Imagine if Twitter and Paypal had a love child. Meet Venmo, the latest, hippest tool for oversharing (and possibly overpaying) with your friends. The mobile app pairs with people’s bank accounts to let them pay each other or request money. The difference is that Venmo lets its users make those payments and their associated messages public on social feeds that others can comment on and like. Cliff Lampe, a social-media professor at the School of Information says, “Venmo is not an inherently social app in the way of Facebook or Twitter, but it offers emotional support and the ability to keep in touch. Young people are good at repurposing feeds and emojis and signals to mean different things and to become social even when it’s not intended to be social.” Mixing banking and social feeds is probably not for everyone, so it remains to be seen if Venmo is the next Snapchat or just another youth-focused social app destined to flame out.
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