Funiki 2.0: Togetherness
From "single-player" to "multi-player" mood tracking experience
My latest pet project is called Funiki. It’s a mood tracking/light journaling app that lets you log your moods and associated activities, and then analyze the results over time.
Why mood tracking? I consider self-awareness and understanding your own feelings quite important. “Classic” journaling is a tried-and-true approach, but it requires regular effort, which I’m sure many people lack. Exactly like me :). That’s why an app where once or twice per day you tap one emoji, with an optional note, can be a good starting point. And once you build that habit, you can go further. Or not, if mood tracking by itself is enough.
Funiki 1.0
The starting point for Funiki was to become one of the best free mood tracking apps. Of course, it had to be different in some way, because this category is very saturated. The unique feature I chose was a wide range of emojis to characterize your mood, instead of the typical “very bad” to “very good” scale.
The app also had a map showing all your moods, but without any filtering or anything like that.
Another quite unique feature is a widget that tries to find a connection between the weather in your location and how you feel. It was actually interesting for me to understand whether weather has any meaningful impact on my personal mood, so I built the feature and made it available for others as well. By the way, it looks like I’m not affected by weather in any way :).
Other than these two features, the app provides pretty typical functionality for similar apps. You can log your mood, link some activities (standard ones or your own), create a journaling note, or add a photo to review later.
And then see how your mood changes day to day, which activities make you happy and which don’t, and which ones bring a lot of controversial feelings :).
Considering the limited free time I have, I had to deprioritize many things. So Funiki uses standard Material Design icons and in general looks very simple. My idea was that more extensive and unique functionality would make up for the design weaknesses.1.
So that’s it for Funiki 1.0, which I think was completed a few months ago when I added the Weather & Your Mood widget.
BUT. I never actually imagined Funiki as a simple mood tracking app. I wasn’t even sure about such a thing as mood tracking when I first thought about some of its features. Only later, when I searched for “log an emoji instead of describing your feelings,” did I find out that this is a whole separate category of apps. I just decided to start with the “mood tracker” path and then build everything else on top of it, assuming that some people would find the app useful for this functionality alone.
Togetherness
I didn't know this word before, but I know it now thanks to this post by Matt Webb: https://interconnected.org/home/2021/09/22/togetherness, and even more inspiring https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party. I love the idea of knowing that others are sharing something with you even when you just scroll a website, watch something or play a presumably single-player game.
The examples I love and got inspiration from (besides cursor party:)) are Journey and Megogo live event streaming.
Journey is a 2012 video game where you play an adventure sometimes seeing other characters close to you. I didn’t know this when I played the game for the first time, but those characters were actually other random players!
Megogo is a Ukrainian streaming service that has a nice feature where you can choose and send an emoji while watching live sports events. You also see emojis from other people popping up.
Both examples are great at giving you a feeling of doing something together with complete and anonymous strangers. And it’s beautiful.
As far as I know, there’s a somewhat similar experience in the game Death Stranding, where you see buildings built by other players in a kind of async multiplayer. But I’ve never played it, so I’m not sure how it works in practice.
There’s also another great example of togetherness that’s probably hard to understand for people outside of Ukraine: Telegram channel reactions. You might think: “is it something like post reactions in FB? Are you all boomers there?”. But in our specific case, these reactions are very “live.” They appear quickly on each post, and you can almost feel how many people share the same emotions. The specificity of the case is that we often spend nights following particular channels to understand which missiles or drones russia sent to kill us this time and how far they are from the places we live.
Like in the screenshot above, we see that russian strategic bombers are communicating via radio, which probably means they’ll fly and launch missiles tonight. Of course, they usually complement this with a few hundred drones that are already flying.
2.0
And so we come to Funiki 2.0.
Being a father of two beautiful little twins and having a quite demanding job, I usually work on the app in short stints late in the evening. So progress is slow (even with AI, which helps a lot). But this January I finally shipped the first feature that I consider part of version 2.0. It’s called “Shout Out”. The feature is optional and was disabled by default for all existing users to avoid accidental “shouting”:).
How does it work? When you enable Shout Out, your last mood is put onto the map. Of course, it’s not showing your username. And of course, each time the location is randomly chosen within your city or region to avoid any privacy risks. The mood stays there for up to 24 hours and then disappears.
This is how an inherently “single-player” mood tracking experience turns into “multiplayer” and thus maybe, hopefully, helps people who use the app feel a little better :).
That’s it for now, but I’ve got more ideas to implement. They will definitely work better if more people use Funiki. So I hope people discover the app and start using it!
Links for convenience:
Website: https://funiki.app
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/funiki/id6749832223
Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.funiki.funiki
Reality check: it didn’t work:).