Social media in its purest form - sharing and connecting with real friends - is incredibly fun. It’s a great example of how technology can bring people closer together. It’s what I grew up with on the internet. 

Unfortunately, outside of our group chats, there are very few platforms that focus on connecting with people we actually know and care about. Maybe there’s no market for it anymore and we are in a post-social media world. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think there will always be a desire to share and connect with other human beings. 

In the middle of April, along with some colleagues I’ve worked with for over a decade, we started testing a new application called Postcards with some friends and family. It’s fun, simple, and social, and we really like using it. 

Postcards are what happens when you mash together photos, voice notes, and some text, and use a little bit of AI and some filters to turn it into a nice little piece of stylized media. We create postcards about our days, personal musings, vacations, things our kids did, places we went, and more. From the mundane to the important, it’s how we are beginning to share the things that happen in our lives with our friends and families. 

Back in the day there were social networks that were built around your real friend graph. Those morphed into broadcast media - places to get famous and places to consume entertaining content, almost entirely from people you don’t know in real life. Then came the proliferation of group chats as an antidote - a place to be yourself and not be judged by the world. 

I know there is a space that exists somewhere between those two worlds - the best of your group chats, but only people you know and like in real life. Postcards is designed to play in that void. It’s an easy way to stay connected to the people you care about, and it is not a place for mind-numbingly consuming content. 

If you want to create some postcards and send them to friends and family, try it out here. I’d love your feedback on it, and I hope there are lots of builders out there trying to figure out how to make social media fun and feel good again. 

Last year i built an ai biographer for my parents. I wanted to capture their life stories and learn about ai voice. With my friend Avi, we built an agent that would talk to my mom and dad on the phone and it was trained to ask them personalized questions about their life. After each “chapter” was completed a separate agent would write it up Walter Isaacson style for everyone to read so people could follow along as the stories were told. 

Since then we have been experimenting with new ways to capture and represent stories, exploring the space between a photo/video and a written journal entry or essay. What can voice on top of a photo(s) unlock? What’s the best way to make it easy, fun, and rewarding for people to capture the moments that matter to them and their friends and family? What does storytelling as a social experience look and feel like in the digital world? These are some of the things we are trying to learn.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been using the product for a variety of reasons: to capture special moments about my kids and family, to document the fun adventures and events I’ve experienced with friends, and to talk about milestones in my life. It’s the thing I am using when a simple photo won’t do the moment justice and I don’t want to write a whole thing about it. 

If you are interested in trying it out shoot me an email and I will add you to our TestFlight (iOS only right now). The only thing I ask is that you provide me some occasional feedback about what’s working or not working for you. 

I no longer have a home on the internet. My online identity exists in fragments spread across various platforms, most of which are walled gardens. 

My home first existed in AOL and my AIM profile. My friends and I loved them and it’s how we’d express who we were online. Then it shifted to MySpace. Then Facebook. Then Tumblr. Then Twitter. Then Instagram. Then my blog. Also LinkedIn.  It’s everywhere. I don’t have a single place I can drive people to. It used to be my blog, but that’s just the things I write on occasion. 

Call me Unc, but I miss the days of curating my tumblr and tending to my AIM profile. I wanted to bring that feeling back so I created my new home on the internet for myself. 

Over the past week I’ve spent ~10 hours vibecoding Things I Like. It ain't pretty and it's slow, but it does the trick for me and some friends and it's fun.

I get my own profile page. I can add all my various online presences across the web to it. I can post the things I like to it. I can categorize them myself or have AI do it and sort them into modules pinned to the top of my things page. I did this to approximate the feeling of an AIM profile where I’d list my favorite sports, friends, bands, etc. 

I’ve created a place where I can share the things I like - my taste. And where people can get a sense of who I am and see where else I exist across the web. 

I can also follow other people thinging stuff and see what they like. I can like them, rething them, and bookmark them. 

What's amazing to me is that in less than a day anyone can rebuild the things they loved about their favorite web applications, especially the ones that got destroyed by algorithms.

Maybe I yearn for the days of yore, but I think there’s a way to bring back truly human to human social experiences online and give people places to truly be themselves again. 

If you want a home on the internet to share the things you like you can try Things I Like.