There were many cool new things about the iPhone 4. It had that slim, boxy build, the screen was far crisper, but there was one thing that every new owner wanted to play with first: FaceTime. Unfortunately, many couldn’t. If you were a first-day iPhone 4 owner, chances are you were alone with your fancy new thing. You’d have to wait until your more practical friends thought over the purchase or waited until they were up for an upgrade.
Such is the case with the Apple Watch, except this time, the loneliest feature isn't about our faces, it's about our heartbeats. When Apple first introduced us to the device, one of the most-hyped, social capabilities was that it would give us a new way of communicating. We could share a heartbeat to a partner, sketch a flower for a friend, send a simple tap to the inside of someone’s wrist.
Now new owners can do all these things...unless, of course, they don’t know anyone else with the Apple Watch. If you’ve found yourself alone with the device, you’re, well, not alone. Now there's a subrreddit for all the single hearts out there: R/lonelyheartbeats.
“It started as a group of Watch buyers who didn’t know anyone else that was getting one and wanted to play with the Watch to watch heartbeats, sketches, and tap features,” redditor nooshaw tells me. Nooshaw started r/lonelyheartbeats as a place for solitary Watch users to share their iMessage details in order to use the device’s most intimate features.
R/lonelyheartbeats has 88 subscribers so far, and two dozen requests, according to nooshaw, who says it’s been more successful than expected. “Looks like people are connecting and tapping each other," nooshaw says, adding, "with dick pics being the norm.”
Sadly, nooshaw isn't actually able to participate in r/lonelyheartbeats yet, as the subreddit creator's own Apple Watch is currently still in “processing purgatory.” But what are the active strangers sending? “Mostly people writing ‘hi’ or drawing stuff, tapping and sending heartbeats. I tend to send them each one back so they can feel what it’s like, too,” redditor HelloKiitty says. “I’m mostly a guinea pig for them, but I don’t mind!”
I asked if HelloKiitty had made any real friends through r/lonelyheartbeats. “Just one, who I talk to maybe every two days, [and] my partner and I also send each other taps, sketches, and heartbeats daily,” the redditor says, though plenty of new people continue to send their sketches and taps. “Random taps and stuff are daily too, sometimes from new people who added me via r/lonelyheartbeats or ones I’ve deleted to make room and they tapped me back again and I read them.”
While Reddit is the unofficial meeting place for internet strangers, it’s not the only community helping lonely Apple Watch owners find new friends. ShareTheHeartbeat is doing the same thing, through what at least appears to be a more organized process. “I started ShareTheHeartbeat on the 20th of April, a few days before the launch of the Apple Watch, after thinking how cool it would be to be able to send and try using the heartbeat, digital touch, and sketch functions of the Watch, really utilizing the new technology and the ‘personal’ side of it,” creator Dave Spalton tells me via email. He says the community has around 100 users now, and is accepting more every day.
Using ShareTheHeartbeat is as easy as signing up for an email newsletter, but accomplishes the task of giving you a digital, biometric pen-pal of sorts. You send over name, email address, desired username, and iMessage address the site will find someone in the world for you to immediately start “heartbeating” with. “Our users come from around the world,” the site reads, “so no matter what time it is where you are, you are bound to find someone to HeartBeat.”
Spalton says he’s met “a few people” through ShareTheHeartbeat, one who’s even only a few miles from his office in the U.K. “A lot of the users I tap/sketch are in the US, so I constantly find myself tapping them while I’m working or bored.” In fact, the first tap he ever received was from a user in the US. “I was in the middle of a job interview. Made me jump a bit,” he says.
But because this is the internet, when we find a strange, simple, beautiful way to make friends, there has to be an evil flipside. Because r/lonelyheartbeats and ShareTheHeartbeat require you to share your email address and iMessage information with strangers, there are very real concerns about getting spammed. All it would take is a few nefarious users to sign up, take your account information and sell it off to scraper sites. By signing up, you could also be asking for a deluge of dick drawings and similar digital harassment.
ShareTheHeartbeat has protections set up so that you can report anyone using the feature inappropriately. (You can, of course, also block someone in iMessage on your own.) In regards to ShareTheHeartbeat’s own security protections, the site doesn’t ask you for your Apple account password, instead generating one for you. "To combat that issue, the email addresses are all parsed using PHP and GD image library in a new window so the users systems cannot copy them at all," says Spalton. "Eventually we are planning an on app itself (Indiegogo campaign [forthcoming]), to hopefully have it all integrated. At the moment, users need to ‘swap’ their own heartbeat address by having it on the site."
There’s also the easy solution of creating an email address specifically for sending random people your heartbeats and crudely drawn poop emojis.
Such is always the risk with internet intimacy. And eventually, the necessity for heartbeat strangers will end. “I figure it will die out over time as more people get Watches,” nooshaw says. But who knows? Perhaps the Apple Watch will remain a bridge for making nameless, faceless biometric friends.
