What is SentLive? #
Defining what SentLive is in a concise way has always been problematic, because it doesn’t fit neatly into existing categories of any other internet based business; to shorten the description too much would not do it justice, but here is our best effort! It is a personal safety service wrapped up with a social network with the aim of bringing everyone who uses it peace of mind, while at the same time being an early warning system alerting the immediate contacts when one of their community is in trouble.
Who can use SentLive, and how and why would I want to? #
We have tried to design SentLive so that anybody can use it, in that we want it to be as easy to use and as simple to understand as possible, so that young children to great great grandparents and everybody in between is able to use it. How anyone will use it would be entirely up to the individual and their closest contacts, but we imagined many scenarios with the original version where people might not only find it useful, but invaluable, and now with the added social network aspect, we hope that it will be enjoyable as well. We have drawn up some imaginary, but realistic scenarios that can give some idea how and why it could be useful to you, which you can find here.
So how does SentLive work? #
The idea is quite simple, but the implementation has been complex. Basically the safety aspect revolves around our ‘Big Blue Button’ found on the Safe Haven page; one click (computer) or tap (touch screens) will not only turn the button green, but also trigger the following:
- Create a Safe Alert, with a general location (suburb, town/city, postcode, country) of where you were at the moment you hit the button;
- Post this Alert to the Activity stream;
- Send a Notification to the SentLive Friends of the person (if they have subscribed to those notifications).
Of course something similar happens when a Not Safe Alert is generated – a member holds the mouse or their finger down on the button, and it turns red, and the same sequence follows, except that the location published is more precise, and there is an additional internal notification to all the friends of the member, that appears on the little bell icon at the top of every screen. Currently, on all devices other than those running iOS, a sound will also play to accompany the new bell notification – this will be heard within a few seconds if you are logged in, or when you next log in. So friends are alerted directly by push notifications to the devices they have allowed them, regardless of whether they are on SentLive, and indirectly via the Bell notification and the Activity stream when they login.
Obviously this is more likely to be used by a member on a mobile device, which is why the site is not only available via a browser, but can be installed as a Progressive Web App (PWA) without the need to download from an app store. Members are encouraged to do this on their mobile devices so the service is available anywhere they have an internet connection. Read more about the process to add SentLive to your device here.
