Speeds of up to 177 km/h, real-time maps and even the risk of messages being lost: how the apps that challenge WhatsApp work by deliberately slowing down our conversations.
In an age in which a message crosses the planet in a fraction of a second, someone thought that real progress was to make it arrive much, much… later. It’s the idea behind Carrier Pidge and of Roosttwo independent apps that try to bring a now forgotten element back into digital messaging: waiting.
Instead of immediately delivering what is written, in fact, these two apps simulate the journey of a bird between sender and recipient, calculating its duration based on the geographical distance. No double ticks to check every thirty seconds, no psychological obligation to respond immediately, the message simply goes out, the virtual bird takes flight and all that remains is to wait.
Digital pigeon
Carrier Pidge takes the idea particularly seriously. After you create a profile, you add friends and indicate an approximate geographic area, not your precise address or continually tracked location. When a message is written, the app calculates the distance between the two users using the coordinates and entrusts it to a virtual carrier pigeon that flies at the overall remarkable speed of 110 miles per hour, i.e. just under 177 km/h.
A text sent a few streets away can therefore take only a few seconds, while crossing a continent can take hours. You can even track your journey on a map, complete with itinerary and estimated time of arrival. To make the simulation even more plausible, the speed can vary randomly by 25% (more or less) and what’s more, 0.2% of the pigeons get “lost” during the journey and the message will never arrive, without either the sender or recipient receiving notifications about it. Finally, reading confirmations are also missing (the fateful blue ticks!), thus eliminating another of the small sources of anxiety in modern messaging.
Social flocks
Roost Social starts from the same philosophy, but transforms the pigeon into a kind of Tamagotchi with wings. Here too, you add friends via username, write the message and observe on the map the bird that actually covers the distance between the two geographical areas, but without the probability that the message will disappear into thin air. On the other hand, you can collect different species – from common pigeons to crows and fantastic creatures – each with its own speed, often inspired by that of the real animal. Birds can be fed and upgraded through small minigames that level them up – obviously, a faster bird will deliver the message first.
The app also includes group conversations, called “Nests”, which can have up to 21 participants, photo messages and a pen pal system. The philosophy declared by the developers is “Friends, not feeds”: no algorithm that selects content and no more infinite scrolling. In short, only people chosen by the user will appear on the app. On Android, Roost has already exceeded 100,000 downloads, a modest result compared to the billions of WhatsApp users but not exactly negligible for a social network of this kind.
Slow messaging
Why all this? The basic idea, deliberately funny, was born as a response to a very serious problem: the pressure caused by constant availability, notifications and conversations that really seem to never end. Behind the game there is in fact a concept that has been studied for some time also in the psychology of digital communication: making a behavior more difficult or slower can change its frequency. It is the “friction” principle, already exploited for example by apps that require a few seconds of waiting before opening a social network.
Carrier Pidge and Roost apply the same concept directly to conversation: that is, they do not prevent communication, but eliminate the expectation of an immediate response. Naturally, they are not suitable tools for an emergency, a work message or the classic “buy milk” sent while someone is already in front of the supermarket checkout. No research has yet shown that using virtual pigeons improves psychological well-being, the experiment, however, remains interesting because the two apps are trying to overturn one of the fundamental rules on which technology has built its success: immediacy, reminding us that, probably, the real urgency in today’s frenetic world is to take a break.
