A New App Will Tell You Which of Your Annoying Friends Should Fuck Off

“My app says I can’t hang out with you.”

Annoying people in your life need to be done away with for good. They just do. Enter Lauren McCarthy
and Kyle McDonald, the creators of the vowel-less app pplkpr (People Keeper), which helps reorganize your social circle by analyzing your physical reactions to people around you. According to FastCo Design, this is how it works:

…pplkpr links up with a wristband that measures your heartbeat, such as the Mio wristband, or any other Bluetooth LE device that can transmit heart rate in real time. Using an algorithm to monitor the change in heartrate, the app will rank people in your life according to how happy, anxious or angry they make you, and can automatically text and tweet people it thinks you should hang out with more.

Ranking people in terms of importance seems like a totally great thing. You know we all love lists. Pplkpr sounds something like a personal assistant that’s basically outsourcing your passive aggression. The creators had some human guinea pigs at Carnegie Mellon test-drive the app and one guy says, “It’s a lot more definitive than just saying, ‘I’m not comfortable.'”

Other students’ reactions:

One young man enthusiastically describes the app giving him an excuse blow off people who stress him out. A woman notes that she was surprised to see how many people made her angry. “Maybe I shouldn’t hang out with Mark,” she says. “Maybe he’s kind of a dick.”