What essentially began as way to "hook-up" in college, social media has turned in a ferocious turf war over the course of the last decade as the population has become more and more obsessed with letting the world know what they just ate, how they feel, what their kids just did and exactly where they are at a given moment.
Perhaps it is that last aspect, location, that brings us to the latest entry in social media mania dubbed Cloak, an app that pulls location data from both Foursquare and Instagram and uses it to tell users how close a certain person is to their current location.
While the creators somewhat tongue-in-cheek the app's usefulness with the tagline: "Avoid execs, co-workers, that guy who likes to stop and chat - anyone you'd rather not run into" - there may be a bit more at play here than originally meets the eye.
Co-creator Brian Moore (Chris Baker is the other half of the founding duo) admits that idea for the app came to be after running into his ex-girlfriend four times in a six-month period.
After just a week on the App store Cloak added well over 100,000 users and hit the top 50 selling apps.
While dubbing the app "The Anti-Social Network" appears to be the punch line, upon closer inspection, there is an element of privacy invasion with Cloak that's worth opening a dialogue about?
"This just has a 'get-over-yourself' feel to it," began former social media marketing consultant Lauren Sosik. "Have we reached a point where we're so immersed in ourselves now that we can't handle normal social situations anymore?"
Both Baker and Moore have already been asked this question and the pair explained, "Your phone is using your friends' Instagram and Foursquare data, but not us. So that data lives locally, in front of you, but we here at Cloak are not seeing it." They further explain that the app is essentially only mining social media information already in use.
Sosik wasn't impressed by Moore's logic for developing the app adding, "So you ran into your ex a few times - come on, get over yourself already."
The other troubling aspect here is the fact that perhaps it's no coincidence that Cloak is currently only pulling data from Foursquare and Instagram, social networks that many brands and companies are using to reach consumers.
At present time, Cloak won't really begin to make a dent in the social media realm until they are able to add location data from the likes of Facebook and Twitter but the app has clearly resonated with a certain segment of the population at launch.
The question is, are those the people the rest of us just as soon never run into?
