This App Helps You, Help Others
Technology continues to find ways to connect and support us in the physical world..
In helping others, you help yourself. While most apps enable us to connect with others through an online community like social media (which is now primarily used as a means to help businesses get engagement), there are some apps that empower users to connect with their local community in more direct ways. Mayo is one such app that achieves this, and it takes connectivity a step further by allowing users to request help from other people in their area immediately.
What is the Mayo app?
Airbnb made it ok to live at a stranger’s house, Uber made it ok to hop in a stranger’s car, Mayo wants to make it ok to ask for help or talk to anyone around you in the same space. Mayo is a mobile application that allows users to ‘ask for help’ from the people in their immediate area- be it a coffee shop, store, library, etc. Using a no-sign-in-required model, Mayo discourages the social ‘connectivity’ aspect that is traditional in most social platforms and instead focuses on connecting people in the real world for the purpose of solving tasks at hand.
Mayo believes in anonymity because it prevents bias/judgements and lowers barrier of entry for users, which is why the app allows only a tiny radius (200m) for searching, and is aiming to further segment the searches to more defined spaces (same Starbucks/office/park/school building, etc) in the near future. By focusing on a small radius, the accountability of users is much higher, and the sense of interacting and being able to see real people heightens. Not only is direct interaction an essential component - and in fact - the main focus of the Mayo app, it’s a necessary skill for everybody in the professional, collaborative (especially freelance) industries.
What’s unique about the Mayo app?
The Mayo app is a forward-thinking application for interactive, user driven community engagement. Some of Mayo’s more specific (technical) unique features are:
- Mayo is anonymous, no sign-up required.
- Users only see what is immediately around them at any given time / place.
- Mayo expires posts after 1 hour of no-activity.
- Mayo expires posts after the poster leaves the area.
- Mayo will actively notify you if someone posted near you.
- Mayo offers kudos point for future rewards.
Removing the ‘profile’ feature is a big plus in my opinion because it removes many of the social stigmas that revolve around social media networks (followers, likes, etc) and instead focuses on what matters most- helping people solve problems and creating real human interactions.
Where and how would I use the Mayo app?
The ideal situation for using the Mayo app is in a confined, population-dense area where users can reply to a requesters post immediately, providing nearly immediate resolution to a problem or task at hand. In a practical sense, this could be as simple as requesting to borrow an iPhone charger from someone in a coffee shop, or basic technical assistance like how to troubleshoot a wifi network issue. A more complex scenario would be asking several people in a library or coworking space to help you resolve a difficult homework problem/assignment, or an issue related to your business.
The Mayo app founder Allen Chan is integrating the platform into the entrepreneurial/business meetup environments to further validate the concept, and at the time this article was written (September 23rd, 2019), is injecting the application into university groups, where the app will help students, help each other. Despite these ongoing integrations, the Mayo app is fully functional and can be downloaded from the Android and App Store. As the app was launched in early 2019, there is still time to become an early adopter of this forward thinking, community driven application.
If you like what Mayo is trying to achieve, they are looking for help to discover more 'Mayo Moments' in exchange for free pizza or coffee. Check out the details here: heymayo.com/mayomoments.
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Aleksey Weyman
Aleksey Weyman is a web designer, music artist and creator of Millennial Moderator
