Click'd: 03/24/19

Click'd by Tamara Ireland Stone is the first of the Code Girls series (with book two coming out later this year). Allie Navarro has built an amazing friendship app at the CodeGirls summer camp. It's called CLICK'D and it uses a quiz to rank everyone's personalities so that they can find their ten best friends near them.

Allie's program has enough potential that she's planning to enter it in an upcoming youth programming contest. Eager to show her friends how it works, she does a beta test at her school and the thing goes viral — for good and bad.

Of all the programming themed fiction I've read, this one gets the scalability issues of large scale usability experience. What works for a few doesn't necessarily work the same way for a large number. And when things go viral and get well beyond the planned audience or the assumed audience, all bets are off.

Despite the flaws in the initial release of CLICK'D as described in the book, I think it sounds like a fun app with a lot of real world potential. Mind you, there are still privacy issues due to its reliance on location data, and the need to have different networks of friends — because no one has just one set of friends. Friendship is both situational and location based.

The second book is Swap'd (2019).

Five stars

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