The grid layout is similar to @kevinrose/@hemeon's Tiiny, @dtrinh's Cap, and @ogtfaber's Taptalk:
We've seen so many mobile messaging apps and few become breakout successes. Why is Pop going to work where others failed, @joshuanguyen?
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@kevinrose@hemeon@dtrinh@ogtfaber@joshuanguyen@rrhoover It is similar on a superficial level, with the squares. However, Pop's grid compactly represents an entire conversation -- swiping on any one auto plays a message. It's not just an efficient layout, it's a rethinking of messaging in general, from the ground up, for video and video alone.
We have learned a ton building Tiiny and at the end of the day any product or service has to solve a real problem. With Tiiny, we were trying to take away the anxiety around sharing photos and videos by constraining the form factor of the actual video (hence our grid).
While Tiiny is fun to use and has a slightly different point of view for photo and video sharing, it doesn’t materially do a better job than SMS, SnapChat, Instagram or Vine for sharing photos and videos.
Tiiny was a fun experiment, but ultimately the users have told us it’s not a strong enough product to replace their existing ways of sharing photos and videos – which is why we are pushing an update today to allow you to download all your Tiiny videos and images so we can gracefully shut Tiiny down
@tomsoderlund yah. we looked at the circle avatars and a few other things but ultimately we focused I how to put every single feature on one screen and one tap away - contacts, record, send and playback. still trying to make videos even more useful - lmk once you've played w it.
Yeah I actually came to the grid layout by starting with the camera. We made the camera a circle because we saw that crop + the top placement focuses your eye on the the camera. A lot of video chat has the user staring downwards, which was awkward. And with the circle shape, we got to the Pop metaphor, and then I nerded out on comic books and thought it'd be cool to have every conversations be on one screen in panels.
We're starting out with a simple focus - just video - and see where we can with that. I'm a big fan of obvious solutions to obvious problems... and the problem now is that phone calls, texting and video chat all have drawbacks.
@robinraszka hey i think that's a good point. FaceTime sucks, because streaming video requires commitment and right now not reliable. I've never had a Skype call not freeze up. Video texting on the other hand? A lot of promise and different people are tackling it different ways. It takes 2 taps to send a video message on Pop - so we're heavily betting on simplicity to attract users as video becomes the default medium. We don't treat videos as embeds/attachments with a photo social network or a text messaging app. We think that creates a lot of opportunity for cool stuff!
@robinraszka Yeah I can see that. For me, available channels still wasn't getting me to talk w friends like I did back in college. Before social networks and texting diluted everything. And talking to other people, some feel the same way.
@kristofertm Yeah for now. In our beta group we saw a lot of new conversations that branched off from older messages. Have been thinking about wiping reaaaally old messages tho.
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