Here’s the latest from the crossroads of faith, media & culture: 10/06/25

Meet Barry Moore. The creator of THE PLACE WE MET APP designed to help users find anyone anyone from their past (i.e. a friend from high school thirty years ago or a love interest you met at a coffee shop last week) has a very interesting past of his own.

JWK: So, tell me about your background. I know you work at homeless shelter while also pursuing creative pursuits, including computer coding. 

Barry Moore: My first post-secondary education was to get a social work diploma.  But I didn’t work in the sector for several years.  I discovered that I was very good at sales, and I worked in several sales jobs, including at a telephone company, selling long distance packages and phone bundles.   Eventually, I decided to get a commerce degree.  My major in my commerce degree was information systems and I almost had enough marketing courses to make it a double major in marketing/information systems.  While in the commerce program I took my first programming course, and I was hooked immediately.  I love programming and I even do it on my days off.  In fact, a day of programming to me is a day off.

After several years in sales, a friend made me aware of a job at The Calgary Drop-in Centre, which is one of the largest, if not the largest homeless shelters in North America.   Work there somewhat satisfies my need to help make the world a better place and I was also attracted to the fact that my hours are completely flexible.  When I need more money, I work more hours.  When I need more time for coding and creative pursuits, I work less hours.

At the same time, I’ve always been very creative.  My parents didn’t believe in buying mountains of toys for kids, so my siblings and I often made up our own games.  We all developed a sense of creativity.   My sisters used to make up stories to tell us at bedtime and I think this is where I first developed a love of storytelling.   I’m the type of person that is always thinking of new ideas.  I have more ideas than I will ever be able to pursue.

I’ve also been involved in drama throughout my life.  I took drama classes right from junior high school through to high school.  While getting my social work diploma and my commerce degree, I also took drama, including playwriting.  I used to play six nights a week in a band.  I’ve appeared in over 75 movies as an extra.  I’ve had one speaking part in an award-winning short film.  I’ve always just loved the showbiz vibe of being on a film set or playing in a band. Creativity is in my DNA.

JWK: The Place We Met. What is it and how did the concept come to you?

BM: I was sitting in a coffee shop reading a book on how to write radio dramas.  It struck me that nobody was talking.  Everyone was sitting staring at their laptop or phone, and the room was mostly silent.  I was thinking about how many dating APPS there are, yet there are still so many single people.  I was thinking about how people can’t just walk up and talk to strangers anymore, they need to meet through an APP.  Then, it suddenly hit me!  What if there was an APP for people to match based on locations they go to regularly.  This was my original idea for THE PLACE WE MET.  It was kind of a dating site. It was for shy people that don’t have the nerve to just walk up and talk to somebody, but instead, put in a match request based on date & location.  The big plus is that if feelings aren’t mutual, their crush would never know they were interested.  Essentially, there is no chance of rejection.

But, then I started thinking about how it could reconnect people that have lost touch with each other.   People can track down old high school friends, work mates, people that met at summer camp, etc.  Married women often change their name and can’t easily be searched.  Also, with THE PLACE WE MET, you don’t actually have to know the name of the person.  Just the GPS location and date-range can reconnect you.  If there are a number of matches for a date-range and GPS location, matching words from a short paragraph both users input helps narrow down the matches.  So, in a nutshell, THE PLACE WE MET is an APP that reconnects people based on date (or date-range) and GPS location.

JWK: How does it work? Who would the users be?

BM: THE PLACE WE MET is extremely easy to use.  You simply enter in a date or date-range of where you met somebody and the GPS location.  It’s unbelievably easy to get GPS coordinates nowadays.  Simply find a location on Google maps and right click.  Lots of information about the location comes up, with the latitude & longitude at the top.   A simple click puts them in the clipboard for pasting into THE PLACE WE MET.  Then, you type a short paragraph into the APP with some details that can help narrow down who you are looking for if several matches are generated for your date/location.  For example, to track down a University friend, you would input the GPS location of center campus.  You might select a radius of 1 kilometer to make sure you cover the entire campus.  If you met someone at a street festival and you can’t really remember the exact location, you would pick the location that you think is the center of the festival and use a radius of up to 5 km.   Back to the University example, your short paragraph might talk about how you were both studying drama and were in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire.  Only the IDENTICAL matching words are shown to each party, so each party in this case might see the words DRAMA, STREETCAR, DESIRE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES as matching words.

As for the users, I see it being used to track down people for various kinds of reunions, people finding old work-mates, people they met at summer camp, etc.  Displaced people will also use it to find people they lost connection with when they were forced out of their homes.  But I’m sure there are probably hundreds of reasons why people might use it.  I’m not really sure if people will use THE PLACE WE MET as a quasi-dating site or not.  I guess we’ll find out!  My guess is that it will be a small niche market of people using it initially, but that it will grow as people discover it.  But I could be totally wrong.  It might blow up quickly with people using it for reasons I haven’t even thought about yet.

JWK: How do you minimize risk of the system being utilized stalkers or what have you? 

BM: Thankfully, it’s not really possible to stalk somebody using THE PLACE WE MET.  The system doesn’t ever track your location.  It works based on a PREVIOUS location, the location where you met somebody.   However, note that the location doesn’t have to be the FIRST place you met someone.  Perhaps you first met at a party somewhere and don’t really remember where it was.   But, after your first meeting, you often met at a certain coffee shop or restaurant.  You might use the coffee shop as THE PLACE WE MET.  In fact, you could enter SEVERAL locations as THE PLACE WE MET, anticipating that the person might use any one of them in their attempt to also reunite with you.

The bottom line related to the stalking issue is that the system only works if BOTH people are searching for each other.  This isn’t an APP that tracks people and gives out their locations.  As mentioned, it NEVER tracks anyone’s location, so it’s not possible for it to give out locations to anyone.

JWK: Besides serving as a tool to help people reconnect for personal or business reasons, you also see potential for the app to be used to assist in reuniting displaced persons with their loved ones. Can you talk more about that?

BM: It might sound corny, but I’ve always had the desire to come up with something that does something to help people around the world.  Shortly after coming up with the idea, I started doing some research on forced displacement and I was shocked to discover that almost 1.5% of all people on earth have been displaced by catastrophic events beyond their control, like war, famine, and various natural disasters.  Extreme weather events are really ramping up the numbers of displaced people. It’s not just something affecting third-world countries.  It’s a global problem.  Most of these types of events happen suddenly, with people barely having time to pack a few critical items before fleeing.  They seldom have time to collect contact information for people they might want to reconnect with later.  While it might be possible to reconnect later with close friends and family on social media, most of us also have lots of people we care about that we’re not connected with on social media, and we have no contact info for.  In fact, we might not even know their last name, which can make it virtually impossible to track them down.  It’s these types of situations where THE PLACE WE MET will be invaluable.   It will be free of charge for anyone who is trying to track down somebody in an area that suffered widespread forced displacement.

JWK: You’re approaching this from a multimedia promotion standpoint – with a song, video and movie in the works. Can you talk more about that?

BM: I’ve always been interested in creative projects.  I’ve produced radio dramas, and music videos. I’ve written a number of songs.  I have several ideas for movies.   So, I’m combining my interests here.

One of my concerns with THE PLACE WE MET is that…it needs widespread awareness in order to catch on.  I thought a great way to generate awareness, and publicity would be a movie about two people with romantic interests that get separated in the chaos of some event and get brought back together using THE PLACE WE MET APP.  Of course, the movie needs a theme song, and we wrote a song called THE PLACE WE MET.   Using the song, we produced a short proof-of-concept video to give an idea what the movie might look like.  Both the song (demo version) and the proof-of-concept video are on the site now for public consumption.  We’re also planning to release a book with the same name.

At the end of the day, I really do hope THE PLACE WE MET brings a lot of joy to the people that are able to reconnect with people they love, especially for the people that have been displaced.  In many cases, they’ve lost everything they had.  The people in their life are all they have left, and in some cases they’ve lost them too.  Hopefully, this APP will bring the people they love back into their lives.  With any luck, we can do all that while providing some meaningful entertainment through the book, movie and song.  I’m looking forward to seeing how this project unfolds!

John W. Kennedy is a writer, producer and media development consultant specializing in television and movie projects that uphold positive timeless values, including trust in God.