YourPond Care: staying in touch, made a game you want to play

You import your contacts and in a few seconds you have everyone. Every name, most of the numbers, a few photos.

Then you open it and it doesn't really know anything yet. Not where people live, not what they do, not how you met or whose wedding you were both at. That was all still in your head, and filling it in meant typing details for a few hundred people in one sitting.

So it never happened. A list of names you never fleshed out isn't much more than the contacts app you already had.

YourPond fills a different way. You don't enter everyone at once. You answer a few small questions a day, and the water rises as you go.

One small ask a day

Every day YourPond nudges you with five things to fill in. Not five hundred. Five.

They're small on purpose - one person, one question, and most are a single tap. A minute a day becomes a habit. Twenty minutes becomes a chore you skip tomorrow.

What a round feels like

You get a person and a question. Where does someone live, how close are you to them, when did you two meet. You answer the ones you know, skip the ones you don't, and that's a round.

Then it tells you that's enough for today. You can keep going if you want, but nothing makes you feel behind for stopping. The water went up a little, and you closed the app having finished something.

Watch it grow

Every answer raises the water. The number on the Care card isn't a guilt meter counting what you haven't done. It's how much YourPond knows about your people, and it climbs every time you show up. Day one it might read 24% full, with 851 things it doesn't know yet. A month of small sessions later, it's a different number and a different card.

And once the details are in, you start to see the shape of it - who overlaps with whom, and the people out on the edges you haven't talked to in a while. That's Ripples, and it grows as you do.

You already did the hard part when you imported everyone. Give it five things tomorrow, and see what a list of names slowly turns into.