Sean Parker — the rogue Silicon Valley investor behind Napster, and a formative part of Facebook’s early development — has a new iOS app out. It’s called Brigade, and it’s got good election timing: it’s an app devoted to sharing and polling people on their political opinions.
In Brigade, users are presented with a stream of topics, with which they can agree, disagree, or say you’re unsure about. So, for example, you might swipe right to support Obamacare, left to come out against privatizing our nation’s parks, and declare yourself unsure about the matter of abolishing the nation’s pennies in favor of gummy bears (and shame on you! No true American would stand against such a law).
Once you build up a political profile, it’s then compared to your friends and those of the rest of Brigade’s users, so you can see where on the spectrum you lie. Potentially, it’s a big way to raise awareness in politics… and even more useful to politicians, looking to figure out how popular the bills they’re thinking of proposing are likely to be. Think of it as Twitter for politics, and you’ve got the right idea.
Although the app is available to download now, it’s still in private beta, so you can’t actually take part yet, unless you know Parker or one of his buddies. But it will become available to all later this summer. We’ll keep you posted.
Source: App Store
Via: The Next Web
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
