Field Guide

Introducing Duet

by Nathan Heleine

Duet is a little application that fits in your pocket, designed to foster and inspire meaningful one-to-one experiences in the real world – a collaborative life to-do list, digital datebook and private messaging instrument, blended with our top-secret original formula for nostalgia and synchronicity. Duet is made for you and the people you love.

Why We’re Making It

Our daily interactions have become incredibly fleeting and fragmented, as we now juggle more connections and digest more information than at any other point in human history. In the process we’re also living much more public lives. Our current digital platforms, on the whole, facilitate a remarkable volume of interpersonal communication with gusto, but they also represent an imbalance. They emphasize brevity over depth, scale over relevance, and utility over sincerity, to a degree that threatens the quality of our most precious relationships and experiences.

“Never in our history have we known more people less.” ~ @rands

Throughout the past decade or so, the world has seen an immeasurable amount of innovation along the public trajectory of online social constructs, but relatively very little innovation along the private trajectory. We’re now stumbling into an unmapped frontier for new digital platforms built to foster a greater sense of intimacy, nostalgia, and personal discovery. They won’t necessarily replace our existing tools; they’ll dance with them and around them, facilitating a healthier balance between our online and offline worlds.

We see an emerging pattern of spaces that celebrate individual expression, bridge online connections to the physical world, and amplify our most meaningful relationships. These spaces cater to increasingly focused networks and their unique needs. They’re built to provide deep value for individuals first, and built to scale second. And in many cases, these spaces are engineered for a higher degree of privacy and control.

Duet is one such space.

How It Works

In the world of our little app, a duet is a plan (or a wish) consisting of two parts:

1. What do you want to do?
2. Who do you want to do it with?

Duets can be romantic, platonic, and just about everything in between. They can be as simple as grabbing dinner around the corner, or as complex as building a new city on the sea. They can be real or not, tangible or fuzzy, one-time or recurring events, action-oriented or the stuff dreams are made of.

Duet assumes that you already know wonderful people and provides a fun way to do more things with them on a regular basis. Over time it becomes a rich digital journal, a lockbox of sorts, chronicling the experiences you share with the most important people in your life.

We designed Duet around the notion that your experiences are unrepeatably yours, and we hope you’ll create and live more of them with the people that truly light you up.

Go out and play, together.

Duet for iPhone is currently in private beta, with an expected launch of Summer 2011. Visit duet.me to learn more and follow @duetme on Twitter for updates.