I’ve been playing with this new app from the Highlight team for a few days. Shorts may be one of the fastest ways to share several photos and videos from your camera roll with your friends and the world (through its discovery feed of people nearby). I also really like the comment annotations (screenshot below), enabling a new way of socializing around your media, and the screenshots people share (it’s like a peek into people’s digital lives).
@pdavison - you launched Roll a year ago, a very similar app to Shorts. How did you come to the conclusion to kill Roll and try something new (albeit very similar).
P.S. Perfect timing before SXSW. 😁
@rrhoover@pdavison Not sure where exactly this fits (social app? photo app? messaging?), but that little quandary aside, the concept is intriguing, if not simply entertaining. Could see this as becoming a popular option for people attending festivals like SXSW (as Ryan suggested), Warped Tour, Bonaroo, Burning Man, etc... We'll see how it evolves :)
@rrhoover Thanks so much! It's been really fun having you on it!
We learned a ton from Roll. The biggest challenge was that it was default private, so new users had to recruit their friends and family to join, which led to a big cold start problem.
There were also some issues with Roll's full-screen card stack interface: New users didn't know where the "home" screen was, it was hard to find content from your favorite people, and users worried about clogging people's feeds when they shared (not good when your app is meant for high frequency sharing).
When people got connected to friends on Roll and learned the interface, the retention/engagement was crazy, so we decided to rethink the app with (1) a new emphasis on friend discovery and (2) a channel-based consumption interface. We also made a lot of smaller optimizations throughout the app based on our learnings from Roll.
Lots more to learn but so far people seem to like the changes and we're so excited to be sharing it here on PH today! The whole team will be standing by all day in case people have questions/feedback. :)
Encroaching on Snapchat territory I see 😉
The model is interesting. Snapchat creates habits by forcing people to use their camera, and while I wasn't a fan at first it's obvious that it does wonders for engagement. Y'all are doing it the other way around, so I'm worried it's not habit-building enough...seems like it might be easy to forget about. Would love to hear your thoughts!
@bryantpeng What we find is that there is a nice natural engagement loop: When you get notified that you have new photos to view, you open the app and are prompted to share. Similarly, when you view your friends' photos you end up liking them, so they get notified and open the app, at which point they end up sharing.
We might add an in-app camera one day, but we think it's nice that right now all of the photos already exist, so it's super easy to create content on the network.
One thing we've noticed is that people are sharing a LOT - about 50% of all the things on their camera rolls and taking 2-3x as many photos/videos vs. before they joined Shorts!
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