Tuned Out

I don’t understand why anyone would need this Tuned app that Facebook made for couples, and I’m pretty sure it’s not just because I’m a crusty old arsehole this time. I, a normal person, just can’t grasp much of the appeal.

A space for your love story

A private space where you and your significant other can share everyday expressions of love and celebrate your past, present and future together. Creatively express yourself, share your mood, complete a fun challenge and build a digital scrapbook of your special memories.

Please note, users must be 13+ to use Tuned. Currently available on iOS only.

Be Present with each other.
– Set your moods so you can stay tuned in to how you’re both feeling throughout the day without even having to ask.
– Exchange notes, voice messages, cards, custom stickers, and music to effortlessly show your romantic side and connect with your partner on a deeper level.
– Take Tuned Couple’s Challenges to learn new things about each other and have some fun together.

Celebrate your Past.
– Reminisce on all your shared artifacts and milestones
– Turn your favorite memories into a celebratory highlights video.

Look Forward to your Future.
– Add important dates in your relationship (like birthdays & anniversaries).
– Create shared lists for all your small, special moments (like bucket lists, date night ideas, and inside jokes).

Ok, so maybe those highlight videos might be kind of neat. Would be fun to look back at now and again. If nothing else they might save whoever gets tasked with making the nice slideshow of memories that’s going to play on a loop at your funeral some time, which is certainly considerate of you. But the rest of this? Your boy is totally lost.

Knowing someone’s mood without having to ask? Dude. Asking is the whole point. That’s one of the ways you really get to know each other. Talk about how you’re feeling. Build some trust and some openness. Hear things that maybe you don’t want to hear. Sure, now and then it might be nice to know if you’re about to walk into hell, but you’re still going to be served better in the long-term by marching in there and facing it down than you are by using it as a way to know when to avoid somebody who might be PMSing or whatever you’ve decided in your mind must be going on when you see the sad or angry signal.

Sharing little digital notes and inside jokes? That’s called a text. They’ve been around for a while and have proven fairly popular.

Voice messages? iMessage can do that, and it comes standard on the iOS device you’ll need for Tuned. It can send those text things, too. Ditto for the stickers and the photos, although putting those together into a shared scrapbook is kind of ok assuming you don’t already have one of the other half million apps that does that. Perhaps I’m not the guy to ask about photo sharing apps what with the blindness and such, but I know they exist.

If you want to share music, just text a Spotify or YouTube link. They make it pretty easy.

Date night ideas? If you must keep track of them digitally, make a spreadsheet.

Reminders of important dates? Do you not have a calendar or reminders app? If not, is your phone even modern enough to use this Tuned business?

Take Tuned Couple’s Challenges to learn new things about each other and have some fun together? Not only does this seem like a surefire fight starter the second one of you gets a “totally obvious” answer wrong, but again, you could just talk. If you want to add another dimension of fun, go out and do stuff while you talk. It’s amazing how well you’ll get to know each other the more you do that. I say this as someone who has been with the same person for literally decades. It works.

This is little more than a mishmash of stuff that already exists and other stuff nobody needs, not to mention yet another way for Facebook to worm itself even deeper into your life. Hard pass from this guy. I’m far too busy being fulfilled by actual conversations.