You won't want to miss out on the world-class speakers at TNW Conference this year 🎟 Book your 2 for 1 tickets now! This offer ends on April 22 →

This article was published on June 22, 2011

Daps’em now lets you give ‘virtual fist bumps’ on Twitter. Will it go viral?


Daps’em now lets you give ‘virtual fist bumps’ on Twitter. Will it go viral?

Daps’em is a social service built around the idea of ‘virtual fist bumps’ – giving people who’ve done something you like some deserved recognition.

Launched at the Techonomy3 conference in Tel Aviv in March, Daps’em is currently available for iPhone. As we explained at the time, it allows you to nominate someone, give details of what they’ve done that you appreciate and where it happened – thus creating a ‘Dap’. Others can then comment on your ‘Daps’ or show their approval with a ‘Yay’ – the equivalent of a Facebook’s ‘Like’.

While Daps’em has stayed ‘under the radar’ since launch, today’s update is likely to see the app exposed to a much bigger audience. Now you can ‘Dap’ any Twitter user, without them having to be a Daps’em user already. In fact, as you can see below, the Israeli startup’s CEO, Hamutal Meridor, ‘Dapsed’ Barack Obama today.

While the US president is unlikely to be signing up any time soon, it’s easy to see how this could help the service achieve viral popularity relatively quickly as people look to find out why they’ve been ‘Dapped’. There’s no risk of Daps’em users becoming virtual-fist-bumping-Twitter-spammers, either. Each user is limited to just three Daps per day, helping to make them a relatively ‘special’ thing to receive.

Will Daps’em take off? That’s down to whether there’s a market for such an outwardly positive service built around giving, not receiving. I’d like to think there is.

Daps’em is free to download from the Apple App Store now.

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Also tagged with