Radical Apps: Reflyer

We wanted to spread the word about this one Radical App, invented right here in Boston. It’s called REFLYER. Go ahead, download and file away under: “What’s going on in the ‘hood?”: Reflyer is a crowd-sourced collated list of flyers in your neighborhood. By giving a second life to flyers on a digital street pole of sorts, Reflyer operates on face value as a sort of ‘Instagram for local events.’ Anyone can take a picture of a cool flyer they see, and it will be posted to the app and categorized by date and genre. Thus resulting in a quite scroll-able list of whatever’s cool & cultural &  happening in your zone!

In some ways its lack of content is actually a plus: a particular curation of the content allows for a more concentrated experience. Unlike the Boston Calendar (bostoncalendar.com), which displays an overwhelming amount of activities, Reflyer offers a very specific range of opportunities, with dope art to boot!

I do have my qualms about certain aspects of the experience. A lack of explicit user profiles or rating system allows the system as-is to get gamed by bad actors and I’ve already seen a few posts that really stretch the definition of ‘flier’ (unless you consider a hastily drawn marker ad on paper to be a flier).  Editor picks’ solves this issue but the model as-is doesn’t scale yet. Additionally, you don’t know who uploaded which flier and there’s evidence to believe that at least a few of the fliers currently uploaded are from the person who posted the flier itself. User Profiles of some sort would probably alleviate that problem, so I imagine such a feature will come in the future.

Inevitably, Reflyer offers a community-centric approach to local activities and is certainly a candidate for replacing Facebook’s evil monopoly.  Give it a shot, let me know what you think!