Highlight, The Fall Of A Remarkable App

When I firstly heard of Highlight that launched at SXSW a couple of years ago, I thought “this is it”. For the first time, someone had developed an app that was telling me where the people I cared about were. The concept behind Highlight is pretty simple. You just have to sign up with your Facebook account and wait for notifications. The app sends you a notification when someone of your friends or friends of friends is nearby.

A concept like this one in conferences is disruptive, but even in big cities where you end up meeting your friends once every six months. Work, family, hobbies don’t help you keep the relationships that you have built over the years, even if behind the corner there is that old friend of yours that might be your co-founder to build a billion dollar company. Highlight aims at solving that problem, by connecting you with your friends.

After a couple of years, it seems that the initial momentum is completely gone. When you start getting email notifications from the co-founder that wants to increase the user engagement, you think that they are a bit desperate. I was one of the first early adopters and supporters of that idea and I still am, but I started wondering if it was going to survive from day one. The difficulty in creating engagement with an app like this is in finding the right community of people.

Even though I installed the app as soon as it was available, I never used it, because no one was using it in Rome. Although I tried to force a couple of friend of mine to install the app, they rejected the idea and they thought it was creepy. In a world where the NSA can spy us at any moment and the geo location of our mobile phones is always active, nothing is creepy, if you know how things work. However it seems people are still stuck on these principles. If they don’t know they are tracked, they are happy, even if they suspect that; as soon as they know, they go mental.

Highlight had to start small and expand slowly. You can’t release an app like that worldwide. You need to start working on small communities of people that can spread the usage of the app thanks to the word of mouth model. After that, you can decide to move to the next city, state or even country. When I was using the app, I didn’t get any notifications, apart from a journalist with who I had one like in common. Is a single like enough to get introduced to another person?

No, it’s not and that’s why I stopped using it. In the past months, I have tried again, in a different city, Manchester. After a couple of weeks, it turned out that no one was using the app and that Highlight was trying to show me some strange person with who I had nothing in common. Another massive problem that this app is facing is battery usage. In a world where I like to be tracked and I tend to use more than four apps that are constantly processing, there is no space for an app that doesn’t create the engagement that I want.

Although the company raised $4M and has recently released the second version, this app is not for me anymore. Nevertheless, I believe the idea is still alive, it’s the execution that killed the app, not what it was supposed to do. With the introduction of smart glasses and smart watches, this technology will be directly implemented and people won’t even notice the shift, from a world where we don’t meet people to a world where we meet people because a device tells us where they are.

Highlight 2.0 from Paul Davison on Vimeo.