Friendship Tests Usually Measure Memory. I Wanted to Measure the Friendship.
I had two friendship-test sites open in separate tabs. One asked whether I knew someone’s birthday and zodiac sign. The other quickly produced something that could be passed to another person. In the traffic snapshot I checked, wtfti showed about 597 visits per month and 1.13 pages per visit; bfftest.fun showed roughly 215,000 visits and 4.8 pages per visit. Those numbers do not prove why one site traveled further than the other. But they sharpened an observation that shaped KnowUsWell: a social product needs an artifact people can share. A score, a card, a label, or a link gives the interaction somewhere to go next. A questionnaire that ends with “you got 8 out of 10” is not necessarily saying anything useful about the relationship. Most friendship tests are really memory tests. Do you know their birthday? Their favorite color? Their zodiac sign? These questions are easy to write and score because there is one correct answer. But remembering facts about someone is not the same as...