As you get older and join the working world, it gets more and more difficult to keep up with old friends. Get togethers become less common and have to be scheduled in advance. That sucks. MochaMeet hopes to fix this problem, and for us, it really did.
MochaMeet is essentially a friendship planner. Fire up the app and connect it to your Facebook account. MochaMeet shows you who’s nearby based on where they list their current location on their Facebook profile and lets you choose who you’d like to make some time with. Add those people to the list of attendees, name the group, and choose how regularly the gathering will occur.
The idea is to simplify the task of getting groups of people together, all of who have their own plans and agendas that can be hard to organize. The premise of MochaMeet posits that even with all of today’s technology, it’s too complicated to do this on your own. Group texts and emails get cluttered; Facebook events get ignored; and working across multiple platforms to talk to everyone gets confusing. All of that takes place in MochaMeet through an in-app chat.
Once you and all your friends agree to the details of your meet up, the group creator can set them in stone, confirming the time, place, and date that works for everyone involved. If you’d like to make the meeting a regular part of your routine, set the plans to repeat as often as you’d like to see the people in person. (It’ll vary depending on how these friends have changed over the years. Pick up right where you left off with an old friend? Make it a weekly get together. A pal from high school who has a kid and just talks about changing diapers for an hour may be a one time thing.)
This doesn’t just go for the people near you. If you’re traveling and want to plan a meet up while on the road with a friend who moved, zoom out on the map and find out where those lost connections landed and schedule some time with them. All your friends are pinned on a map, making it easy to scroll the country and see where everyone has ended up. Even if you’re not planning to meet anyone, it’s a fun visualization.
Everything MochaMeet promises, it delivers on. The problem is, it feels a little redundant. There are plenty of calendar apps that allow users to tag people and places to specific events. MochaMeet does have the handy claim of unifying the planning process into a single app but it requires you to log in via Facebook, prompting us to wonder why one wouldn’t just plan via Facebook? You’re only connecting with people who are on that social network anyway, and they have to accept the invitation to MochaMeet on Facebook. It feels like an extra step. If your friends are more willing to use a platform dedicated to making plans to get organized, maybe it’s worth it. Otherwise, it seems superfluous.
