Realcontacts promotes face-to-face interactions in the digital world

To bridge the increasing divide between our real and digital lives, a team of international entrepreneurs has developed Realcontacts, a San Francisco-based social app that promotes face-to-face interactions and relationship evaluation features.

As social networks continue to proliferate and become an integral part of our everyday lives, the way we interact with our friends is changing.

Founded in 2011, the Realcontacts app for iOS allows users to easily connect with their friends, set up face- to-face meetings, and evaluate their encounters to ultimately gain a fresh perspective on their real life interactions and relationships.

“We developed Realcontacts to help us reflect on our interactions, to reinvigorate the meaning of cultivating dynamic relationships with those around us,” says Realcontacts Founder and CEO Maurizio Tripi.

Users can tap on “Meeting Check-In” to check in to a meeting and record the date, time, location and individuals attending. Based on their meeting, users can then tap “Meeting Evaluation” to rate the meeting according to their own personal value system. Value system labels within the app are fully customizable and can be anything from “Fun” to “Patience”, and “Reciprocity”, all of which have a set value that can be increased or decreased depending on the experience.

With a focus on the highest level of privacy, Realcontacts allows its users to set the feedback and evaluation section that impacts their contact’s reputation to be anonymous. Additionally, the “Reminders” feature reminds users to keep in touch with their connections.

According to Realcontacts’ Co-founder and CFO Andrea Tripi, the evaluation features are more than just giving friends a “good review”, rather, they are about analyzing how we interact with each other, how we value our friendships, and how our interactions reflect our own behavior.

“We’ve designed Realcontacts to have our real relationships, not our online social networks, as the primary focus,” says Realcontacts” Technology Lead Antonio Sala, a PhD in Computer Science and former Data researcher at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose.

“We believe that Realcontacts can be an invaluable tool in our society, something that can have a positive effect in a much needed social shift, and we are proud to be part of it,” he adds.