Steve Sweeney ’10 unveiled his thesis project in front of a packed auditorium in Thayer Thursday evening. After a week of sending out self-call blitzes explaining how much time he spent in the library and reminding everyone how good a student he is because he wrote a thesis, Sweeney unveiled his thesis project, a new iPhone app.
The app, Hand2Face, is a carefully crafted to help manage social lives and conversation for students who are too busy on their iPhone to pay attention to their friends who are usually in their direct vicinity and trying to engage them in conversation. The product mission states, “to eliminate all douchiness associated with using an iPhone in social spaces.”
Sweeney developed the app in response to the recent trend of iGnoring, where students choose to interact with their iPhones instead of actual people who are standing only a few feet away. iGnoring can often spread through a group of friends so that multiple students in a group choose to iGnore each other instead of talking to each other.
Sweeney explained the innovation of his product, “This goes a step beyond Facebook and blitz by allowing people to completely maintain a normal social life while replacing all face to face interaction.”
Through extensive testing, Sweeney learned that Hand2Face can eliminate 83% of conversation in a circle of freshmen sitting on the green as opposed to only 72% eliminated by the control group, regular iPhones and Blackberries.
Craig Maddux ’13 was excited about the new app, “This completely revolutionizes social interaction. It should eliminate those awkward moments in line at the Hop when my weird trippee or that girl I hooked up with during orientation is in line behind me. Now I don’t need to pretend that I don’t see them because I’m texting, I can just Hand2Face them. It should also really help my game in frat basements in the awkward period before I've been drinking.”
However, not all students were open to Hand2Face. Julia Davenport ’11 complained while standing at a blitz terminal, “You just can’t replace face to face interaction with some stupid iPhone application.” Sources confirmed that Davenport does not have an iPhone.
Big Green Marketing, a resume company founded by two ‘11s, was hired to promote the new app. Although preliminary, the leading slogan is “Looking like a tool? There’s an app for that!”
Sweeney is already developing new app that removes the “Sent from my iPhone” tag from blitzes, for those who haven’t figured it out yet, to further reduce douchiness in addition to several Dartmouth specific apps such as a DBA to Real Money Converter, Pong Line Tracker (including bump prediction percentages by class year), and Where’s the Sun God?
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