I like the idea of making chat more "personal" this way. I wonder how the founders are planning on reaching critical mass of users for a chat app? Would love to hear their thoughts. 😜📹
@kjemperud@_vojto We don't really have an idea about the growth now. We want to try if we can find the right audience by this project first.
And it's indeed a learning project to us. :)
Reminds me a lot of React Messenger which launched a year ago. This type of interaction is at first fun, but the novelty quickly wore off and more importantly, being recorded as I was typing only made me self-conscious and less willing to communicate in some situations (e.g. when laying in bed).
@kwdinc@kjemperud Yes, it’s our learning project and I hope we know what's we're doing. :)
At first, I don’t think I’ll use Smile that much (I’m a married man, so … :p). But after using it more and more, I really enjoy seeing the place my wife is going to, and we have more things to chat about.
We are very interested to learn if there are more people feeling the same, or they have different usage using Smile.
@rrhoover Thanks for the feedback.
Do you think we should make the videos disappear faster, or make them smaller? or do you have any other ideas that can make people more willing to communicate?
Do you also feel the same using the back camera?
@rrhoover for me it's more like asynchronized FaceTime. I spent lots of time playing Smile with my friends and families oversea. It gives me an easier way to keep updated with people I cared the most :)
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I don't think people would want to be videoed whilst responding to every message. Is there a way to selectively turn it off?
I would imagine it to be kind of fun for a few messages at times, but I think people would soon revert back to WhatsApp/iMessage.
@adamcudworth Sorry but the videos can't be turned off.
If users can turn it off, Smile will become another utility messengers like iMessage and Whatsapp.
We want to create another use case which users can communicate on iMessage most of the time, but still use Smile with some friends because it feels much closer and fun.
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It's really an interesting app : ) hope to know more about their next step. there should be more than this .
Hi, I'm Yenwen, co-founder at Smile.
Some background on this project. It started because my co-founder got a girl friend several months ago, but she seldom takes selfie. We want to make an app encourages her to take more pictures. :)
But after we use Smile more and more, we found that it’s very interesting to get more context of his/her text from either front or back camera. He/She might just reply a simple “hi”, but by the video, we can know he/she is either busy traveling in the train station, or laying on the sofa lazily.
We think the surrounding/details that we normally don’t have the motivation to share is the fun part of Smile. It's actually more like an asynchronized FaceTime than messaging app.
Please let us know if you have any questions and feedback. We are happy to answer!
@markbao Yes! we'll make it easier to find friend in the future, for now we hope user only talk to their closed friends by inviting people. Thanks for feedback!
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