What's your favorite defunct consumer social app? (and what does that say about you?)
@rrhoover 's comment on @kwindla 's "Happy Birthday, Photoshop" thread got me thinking:
"I wish Product Hunt was around longer so we had more nerdy, tech archeology to explore."
The products that made an impression on us, even if they didn't make it, often inspire the next generation of apps. Also, there's something interesting about a product that you resonated with and you thought should have been huge but didn't quite make it. It's an opportunity for reflection on maybe what was missing or how your values may differ from the world or how that product may have been a glimpse of the future and ahead of its time. I subscribe to the idea that most startup ideas will happen eventually, but timing matters. You need to see into the future, but if you see too far into the future, it may take a while for that to become reality.
For me, there are lots of contenders in the consumer social space. I really loved @Clubhouse, especially in the early days of the pandemic. I thought @Airchat had a fascinating interface (twitter...but audio?). I also thought the authenticity and light attention requirements of @BeReal. was compelling. But maybe my favorite more niche product is @Honk by Benji Taylor.
Honk was real-time messaging, one-on-one, without a log. You could see people typing in realtime. You could spam emojis, and your swarm of emojis would battle comically with your friend's swarm. It was silly, and beautifully designed, and a valiant effort at breaking through our cultural tendency to regress to boring async chat.
There's also something really cool about seeing somebody type in real time. It's like seeing them think! One magic moment is when you start typing and before you can finish the idea, the other person's understood the idea and is responding. It's a funny feeling.
Plus their Twitter account was genius. It would often just tweet "Honk" 😂
What's your favorite social app that doesn't exist anymore? What did you take away from it?
@rrhoover I'm guessing you have too many to count. @bernatfortet @kwindla @gabe
@rrhoover I hadn't heard of @Mindie !!! Twitter is maybe the epitome of how constraints lead to creativity, but this pattern shows up in many different arenas.
Sometimes it doesn't work. Like for Yahoo, they had @Yahoo Livetext live video texting, without sound. That...didn't feel like it led to enough new creativity and behavior to overcome the realtime/liquidity problem.
BeReal's random once-a-day picture caused some impressive on-the-spot creativity since it was hard to actually pose.
Do you know of any short-form audio-only apps? Like twitter for musicians / people making beats?
@rajiv_ayyangar @Anchor by @mignano and team were early in social short form audio.
I vaguely remember some startups exploring the unfinished music-sharing use case but can't remember their names off hand.
@mignano @rrhoover oh cool. I can guess at the limitations of short-form audio in both discovery (hard to "skim") and core experience (less engaging than video...but on the other hand, it's hands free).
There were some musicians putting beats or composition fragments on Airchat, but they weren't easy to scan, visually.
One cool analogous experience is browsing through rooms on Tonic (https://www.jointonic.com/) - hearing musicians practice live. Though this tends to be for classical musicians, not people composing.
@rajiv_ayyangar Oh yes! Tonic was the name of the app I was trying to remember.
Airchat attempted to solve the "skim problem" with real-time captions. It worked well.
All the social media in the world doesn't come close to the creativity of a six second video on Vine.
I miss Vine too—such a simple, creative app that paved the way for TikTok. Honk sounds like a fun twist on real-time chats, though!
It is the fact that Clubhouse connected me with at least 5 or 6 close people from other countries and we met in real life in Italy on a trip (that was kinda adventurous) :D
Many of the social media I registered for exist still, but I can name one that is less used (or heard of) than it used to be: Skype.
@busmark_w_nika That's a cool story about Clubhouse! I have fond memories of that time and a few friends that I met through Clubhouse.
Skype, on the other hand, really did fall off the map, although now video calls are rather plentiful and available in a lot of different apps.
Did you ever use @Houseparty ? It was an early attempt at real-time connection before Clubhouse.
@rajiv_ayyangar TBH, I use Google meets so much that Skype doesn't exist for me anymore :D I only hear about Houseparty but I missed this trend. In general, social media have a hard time succeeding after 2020. The last significant growth was in TikTok. After this year, many social media came in but also "walked away" quickly.
I know. But i liked the communities! Maybe that means I enjoy niche discussions more than mainstream social feeds.
Clubhouse was great at the pandemic loneliness peak. It was like reddit - if you can think of it, a room exists for it, except live and voices! Tuesday Trivia ftw!
Product Hunt
Mindie is one of the first that comes to mind.
It was a short form music video app, pre-Musically and TikTok. I made ~100 mindies and admired how the constraints led to so much creativity.