Not Tinder, but...

Worldbuilding

(Originally posted on Facebook)

It suddenly occurred to me today that a supers smartphone app would solve so many problems in contacting other supers (this is distinct from "super Tinder" which I have also talked about).

Problem 1: What's it called?

The names I come up with seem very...quotidian. SuperTalk. ParaGraph or MetaGraph. The cutest so far is "App, App, and Away".

I'm thinking of an app that does the following (or says it does; whether it really does it is left as an exercise for the GM):

• anonymizes or never gets location info
• offers the choice of really deleting exchanges or, like SnapChat, deletes them after a certain period of time
• encrypts data that's transmitted or saved, so if someone makes a copy of your phone somehow, they don't have a way to read your info. (I leave actual details to someone with expertise, but I'm thinking of a key that's stored somewhere and everything is encrypted in a new way after each look, though the transmission of the key might be vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack
• does not translate but handles multiple language code sets
• provides a list of enrolled supers, so if you've never met Fantastica you can still send him/her/it a message.

Problem 2: How are people verified?

Given that the supers population is limited, this might actually be a use for blockchain algorithms. My tentative answer is that some other user verifies you. So you can *get* the app off iTunes or the Google store or whatever the equivalent is, but you can't *use* the app until you're verified.

There might be a second app for getting in touch with heroes, but I think it would be like looking at a celebrity's Instagram: every fifth entry is "I love you so much! Please answer this!"