An app that maps your relationships from your own words
Published .
An app that maps your relationships turns what you already write into a picture of who is actually in your life. Elwenne builds one from your messages alone: you sit at the centre, the people you mention sit around you, and the distance between you and each of them moves with how often they come up and how things have been going. There is no list to fill in first, and the people on the map never speak.
What is a map of your relationships?
Your world is a living map with you at the centre and the people around you, drawn closer or further by how often they come up and how things have been going. Family, friends, work: the clusters appear on their own.
The contact list in your phone answers a different question. It tells you who you know, in the order you saved them, and it looks the same in a month you spoke to nobody as it does in a month you spoke to everyone. What a list cannot hold is distance, and distance is the part you feel.
Two things move somebody on your map, not one. How often a person comes up is the easy half to picture. How things have been going is the half that makes it a map of a life rather than a tally, because a name you type every day is not automatically someone you are close to, and the name you have not typed since spring is not automatically gone.
A living map means one that is never finished. It is not a thing you go and look at; it is the shape your writing has on the day you open it, and in a month it is a different shape.
The map has an honest limit in it, and that belongs early rather than late. A map drawn from your own sentences holds exactly the people your sentences hold, and nobody else. The cousin you think about constantly and never write about is not on it. Nothing there arrived from anywhere except what you told Elwenne.
The map is yours in the ordinary sense of the word. It lives where the rest of your writing lives: one sealed vault that belongs to you, encrypted with a key of its own, and you can export or delete all of it in one tap. Nobody else stands at its centre, and nobody on our side reads your messages in the normal course of things.
There is one limit we say out loud rather than leave you to find it. To reply, Elwenne sends your message and the relevant past entries to the model that writes its answers. Encryption protects your vault at rest; it does not hide a message from the model while it is answering. The privacy page says exactly what that means.
How does someone get onto the map?
Mentioning them is the entire step. Every person you mention becomes a presence in your world, a friend, a parent, a manager, holding everything you have said about them.
Holding is the exact word for it. A presence is where your sentences about one person collect, so four months of remarks about a manager sit together instead of being scattered through the messages they arrived in. Elwenne adds nothing to what is there. Nothing about that person arrives from anywhere but you.
And a presence never speaks. They are living records, not simulations. That line carries more weight than anything else in this note, so here is what stands behind it.
A record of somebody stops being a record the moment it answers back. What answers back is a character wearing their name, assembled out of the part of the story you happened to write down, which is usually the part that was hurting. You would be talking to the worst of it, and it would answer in your sister's voice.
A record that stays quiet holds what you said about a person, which is what you need when you are working out whether the friendship changed or whether you did.
What does Elwenne notice, and how does it say it?
It reads the map and your history and says things like "you and Sara have drifted since June". Both Sara and the drift come from the example on our landing page, and both are made up.
Look at what the sentence does and does not do. It names two people and a month. It does not tell you how to feel about the month, and it does not tell you what sort of person you are. A pattern with a date on it is something you can go and check.
That is the rule underneath all of it: every observation traces back to something you actually said, and you can tap to see it. Nothing is handed down as a verdict from somewhere above your own writing; the sentence it was drawn from is sitting right there.
So the last word stays with you. Open the line and you might find the pattern is real and you had stopped seeing it. You might find that June was the month your sister moved house, and that what looks like drift has a plain reason behind it. When something tells you about yourself and shows you nothing, only one of those endings is open to you.
What Elwenne offers after that is deliberately narrow. Suggestions come from a small library of well-studied techniques, never from whatever the model feels like saying. A companion with opinions about your sister and a free hand to act on them is not the thing we are building, and there is a separate note on what Elwenne is not a replacement for.
What it will never do
Elwenne will never put words in your friend's mouth. Never is the word on our landing page, and it is meant as written rather than as a default with a switch behind it.
It will not imitate anyone, and that holds for strangers as much as for your family. Writing in someone else's voice is cheap to do and impossible to undo. Read a single paragraph in your father's register and you cannot unread it: you are carrying a sentence he did not say, and you will hear it again the next time he calls.
It does not guess at what the other person meant, either. What your manager was thinking the day you wrote about him is not in your vault, and nothing invents it to fill the gap.
It will not hand you a reading that would fit anyone reading it. Every reflection cites your own entries, and that on its own rules the generic line out, because a sentence true of everyone has nothing of yours to point at.
It does not tell you what to do about any of it. What you do about the people in your life is yours, and a map that started giving orders would have stopped being a map of you.
Where to start
The map is not something you build. It grows out of messages you were going to send anyway, in Arabic, English, or Arabizi, so the first person lands on it the first time you name one. Memory, export, and delete will never sit behind a paywall, and Elwenne costs nothing to start: 20 messages a day, full memory, your world map, and export.
Elwenne is opening its doors slowly, a few people at a time. That means the map is not a thing you can open tonight, and saying it above the link rather than under it is the honest way round. If you want to see who your own words have been circling, join the waitlist. We will write when it is your turn, and we use your email for that message only.