INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Is there any space on kids& homescreens for another social sharing app to poke in Y Combinator backedSplish wants to have a splash at it (
)
— with a super-short-form video and photo sharing app aimed at the under-25s.
The SF-based startup began bootstrapping out of their
college dorm rooms last July, playing around with app ideas before settling on goofy video loops to be their social sharing steed of
choice.
The Splish app pops content into video loops of between 1-5 seconds
Photos can be uploaded too but motion must be added in the form of an animated effect of your choice
So basically nothing on Splish stays still
(Hence its watery name.) But while wobbly,content on Splish is intended to stick around — rather than ephemerally pass away (a la
snaps).
Here are a few examples of Splishes (embedded below as GIFs… but you can see them on its platform here, here and here):
It
the first startup for the four college buddy co-founders: Drake Rehfeld, Alex Pareto,Jackson Berry andZac Denham, though between them
they&ve also clocked up engineering hours working for Snapchat, Facebook and Team 10.
Their initialweb productwent up in March and they
landed a place on YC program at the start of May — when they also released theiriOS app
An Android app is pending, and they&ll be on the hunt for funding come YC demo day.
The gap in the social sharing market this young team
reckons it spotted is a sort of ‘anti-Instagram& — offering a playful contrast to the photo sharing platform polished (and at times
preening) performances.
The idea is that sharing stuff on Splish is a bonding experience; part of an ongoing smartphone-enabled conversation
between mates, rather than a selectively manicured photoshoot which also has to be carefully packaged for public ‘gram consumption.
Splish
does have a public feed, though, so it not a pure messaging app — but the co-founders say the focus is friend group sharing rather than
public grandstanding.
&Splish is a social app for sharing casual looping videos with close friends,& says Rehfeld, giving the team elevator
&It came out of our own experience, and we&re building for ourselves because we noticed that the way you socialize right now in real life is
you do activities with your friends
You go to the beach, you go to the bar, the bowling alley
We&re working to bring this same type of experience online using Splish through photo and video
So it more about interaction and hanging out with your friends online.&
&When you use Instagram you really feel like you&re looking at a
It just the highlights of people lives,& he adds
&And so we&re trying to make a place where you&re getting to know your friends better and meeting new people as well
And then on the other side, on Snapchat, you&re really sharing interesting moments of your lives but it not really pushing the boundaries or
creating with your friends
It more just a communication messaging tool.
&So it kind of the space in between broadcast and chat — talking and interacting with your
close friends through Splish, through photo and video.&
Users of the Splish app can apply low-fi GIF(ish) retro filters and other
photographic effects (such as a reverse negative look) to the video snippets and photos they want to send to friends or share more widely
— with the effects intended to strip away at reality, rather than gloss it over
Which means content on Splish tends to look and feel grungy and/or goofy
Much like an animated GIF in fact
And much less like Instagram.
The team hope is the format adds a bit of everyday grit and/or wit to the standard smartphone visual record,
and that swapping Splishes gets taken up as a more fun and casual way of communicating vs other types of messaging or social sharing.
And
also that people will want to use Splish to capture and store fun times with friends because they can be checked out again later, having
been conveniently packaged for GIF-style repeat lols.
&Part of the power here in Splish is that relationships are built on shared
experiences and nostalgia and so while [Snapchat-style] ephemerality reduced a lot of the barriers for posting what it didn&t do is
strengthen relationships long term or over time because the chats and the photos disappeared,& saysRehfeld.
The idea is a content format to
gives people &shared experience that lasts&, he adds.
They&re also directly nudging users to get creative via a little gamification, adding
a new feature (called Jams) that lets users prompt each other to make a Splish in response to a specific content creation challenge.
And
filming actual (playful) physical shoulder pokes has apparently been an early thing on Splish
That the merry-go-round of social for ya.
Being a fair march north of Splish target age-range, I have to confess the app loopy effects end
up triggering something closer to motion sickness/vertigo/puking up for me
But words are my firm social currency of choice
Whereas Rehfeld argues the teenager-plus target for Splish is most comfortable with a smartphone in its hand, and letting a lens tell the
tale of what they&re up to or how they&re feeling.
&We started with that niche first because there a population in that age range that
really enjoys this creative challenge of expressing yourself in pretty intuitive ways, and they understand how to do that
And they&re pretty excited about it,& he tells TechCrunch.
&There also been a little bit of a shift here where users no longer just capture
what they have in real-life using the camera, but the camera used as an extension of communication — especially in that age range, where
people use the camera as part of their relationship, rather than just capturing what happens offline.&
As with other social video apps,
vertical full screen is the preferred Splish frame — for a more &immersive experience& and, well, because that how the kids do it.
&It the
way users, especially in this age range, hold and use their phones
It pretty natural to this age range just because it what they do everyday,& he says, adding: &It just the best way to consume on the phone
because it fills the whole screen, it how you were already using the phone before you clicked into the video.&
Notably, as part of the team
soft-edged stance against social media influencer culture, Rehfeld says Splish is choosing not to bake &viral components& into the app —
ergo:&Nobody rewarded for likes or ‘re-vines&
There no reblog, retweet.&
Although, pressed on how firm that anti-social features stance is, he concedes they&re not abandoning the usual
social suite entirely — but rather implementing that sort of stuff in relative moderation.
&We have likes and we have a concept of friends
or follows but the difference is we&re building those with the intention of not incentivizing virality or ‘influencership&,& he says
&So we always release them with some sort of limit, so with likes you can&t see a list of everybody who liked a post for example
So that one example of how we&ve, kind of, brought in a feature that people feel comfortable with and love but with our own spin that a
little bit less geared towards building a following.&
Asked if they&re trying to respond to the criticism that been leveled at a lot of
consumer technology lately — i.e
that it engineered to be highly and even mindlessly addictive —Rehfeld says yes, the team wants to try and take a less viral path, less
well travelled, adding: &We&re building as much as possible for user experience
And a lot of the big brands build and optimize towards engagement metrics… and so we&re focused on this reduction of virality so that we
can promote personal connections.&
Though it will be interesting to see if they can stick to medium-powered stun guns as they fight to carve
out a niche in the shadow of social tech attention-sapping giants.
Of course Splish public feed is a bit of a digital shop window
But, again, the idea is to make sure it a casual space, and not such a perfectionist hothouse as Instagram.
&The way the product is built
allows people to feel pretty comfortable even in the more public feeds, the more featured feeds,& adds Rehfeld
&They post still very casual moments, with a creative spin of course
So it stayed pretty similar content, private and public.&
Short and long
It fair to say that short form video for social sharing has a long
but choppy history online
Today smartphone users aren&t exactly short of apps and online spaces to share moving pictures publicly or with followers or friends.And
animated GIFs have had incredible staying power as the marathon runner of the short loop social sharing format.
On the super-short form
video side, the most notable app player of recent years — Twitter Vine —sprouted andspreadvirally in 2013, amassing a sizable community
Although Instagram soonrained on its video party, albeit with a slightly less super-short form
The Facebook-owned behemoth has gatecrashed other social sharing parties in recent years too
Most notably bycloning Snapchat ‘video-ish& social sharing slideshow Stories format, and using its long reach and deep resources to sap
momentum fromthe rival product.
Twitter voluntarily threw in the towel with Vine in 2016, focusing instead on itslivestreaming video
product, Periscope, which is certainly a better fit for its core business of being a real-time social information network, and its ambition
to also become a mainstream entertainment network.
Meanwhile Google focus in the social video space has long been on longer form content,
via YouTube, and longer videos mesh better with the needs of its ad network (at least when YouTube content isn&t being accused of being
Though Mountain View also of course plays in messaging, including the rich media sharing messaging space.
Apple too has been adding more
powerful and personalized visual effects for its iMessage users — such as face-mapping animoji
So smartphone users are indeed very, very spoiled for sharing choice.
Vine success in building a community did show that super-short loops
can win a new generation of fans, though
But in May its original co-founder,Dom Hofmann, indefinitely postponed the idea of reviving the app by building Vine 2 — citing financial
and legal roadblocks, plus other commitments on his time.
Though he did urge those &missing the original Vine experience& to check out some
of the apps he said had &sprung up lately& (albeit, without namechecking any of the newbs)
So perhaps a Splish or two had caught his eye.
There no doubt the space will be a tough one to sustain
Plenty of apps have cracked in and had a moment but very few go the distance
Overly distinctive filters can also feel faddish and fall out of fashion as quickly as they blew up
Witness, for example, the viral rise of art effect photo app Prisma
(And now try and remember the last time you saw one of its art filtered photos in the wild… )
So sustaining a novel look and feel can be
Not least because social big beast, Facebook, has the resources and inclination to clone any innovations that look like they might be
Add in network effects and the story of the space has been defined by a shrinking handful of dominant apps and platforms.
And yet — there
still always the chance that a new generation of smartphone users will shake things up because they see things differently and want to find
new ways and new spaces to share their personal stuff.
That the splash that Splish team is hoping to make.
