Peoplekeeper judges your friends so you don't have to

25 Jan 2015 • engadget.com

One episode of beloved sitcom Community features a pair of developers who build an app that enables people to give their human interactions a score out of five. In the show, the idea quickly turns dystopian, but is there something in the idea that an app can teach you which of your friends you shouldn’t be hanging out with? That’s the concept behind pplkpr – peoplekeeper – software that behaves like a food diary, but for your social life.

That was a great episode. But do we really want an app making these kinds of decisions for us?

Once you’ve downloaded it to your iOS device and plumbed in your Facebook contacts, whenever you’re about to meet, or have just left someone, you can tell pplkpr how they made you feel. For instance, if I were to meet my (entirely theoretical) colleague Aaron for a drink, I could then tell pplkpr how angry, bored or aroused I feel.

So I tell it how I fell about people and later it tells me how I feel about people? Color me not impressed so far.

It’s not a particularly specific system, which is why you can also pair the app to a heart-rate sensing device that’ll monitor your social vitals in real time.

Ok, now this sounds a lot more interesting. Capture biometric data that is beyond my conscious thought and then correlate that against who I hang out with. It seems that could lead to some interesting results maybe.