Posted in: Conventions, Cosplay, Games | Tagged: android, app, conventions, cosmunity, cosplay, fandom, games, geek culture, ios, mobile app

Geek-Culture Focused App 'Cosmunity' Has Launched On Mobile, Will Anyone Notice

Billed as "the first social marketplace for your inner geek," Cosmunity is a newly released social network app for iOS and Android that focuses on convention attendees and geeks at large. The company had been not-so-quietly adding various cosplay and fandom individuals to their open beta test over the last several months to build out content and to collect feedback around the app's features.

While it's titled cosmunity, co-founder and CEO, Cole Egger says that it's not just for people interested in cosplay. The impetus behind development of the app was that after attending several Comic Con events, that people were grumbling about 'Post-Con Depression.'

Everyone was bummed that they had to leave their community until the next event. We created Cosmunity to solve that.

Ming Chen of AMC's Comic Book Men is an enthusiastic backer and advisor to the company. Ming said, "Cosmunity is unlike any other app on the market for the geek community."

The app is made up of three main areas: a social feed showing either whatever the people you are following are up to, or the site's most popular posts, an event calendar, and a store.

The UX could still use some love; the grey-on-grey color theming is problematic, and not having an option to change it to something with a stronger contrast is a surprising miss.

The calendar still orders the events in a rather random sequence – it's mostly by date, but not always. Users can tag events as being liked, or if they're intending to attend, and with comments. There's no current way to attach sub-events to a convention (such as to schedule meetups), and the event detail pages themselves have the basic date, url, and location but not a lot else.

The store is something akin to Etsy being listed by way of a social media feed. You can search by text, but there's no browsing by categories, so discovery of items is a matter of needing to speed scroll along until something catches your eye. There are some cool things out there, however, ranging from individual crafts to Cosmunity partner and comic book dealer, Metropolis Comics, who has an Amazing Fantasy #15 up for sale.

It remains to be seen if Cosmunity is actually addressing any missing elements of the community (since the three primary app features are already served by Facebook Events, Etsy, and Instagram by far larger populations), and none of them really address diminishing the Post-Con Withdrawal vibe since you're still seeing all the photos of everything you missed seeing while you were busy taking photos elsewhere (San Diego Comic-Con and DragonCon attendees will know the feeling all too well). Most events at this point also have their own apps, which are continuing to mature and expand in functionality. However it might be some of the cross-event services, such as Front Gate Tickets and GrowTix, might find themselves more in a position to expand their offerings to encompass the space sooner rather than later. This will leave Cosmunity with a fairly narrow window in which to entrench themselves before others show up on the scene.

The app is free, and can be found in the iOS and Android stores. Give it a try and let us know what you think, is there something it brings to the table that was missing before?

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