ad server) chews up battery life.
- the ads use up your limited screen space. Here are a few links supporting the above claims: Article 1, Article 2, Article 3, Article 4
Sharing the Load
Keeping contacts up to date and organized can be a HUGE task. But in a group-oriented application like BeLooped, each person contributes by managing their own profile. All changes are automatically shared with other group members, keeping everyone in the loop.
Sharing
Maintaining a list of a few contacts is relatively easy, but a larger list is inherently much more difficult. It isn’t a surprise to find that several pieces of information (such as phone numbers or addresses) have changed or are no longer valid at all, and obtaining new information isn’t always easy.
BeLooped solves this issue by being group oriented. When contacts are divided into groups, lists are smaller, focused, and easily managed by one Group Manager (GM). The GM approves membership and certain content, but the members are in charge of maintaining their own profiles/personas. When a person updates their info, other members receive the update as well. In this way, everyone’s contact lists stay relevant and consistent, with considerably less effort than traditional contact management.
For Everyone
Different groups have different needs. An events calendar may benefit one group, while a supply list would be great for another. BeLooped Tabs let you customize and add functionality perfect for any given group.
For Any Type of Group
A “group” is a generic term to describe a number of people with a similar interest or that belong to the same organization. But not every group is the same. The needs of a business group will be very different from that of a sports team.
To fulfill our promise of BeLooped being a group productivity platform, we added Tabs. Tabs add functionality specific to the needs of specific types of groups. In many cases, groups find that they have no need for a website.
Since a copy of the group’s data is always available on your smartphone (the BeLooped server is only for synchronizing things), you have access to important information even without an internet connection.
