Palnook Blog

I am sure there are many of you who are curious about Palnook’s vision. As promised here is an explanation about this project, its mission and what we find so exciting about it.

Some time a go I was walking with a friend. We were joking about the nature of growing old (though neither of us is all that old,.. honest). We observed that as you get older your pool of friends grows smaller. When you are in high school or college, it’s like a competition of who has the largest network of friends. This is a large part of why Facebook was, and still is, so popular among college age users.

And I don’t know about you, but as I get older and my free time more limited I typically do not want to spend time with people who I only marginally like. On top of this our sources of new friends tends to become more and more limited as we move into adulthood. If someone has had the same job for 10 years, they already know all the people they spend most of their day with. Or homemakers only have a limited selection of play dates or other events for social activity outside of their existing set of friends.

But we don’t generally mind. Because as we grow older and wiser we realize that its the quality of our friends that matters, not the quantity.

Around this same time my wife was joining an online forum group. The group was focused on people who were moms, so we affectionately dubbed it the “mommy board”. But in truth, this group only partially talks about life as a mom. They are a strong support network for each other in may ways beyond simply being parents. As such this group has been a great asset to it’s members, something which has really helped them through some hard times and hard decisions. As such, this group of women, most which have never met face-to-face, have grown to be good friends.

It occurred to me that this type of online group of close friends is something everyone would enjoy and benefit from. Sure we might focus on quality over quantity as we get older, but this just means that we can form even more meaningful bonds. And our online friendships should be no different.

This is the type of friendships Palnook will set out to help form. As such on Palnook you will never find:

• A count of how many friends someone has. This makes sense for LinkedIn (I’m a fan) or Facebook, but not our site.
• Sources to find existing friends. Certainly if you have a friend who would enjoy and benefit from a group you are in, invite them to join. But for the most part you already have plenty of ways to interact with your friends, you don’t need one more. Here our goal is to form new friendships, new groups.
• Features that pushes joining multiple groups. Joining extra groups will of course be a supported feature, but the goal will be to find a single group for each of our users where they can find the type of support and friendships that will last for year, or even better yet, a lifetime.

In the end this is a mission the Palnook team feels passionate about, we hope you will join us in this effort. If you would like to be a part of the Beta Testing group, simply like our Facebook page. We will be using that as our contact list of beta testers.

Thank You

- Rob