A quiet signal between friends.
Remember IM status? You could see that your friends were online, idle, busy or offline. You could see when they were available to connect, without ambiguity. That kind of presence has been missing in our world of always-on devices, ironically making it more difficult to know when a person is available to connect.
We don't just call anymore. Why? We message… and then we wait. What is the expectation of a response? How do we know when someone is open to conversation? Aldis exists to help answer these questions organically.
How do we know when someone is nearby, available for coffee? We can share our exact location… or nothing. What if I wanted to just share the town I'm in? Or the time zone? Aldis is designed to share this information in differing layers of fidelity based on your preferences.
Aldis is a presence layer intended to promote human connection. Your contacts are sorted into layers: your closest friend(s), the next most close, the fifteen, the fifty, the hundred and fifty, and the long tail beyond.
Your friends see your availability and location in different fidelities. Your closest layer sees the room you're in, and your schedule. The next sees the neighborhood, and some general times. The next layer would see the city, and a day in which you might be free. By the time you reach the long tail, all that remains is a Mark, a quiet ping that you're alive and connected.
The ultimate goal is to provide a gentle signal that you're available to connect. How you connect is up to you.
Aldis sorts your whole world into layers. It never asks you to cap the list or leave anyone out.
Every contact is hashed before it's stored. Your raw names and numbers never leave in the clear.
You decide how close someone is. They never see which layer you placed them in.
The innermost layer holds two people at most, for a partner, a co-parent, or a child. Aldis never puts someone there for you.