Human beings make sense of the world through stories. We see everything through the lens of a beginning, a middle and an end. Studies have shown that people even have better recall of information if it is presented as a story.
We share stories to get to know each other because they foster our understanding and knowledge. “How did you two meet?” “Where did you live before?” and even “How was your day?” are our invitations to each other.
Without stories, our collective conscience cannot learn, adapt or evolve.
The Internet is–above all else–a storytelling engine, as is demonstrated by the language social media services frame their experiences with. You capture moments with Path, and Facebook displays a literal timeline. Twitter invited early users to tell a story: “What are you doing?” From Wikipedia to Politico to YouTube to any number of other sites, storytelling is ubiquitous on the web.
An interesting story: Our remote team members can pop into the office any time they like on a big screen TV that always remains logged into a Google Hangout.
Using various services, we create pieces of stories: locations, contacts, places, photos, videos, links. These pieces are fragmented across the web – difficult to get to, and impossible to experience coherently.
At the core of Singly is a disruptive, intoxicating idea: people own these fragments and they have a right to reuse, shift, and remake them as they see fit to tell new stories.
As a first step toward empowering the average citizen, we’re releasing an app development platform and marketplace.
The Singly platform drastically extends front-end developers’ abilities. Singly handles building aggregators, maintaining servers, and battling authentication flows so that designers and front-end developers can make beautiful and useful products. Full stack engineers will be able to get to a testable product or prototype in record time, and will be able to solve more interesting problems than wrangling APIs.
Ours is a story about a new kind of digital society, and it begins with developers.
