IT’S 8.18 am on a Wednesday when my phone buzzes with a prompt to “Offer your knowledge to others”. The push notification also tells me that I have “three relationships to reach out to”, including, in brackets, the name of my sister, and “four new people” to “discover” – here it mentions someone I recently emailed for work. I ignore it, then click snooze on several other reminders to reach out to my friends.
The message is from UpHabit, one of many apps that have launched in the past couple of years to help people better manage their relationships. They are based on customer relationship management software, or CRMs, which are now routinely used by companies for things like compiling customer data and offering up suggestions on how to retain business. These new apps, personal CRMs, offer similar services, but the relationships they help you “manage” are with your friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances.
Advertisement
In an era when people tend to move house or job multiple times, making and neglecting relationships as they go, these tools promise to help us stay in touch – and be better, more thoughtful friends. Yet how many people can we genuinely stay connected to? And if I send a message to someone because an app prompted me to, is it less meaningful somehow than if I remember myself?
To understand why so many personal CRMs, or PRMs, have popped up since 2018, what that says about our relationships and whether push notifications can really make us better friends, I gave a few a try. It didn’t go quite as I expected.
If these kinds of apps sound tempting, you are currently spoiled for choice. From the least to the most inexplicably named, you can now download Ntwrk, UpHabit, Plum Contacts, Dex, Garden, Levitate, Monaru, Clay and Hippo.
They don’t just prompt you to “discover new people” before you have had your morning coffee. Most work in a similar way: you import your contacts to the app, label and tag them as friends, family or co-workers, for instance, set reminders for when to contact them and log the topics you last spoke about. In theory, this means you will never forget the name of an acquaintance’s kid or to ask your uncle how his knee surgery went, and you will generally have stronger, better relationships as a result.
“Everyone is very busy, and if you switch jobs or move continents, you kind of lose touch with people,” says Neil Wainwright, founder. “I decided to build UpHabit because I wanted to help with that situation – I wanted to help people stay connected.” When Wainwright first uploaded his contacts to the app, he was reminded of a colleague he worked with a decade ago. “I reached out to him, reconnected with him… and my wife and I actually went out for dinner with him and his wife, and it was a delightful time.” They are still in touch.
UpHabit is by far the most popular PRM on the market, something Wainwright attributes to his “obsession” with his customers. He says the app is constantly revised based on user feedback: in 2019, the team updated it 92 times, including enabling birthday reminders, adding a tab for recommended reading and allowing users to tag people in bulk.
Making it work
Another thing that changes occasionally is the wording of push notifications, which Wainwright says have been refined. Still, compared with other apps, Ჹ’s prompts have a slightly preachy tone: “Form great bonds by offering to help someone”, “Nurture relationships before you need them”, “A simple ‘how are you?’ can go a long way”.
I didn’t just ignore the “Offer your knowledge to others” notification, I actually laughed aloud. It felt strange and clinical to me, and the command seemed almost impossible to act upon (“Hi Beth, I know we haven’t spoken in a while, but ideally you should caramelise your onions for up to an hour”). As well as UpHabit, I tried Dex and Ntwrk, but similarly struggled with their reminders. In a world of ever-increasing push notifications, it suddenly felt as though friendship had become another task to keep on top of.
“These new tools promise to help us become better, more thoughtful friends to others”
On a practical level, I found Ntwrk’s commands better and easier to act on than Ჹ’s (“How about sending Allie a quick message?”). I also generally found its interface nicer, though its tutorial features characters from TV drama Mad Men in place of your contacts, which I found bizarre. Dex, a desktop application, was also visually pleasing as it uses emojis to help categorise people, but I found it buggy when importing contacts from Facebook. With each app, I set up reminders for who I wanted to contact and when, and got notifications when the time arose.
I thought these apps might be worth a try based on my own experience coming up short in a friendship. Towards the end of 2019, I forgot to text a friend to ask how her job interview went, remembering only weeks later when we went for dinner. I felt terrible, especially as I was one of the only friends she had told about the interview and because I had made a mental note to text her. This is just the kind of problem a PRM aims to solve. But why should we now need these digital reminders when, for centuries, we have simply relied on our brains, calendars and stray Post-it notes?
“Life is busier now for sure, and we move more, so relationships get disrupted by distance more often,” says Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist and anthropologist at the University of Oxford. “I think this is why Facebook took off so suddenly – it caught a generation that was much more mobile and realised that this badly affected close relationships that they wanted to keep going.”
In 2010, Dunbar wrote the book How Many Friends Does One Person Need? and posited that, cognitively, humans are only able to maintain 150 stable relationships, something now known as Dunbar’s number. He says that, on average, we all have five intimate relationships (“shoulders to cry on”), 15 close friends and family, 50 good friends (the people you would invite to a party) and 150 friends (people who might turn up to your funeral). Dunbar hit upon these figures by studying different primate brains, including ours, and comparing them with social group size. Put simply, he concluded that our brains aren’t big enough to maintain more friendships.
If our brains can’t do it on their own, can apps help? Early into my experiment, a week-in-review update from UpHabit chastised me for only actively managing four friendships, saying the app works best when “enhancing 50+” relationships, with “top Habiteers” managing more than 300. Dunbar says it is unlikely that apps will allow us to foster more than 150 stable relationships, because “the constraint is in our heads” – although he does say we can have up to 500 acquaintances.
Beyond the mental limitations, Dunbar says we simply don’t have enough time for more relationships. Apps can help with time management, by allowing you to reach out to two people at once, for instance, but they can’t magically create more dates in the diary to have dinner, or renew our interest in someone we were naturally drifting apart from.
“We can all have about 150 friends. Our brains aren’t big enough to maintain more”
Theoretically, then, while PRMs can’t help us have more friends than ever before, they should be able to help us better maintain the relationships we have. Does this work in practice? Dunbar’s research has shown that we usually have to see someone at least once a week to keep them in our top five friends, says Dunbar, whereas once a month will suffice for the 15 close friends layer. “You have to see the whites of their eyes,” he says. Historically, face-to-face meetings, storytelling, sharing food and drink and performing rituals have all been essential in-person interactions for maintaining friendships. Yet in the context of the ongoing global coronavirus crisis, just how well we can recreate these experiences using technology, and specifically video chat apps such as Zoom and House Party, is being tested like never before.
At any rate, most PRMs don’t claim you should only reach out to friends via the internet – and on UpHabit, at least, you can log whether you chatted through text, email, on the phone or face-to-face. Yet when the prods to connect pop up, I found that I ended up throwing out a quick message, and was disappointed by the artificiality of the ensuing exchange. After two weeks, I started hitting snooze on notifications.
Lucas Bazemore, co-founder of a now defunct PRM called Ryze, sheds light on my difficulties. “Our customer retention was atrocious,” he says. “People would start using it for about a week, and then they’d say, ‘I don’t really know what I’m going to get out of this’.”
Bazemore was motivated to launch the app when he was at university because he realised he was likely to lose touch with friends after graduation. He also admits he had “grandiose” ideas about taking on LinkedIn.
He acknowledges that PRMs can be difficult to stay on top of for most people. “It’s a lot of work,” he says. “The benefit is too vague and too far into the future to justify all of the inputs required.” The reason so many inputs are needed is because it is really hard to consolidate all the applications we already use – emails, calendars, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, phone logs – into a single PRM. The apps can also wind up feeling redundant. I didn’t bother with birthday reminders in my PRMs because Facebook has done the job perfectly for years.
Another issue is whether we truly want to stay so connected. “By nature our relationships are ephemeral,” says Bazemore. I’m happy to naturally let some relationships go – I don’t want to keep in touch with everyone I met at university, for example. It feels strange to force friendships when it may be time to drift apart.
As such, I saw no immediate benefits from the apps, and the long-term benefits advertised felt weirdly transactional. For example, Dex’s home page promises you can “turn the person at a networking event into someone who has your back”. On a practical level, I also found that I remembered the appointments, anniversaries and anguishes of close friends, making the reminders redundant. Setting reminders for people I was less close with – to ask an acquaintance how a work project went, for instance – left me feeling more creepy than caring when I reached out. After all, how would people feel if they knew I was only chatting to them because an app told me to?
“The reminders left me feeling more creepy than caring when I reached out”
“Most of us have electronic calendars where we input our friends’ birthdays, so an app isn’t that far of a stretch from that concept. But if we are using software to remind us how to be a friend, that seems a little more mechanical,” says , a professor of counselling at Northern Illinois University and author of Toxic Friendships: Knowing the rules and dealing with the friends who break them.
Wainwright understands this criticism. He says he doesn’t like to use the term “personal CRM” as it can be off-putting to the people who are being relationship managed. On a personal level, Degges-White says she would “like to think a good friend wouldn’t need an app to remember that I’d just broken up with my partner or that I’d gotten a new dog last week”.
Remember, remember
Despite my difficulties, many people swear by PRMs. Timothy Luoma, a Presbyterian pastor in Plattsburgh, New York, uses UpHabit to remember the details of his parishioners’ lives, in particular, to keep track of death anniversaries. “The overall goal is to make sure that I am taking good care of my entire congregation, and not just those people who I see regularly, or the squeaky wheels,” he says.
Luoma also uses reminders to call each member of his congregation on their birthday. “Phones are not new. Calendars are not new. So why didn’t previous pastors call people on their birthdays? Well, if I had to use a calendar of birthdays and then had to look up people’s phone numbers, I might not do it, or it might seem like a hassle,” he says.
The more I use the apps, the more I am convinced they suit niche needs like Luoma’s. It is also easy to see how PRMs could be helpful to people who have memory loss or who may struggle with social connection. At least anecdotally, for now the apps seem to be favoured by people whose careers rely on intertwining the personal and professional, and, unsurprisingly, early adopters of new technology.
When I ask Wainwright to put me in touch with UpHabit users, the first three people he refers me to all work in tech. Edmund White, who is at a software company in Brooklyn, tells me that before downloading UpHabit he kept a spreadsheet of his acquaintances after learning that networking is crucial for success. “I knew this was one of my weak points and something I was not comfortable with,” he says. White maintains 58 relationships in UpHabit. Ironically, using the app has made him need it less. “I now think about others and will sometimes follow up without being prompted by the app,” he says.
Despite the hype, the number of people using PRMs remains small. UpHabit has just over 25,000 downloads. Bazemore says Ryze was downloaded less than 10,000 times and Dex’s operations are so small that its founder Kevin Sun sent me a personal email offering to show me the ropes after I signed up. Later, he told me this unusual move provides crucial feedback for making the product better.
In truth, PRMs have been popping up since 2011, says Bazemore. “Once every six months some venture capitalist on Twitter will have a tweet storm about PRMs and everybody in college thinks, ‘Oh, I can build that’,” he says. Most of Ryze’s biggest competitors when it launched in 2017 are also now defunct. “We had a list of about 10 that existed two years ago – they don’t exist now.”
Ultimately, it feels as though PRMs reveal less about modern friendships and more about the frenzied start-up culture trying to optimise every area of our lives. I don’t doubt these apps are useful for some people, I’m just not one of them. How’s that for offered knowledge?
