Hello Network, the new social networking app from the founder of Orkut, lets you focus your interests; here’s how

To get started, hello Network users should select at least five hobbies or “personas,” as the company likes to call it. You can choose to go with “Anime Fan”, “Animal Lover”, “Artist”, “Baseball fan”, “Car Buff”, “Chef”, or hundreds of other characters featured by the app. Try to choose more than five and you will get a message that says “Persona slots full”. Keeping the Indian audience in mind, characters like “Cricket” and “Bollywood” have also been added. The app also supports country codes and languages.

In an email interaction, Orkut Buyukkokten, co-founder and CEO of hello Network, said indianexpress.com the reason why personas are limited to just five. “When our users choose five interests from a list of over 100, they end up choosing the ones that are really interesting to them. As we grow up, our interests and passions change. One of the great things about hello is that you can change your character at any time, ”he says.

The Hello Network app shows you a personalized “folio” or feed containing messages or “words” of common interest from other people. Of course, hello Network is not for everyone, especially not for people who are used to browsing all kinds of random topics on social media. Personas are limited to five, which makes the app very specific.

So how do creators keep tabs on people actually posting content that interests them? “Hello introduces a higher level of passion categories that we call personas. When users post content, they tag personas. This makes all content organized, relevant, discoverable and searchable,” says the hello Network co-founder.

The Hello network app shows you a “folio” or personalized feed containing messages or common points of interest from other people.

How to use Hello Network?

Currently, hello is available in 12 countries and in five languages, including English, Portuguese, French, Hindi and Spanish. You will need to create a profile to start using the service, and all fields are required. The app asks for your photo, first name, last name, location (to display personalized feeds), gender, date of birth, and content languages. Enter your phone number and password and you will get a code on your registered cell phone number. Put in the code and you’re good to go.

The Hello Network is a great way to discover and share posts of common interest. The best thing about the service is that it allows you to keep tabs on the latest genres that interest you the most. You can join communities to see trends or create one. The app also allows you to chat with other members of a community.

However, for a platform of common interest that hello is trying to create, posting videos is crucial. After all, how long can you keep looking at photos? Frankly, hello Network is a service that can get interesting if video posts with recipes or crafts etc. are shared. Since the app is still in its early stages, we can expect more types of content, including links to references to video content, Buyukkokten reveals.

“We are also studying the integration of videos into hello. We want to make sure that all the features we add will provide a positive user experience, ”he said, adding that the beta app is fairly stable and all known bugs will be fixed before India launches.

Regarding friends on the hello Network, you can either send a friend request to the people in your folio, invite friends to join the hello network via their mobile number or simply grant access to the application to your contacts to send requests directly. There is a chat window that allows you to message anyone from their profile.

The Hello network application is currently available on Google Play Store and App Store as an “Unreleased” version.

Hello Network’s user interface (UI) is fairly straightforward, with the most important tabs lined up at the very top. Just swipe right to switch between profiles, communities, folio, messages, and notifications. The application opens by default the folio tab. Swipe down to browse other people’s posts on the folio tab. You can like a post by clicking on the heart icon or post a comment as well.

Another unique feature of the Hello network is the “karma” and “achievements” features that appear in the profile tab. Karma Points are earned gradually when other people like or comment on ratings on your profile. The “achievements” feature has different levels that end over time when a user successfully completes specific challenges. For example, you can create more than five notes of your interest and more notes to get a certain number of likes and comments to complete level one; etc.