Maj. Tony Weedn was on a temporary duty assignment earlier in July when he got an urgent text from his friend, Capt. Chris Lott: “Hey, I’ve got an idea. We need to do it right now.”
Weedn and Lott had founded a software company called “Glip.” Now Lott, who is in his ninth deployment, had noticed that people on Facebook were overlaying Confederate flags and rainbow flags over their profile pictures.
Yet one flag seemed to be conspicuously absent.
“He’s like, ‘I don’t understand why it can’t just be Old Glory: Why can’t we just have the American flag and let’s overlay that on the Facebook profile?’” Weedn told Air Force Times.
So they created a free Facebook app that allows users to do just that.
Amid all the recent controversy surrounding whether gays and lesbians can be legally married and whether the Confederate flag is a symbol of heritage or hatred, the app’s purpose is to bring Americans together, Weedn said.
“We talked about, ‘Let’s unite Americans and let’s focus on something good and something we have in common,’” said Weedn, a T-1 instructor pilot at Vance Air Force Base, Oklahoma.
Initially, not as many people as Weedn had hoped used the app because Facebook did not include a link to it. But in late July, Glip partnered with a prominent national organization with the same vision.
Now that the app is available at Facebookflags.com, more than 300,000 people have used it, Weedn said. The app has evolved to allow users from other countries to overlay their country’s flags on their profile pictures.
Despite the app’s popularity, Glip is actually losing money because it has to pay out of pocket to develop the app and host the website, Weedn said. The more traffic the website gets, the more expensive it is to host.
To recoup some the business costs, Glip plans to start selling shirts to promote the app he said. Any money left over from paying the bills would be donated to the Wounded Warrior Project.
Weedn declined to say how much money his company has spent on this venture, but he insists the idea behind the app is worth the expenses.
“Life isn’t all about money,” Weedn said. “We’ve been blessed that we have some savings, which has helped. But in promoting a vision of unity right now, especially with all the turmoil in our country and with the wars in the world, I guess it kind of felt like this is something that we can all rally around.”
