Instagram – fast food of photosharing?

FastfoodI wanted to reflect shortly on Instagram, it’s merits and pitfalls. Just as Rewindy brings a new format to photo sharing combining an interesting story or narrative and beautiful photos into a visual story, Instagram brought a new format to photo sharing that was essentially square format photos with colour filters. This was packaged up in an iPhone app easy to use. Ben Lariviere tweeted quite appropriately: In 10 years, the babies of today will be asking “Why are all my baby photos square format with these awful filters?” I hope that will not be the case. Instagram is a fun way to create special effect photos but as with all effects, it also easily distracts.

The biggest issue I have with Instagram and Facebook photosharing for that matter is the design optimized for one photo. I know, to get people to consume all in the feed, and make it easy to share, you are encouraged to share only a single photo. But what about sharing an experience you had, telling what you are feeling, have done or what you think? Things we are used to in real life.

When chunking up your experience into a single Instagram photo, or a few, it is very difficult to tell the story. It’s kind of the fast food of photosharing, easy to chew, tastes ok, but doesn’t leave any impression on you. You might have got some cheap entertainment to fill your stomach but walked without remembering anything your friend shared with you.

When you really want to share your experience, express yourself and making a lasting impression you probably find it easier to tell the story not just share a single photo. Tell how it started, why you ended up on the beach, how you fun it was playing beach volley with Tina and Sam first time in years and what surprising thing happened then. Online you can blog about it and add photos to make it easier for your friends to digest what you did. Or, you can use Rewindy to make it easy for you to tell the story.

If Instagram is a fastfood experience, Rewindy is a fun relaxed dinner among friends where the stories follow each other and laughter grows louder into the evening.

- Chris

Motivations for visual storytelling

Combining the academic research on photo sharing and messaging with the learnings we have gained from users in Rewindy I compiled a list of motives why people create and share their visual stories.

Preservation of memories

A visual story is a frozen moment in time - viewing a story is a step backwards in time. A visual story is a great way to share experiences with others. Stories can be used to interpret life to others and to oneself by documenting it. What is worth documenting is your choice.

Social interaction

People experience as much joy from the feedback and conversation around the content created as they do from sending or receiving the content itself. Shared stories and experiences within small group bring people together. Sharing visual stories distantly is also one way to keep up with one another’s lives.

Act of creation

Creating a visual story is found to be easy and attractive. The authoring of a story is a performance where people can express themselves and convey a particular message to others.

Make your photos into something more

People capture ordinary things, but combine those images with elements that explain the content into something exciting. With visual stories, pictures and words work together expressing things that one could not do without the other.

Transmitting emotions and moods

Stories can be used for sentimental purposes, giving other access to private places, situations and emotions. This is not only due to the richer description of reality visual story allows, but also due to possibilities it offers for interpretation. Visual stories can transmit mood, humor and emotion better than pictures only.

Enhancing a moment

One common social reason for story sharing is to enrich a mutual experience by sharing the content. This could be done with people present the moment of the experience or by sharing content with people not co-present. Shared moment can also be enhanced later by sharing or viewing the story together with people who were present at that time.

Story as a gift

The intimacy of a visual story makes people to consider some shared stories as gifts. Contents of a story don’t have to be spectacular, but it is the act of sending and receiving that gives us pleasure. It’s a great way to make an emotional connection by expressing that the sender is thinking of the receiver

Personal storytelling

Often mobile devices and cameras are used just to record an event in everyday life which is assembled into a story at a later stage. A will to create story can be a driver to take pictures. Photos are organized into a sequence, thus used in creating a narrative or story. By adding a story of what the viewer cannot see, the imagination can fill the gaps - the story becomes live.

In digital storytelling, narrative accessibility, warmth and presence are prioritized over form and technological virtuosity. The style of digital stories can be emotional and touching, retaining the warmth of human intimacy despite the dominance of technology.

Entertainment

Humor is one essential aspect in many stories. People like to create humorous content and comment others’ creations in humorous ways. This turns the social activity of sharing stories into a play-like activity, which has an entertaining value itself.

Some entertaining stories involves both sender and recipient taking part in the creative action. The sender usually includes some kind of story, joke or puzzle in the story to be sent and the receiver must interpret this and quite possibly comment it.

Self-expression

Self-expression is about showing people what kind of person you are. Self-expressive stories’ primary value can be aesthetic or artistic. Ordinary people’s self-expression through art has been devalued for hundreds of years, but it seems that modern digital content creation tools and publishing services are making average people interested in creating art again.

People don’t necessarily create expressive stories because they want it to be popular, however there seems to be a natural need to exhibit productions of creativity to other people and seek for acceptance and positive feedback. People also like to get critical feedback in order to learn and get better.

Functional uses

Some stories can be functional, either for one self or for others. Story can act as instructions for others, or in place of writing, copying or scanning. Stories can be used as a tool for documenting a situation for later reference, evidence or reminder. Stories can also be problem solving, by explaining concepts or when doing instructions for others .

- Mikko

Photosharing versus storysharing

The history of online photosharing goes back more than 10 years with Snapfish, Picasa, Photobucket and Flickr being the pioneers. Today Facebook, Picasa and Instagram seem to dominate the mindshare. See a good infogram on history http://blog.kissmetrics.com/history-of-photo-sharing/

Surprisingly little has fundamentally changed since the early days. Usability has of course improved significantly as browsers capabilities have improved. But photosharing is still sharing a few photos mostly without much further context. Pictures are powerful and can tell a lot, but if you look at someone’s pictures on Facebook, you often don’t really know what happened. You don’t have the same background information why a photo was taken, what was said or what happened just before or after. The photo doesn’t often capture the thoughts or feelings of the people in the event. This is why people love stories. A story is a narrative you can relate to and it highlights thoughts, emotions, relationships and can freely go into history or speculate about the future. Things that are at extremely difficult with photos. A photo on the other hand creates a very detailed picture of a person, scene or object in the viewers mind.

The combination of these two the photos and the story is a visual story. Bringing together the context and narrative what happened behind the photos, with the best visual images. A visual story is a much more personal and expressive way to share your photos, or a visually beautiful way to share your story.

Try comparing only the left photo below or only reading or hearing the story on the right. The combination is powerful :-)

- Chris

photo vs story

Free or cheap tools for startups

This is a list of online and desktop tools and services we use for day-to-day work at Rewindy. I’ll skip listing the developer tools and obvious choices such as GitHub, Google Apps and Amazon cloud.

1Password & Passpack

Password management with the team is a hassle. I remember doing moronic stuff in the past like sharing passwords in Skype and updating a local copy of list of passwords in an encrypted text file.

Nowadays, for my personal passwords I use 1Password, which is quite likely one of the most useful apps in my Mac.

For sharing passwords with our team, I started to look for something similar, which would have to sync between Mac and Windows machines and preferably work inside browser. We picked Passpack and it’s been working quite nicely. Three-step login process is slightly annoying but at least makes you feel more secure.

Everytime someone creates a new account they add the credentials to Passpack. I can login by copy-pasting credentials from Passpack when logging in for the first time and then I add the account to my personal 1Password data file.

Trello

Trello is a suprisingly versatile online tool for lightweight project management, todo-lists, or managing whatever process you might need.

It easily fits Kanban-style workflow but you have quite a lot of freedom in how you want to organize things. Trello doesn’t try to do too many things thus UI is quite intuitive.

It doesn’t really scale well for larger amount of cards, but we usually create new boards when needed and if previous ones get cluttered. Trello is free at the moment.

Pixelmator

Photoshop is great but the licence is mighty expensive for a bootstrapping startup. Maybe you can make that investment for your designer, but other team members also have image editing needs every now and then. 2nd best option for Mac is Pixelmator which costs only $29.99 and has most of the features you need from a image editing app.

It’s not nearly as polished, and feels a bit sluggish at times, but developers are actively making it better. And we rather support a nordic startup than a large corporation.

nvALT & Evernote

nvALT is a fork of Notational Velocity (development of which seems to have stopped), with new features and UI. I’m using that for storing various text snippets and stuff to remember in Markdown format.

For storing bookmarks, I use Evernote. I’ve tried managing my bookmarks in browser and with many online apps, but since I have thousands of bookmarks they quickly become unmanageable. Evernote has been working ok for this, but the search, UI, text formatting etc. could use some improvements.

I tend to have list such as “dev-javascript”, under which I have notes such as “RegExp”, and in that note I list bookmarks related to doing regular expressions in JavaScript with a short description or keywords for the link below. I don’t use tags at all since I haven’t really found them useful for searching and filtering.

Reeder & Twitter for Mac

For a startup it’s crucial to follow what’s happening in the industry. For managing information overload, I’ve settled with tighly managed RSS feeds in Reeder, which syncs with Google Reader and has a very nice iOS app. Some might say RSS is dead, but IMHO with the right selection of feeds, it’s still easier to follow than Twitter which has 90% crap.

Nevertheless I check Twitter couple of times a day with Twitter’s Mac app, and try to scan just the informative tweets.

Do you have some great tools to add to the list? Join the discussion on Hacker News.

- Mikko

Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley

Early June I spent one and a half weeks in Silicon Valley and San Francisco talking to investors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, people in the photo sharing industry, and interviewing potential users.

I had planned my trip by searching for and signing up for meetups in the Valley as well as in the City (San Francisco). In the end I participated in roughly a meetup per day in addition to all the other meetings. So there was a lot of socializing, but it was also very rewarding to get to pitch the Rewindy story. I got the immediate feedback, heard from other people working with startups their perspective on everything from forming the company to marketing, recruiting and raising financing.

I had the benefit to hear Steve Blank talk about the familiar topic on the importance of iterating the startup product with the customers and learning fast. I also met with Eric Ries  in a fireside chat event where he explain about the Lean startup ideology. I’ve read the book so no big news but I got his personal explanation. The lean startup ideology is very much what people in the valley believe in, but at the same time not many practice it in a broader sense in reality. Partly because it is simple in theory but not so easy in reality, partly because of the investment scene that provides money fairly easily and gets startups going faster than is always helpful, as they don’t take the time to iterate in smaller scale that is cheaper.  I invited Eric to come to Finland and talk to entrepreneurs in Helsinki. His answer was that he is asked to speak so much over entire world, that his speaking engagements are prioritized based on money. I guess it makes sense for a speaking head professional.

What I learned from pitching Rewindy to a lot of people was that the focus on story telling with photo and later video is a really interesting area. In area of stories and narratives there are quite a few startups working on concepts from different directions. Rewindy storysharing caters to a fundamental need all humans have - tell and listen to stories. What Rewindy provides, is a new format focusing on visual stories. You can find both successes as well as failures in introducing a new format to the market. Most recent success being Instagram where the format is as simple as a square photo with colour filters making a often not so good photo look good by heavy artistic filters. Of course there are many other factors playing into Instagrams success, but having a compelling simple format is definitely a key ingredient.

- Chris

 

Jimmy Wales: “Collaborative storytelling and filmmaking will do to Hollywood what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica”

Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia got a lot of press recently (e.g. in Wired) when he predicted that

“Hollywood will be destroyed and no one will notice”, going on saying that “Collaborative storytelling and filmmaking will do to Hollywood what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica”.

While I don’t think the movie industry is going away very soon, I very much agree that collaborative storytelling by consumers is on explosive rise. Human nature is wired for stories. Collaboration in a way or another is all what web and mobile services often are about, and what makes them compelling.

With Rewindy we are focusing exactly on collaborative storytelling. We believe people want to tell the stories behind events and moments, things that photos or videos typically don’t capture, things that give our personal perspective on things, things that can make even bad photos interesting. And it is not only about people wanting to tell the stories, friends are much more interested in a personally told story with photos than a bunch of pictures slammed onto Facebook for all hundreds of friends to skim over.

Let’s see how Jimmy’s prediction holds true. Let me make a shorter term and faster to validate prediction. I predict that in 2013 one of the hottest B2C web service categories will be around storysharing. There is so much bubbling under in this area and people are getting tired of plain media sharing.

- Chris

First landing page for Rewindy

We just got the first landing page live for www.rewindy.com. Although www.launchrock.com and www.unbounce.com provides good hosted solutions for landing pages we ended up doing an own landing page. Why? Because we wanted a better user experience with a carousel explaining what Rewindy is all about. After we had iterated the text and visuals a couple of times we decided for a layout. Juha-Antti did his Photoshop magic to finalize the looks and Mikko cooked up the landing page with carousel in matter of hours using twitter’s bootstrap framework. Now we start converting our service look and feel to Rewindy for our private alpha users.

You can start following us on Facebook and Twitter as well, just press the buttons on the landing page. We much appreciate all FB likes and Twitter followers as it helps us connect with people like YOU. They are channels for keeping you up to date on what we are up to, and where you can provide feedback.

What do you think about the landing page? Send us what you think to @rewindycom on twitter or email me at chris (@) rewindy.com

-          Chris

Baptizing a .com

Picking a name for a service is always difficult. Actually we already had a name we got used to, it was gruupz.com but the more we interviewed people and listened to the feedback the clearer the message got. Gruupz was not a very good name. We held some workshops with our advisors, thanks Miemo and Michiel, and decided we need to come up with something easier to pronounce, remember, and write for our users.

Apart from having a free .com domain, which pretty much rules out every sensible word and two word combination, the main criteria for a good name are in my opinion 1) easy to remember after hearing or seeing it, 2) sound and meaning of it should be in sync with the value proposition. We brainstormed with the founders, used great services like http://www.nxdom.com/ and http://www.bustaname.com/, and came up with 3 candidates we liked. We thought we had a winner but after asking around for opinions we realized the name gave the wrong associations, and was harder to spell than we thought. But a winner emerged from the poll among friends, it was Rewindy.com.

Rewindy was actually the perfect name, in hindsight. Our service is all about rewinding your life to the moments and stories you want to share with friends and remember yourself. You can rewind to the party last week, the vacation last summer, or the friends wedding 5 years ago.

And as for babies, often they get baptized only months after birth, so did Rewindy.

 

- Chris