Its for the photos, in a nutshell the 'chat' will inherit/show you albums from everywhere that the user/group is a subset. For example, if you have a family group with a bunch of family photos, and you open the 'chat' with a sibling, you'll also see the family photos since the sibling is a subset of the family, unless you toggle inherited off, in that case it'll only show you albums with you and your sibling exclusively. Just a filtering mechanism for convenience
I think your analysis about the feed is correct, but the intention isn't to create a traditional feed to scroll for hours, we have plenty of those that do a very good job already. Its more of a different interface for effectively a chat platform where you send links/posts from different parts of the internet directly to a few people you know. The purpose of the feed stops becoming something to scroll to discover new content and more like instagram chat in a unified place, but instead of memes it can be whatever you want.
The business side of things might become a challenge, I have some ideas on how to overcome this without affecting the core product, but its definitely going to be a lot of experimentation. As for the scattered users, because its private its useful as a way of directly sending interesting things from other platforms to someone you know, rather than competing with those platforms. As long as there's one other person you know, its closer to a messaging service for links/posts than a traditional social network
Thanks! :) There could be, talking to users they would definitely like some 'magic button' that automatically organizes the photos into albums by date/location and auto-adds them to pockets. We've been trying to work on a local, opt-in solution on iOS but its definitely not an easy problem to solve, so on the back-burner for now.
I completely agree, my only issue with WhatsApp is that when I get a message, I need to read it immediately and its 50/50 whether its important or just a random link to something. For me at least, the reason Instagram messages work is I can ignore the notification because I know its definitely not important and just something funny to look at later.
I think the 'sending posts directly to people' which mimics the way memes are sent on instagram helps a lot with this. If I know exactly who the audience is for what I'm sending it definitely makes it more comfortable.
I think so, the feed doesn't really cost much and our infra isn't on AWS. The main focus is the photo storage and as long as that makes enough to cover costs long-term I'm happy keeping it the way it is. There isn't really a point trying to compete with modern Facebook.
Sure, but it doesn't always work and isn't very organized. My point is that you already organized all of those photos every time you shared them. So why not capitalize on it for future photos without additional effort?
The other thing is that it isn't straightforward to pass on existing photos to children. I inherited boxes of photo albums and VHS tapes from my childhood, but it's a lot more complicated to share a whole bunch of memories with future generations; adding a placeholder to a bunch of albums that someone else can inherit later just makes more sense to me.
The end-result is that each 'chat' (Pocket) is effectively a chronological history of all your memories with this person/people. A good friend of mine is using this for his newborn; he has a placeholder for him, and he and and his wife leave voice-notes on interesting photos with the placeholder. The idea being that when the child is older they can inherit their placeholder, which would be the equivalent of inheriting a box of photo albums and VHS tapes from your parents; only digital, which comes with obvious benefits.
This was about a year's worth of work, and business logic was and remains the most challenging part of this, considering Pockets are designed to be shared between multiple people, so it had to be designed more like a chat app than a photo storage solution. For example, when you upload a photo to a Pocket with real users, you have 3 hours to permanently delete the photo, otherwise it becomes 'grandfathered'. Users can also dump the 100 nearly identical selfies they took in an event, pHash duplicate detection organizes these, so each user can choose which one they like the most and delete the rest, only for themselves. This way each user curates their own version of the photo album however they like without affecting the others.
Currently working on making it simpler to automate importing photos as events using the metadata in your camera roll. I've made some progress by grouping photos based on time/location, but it needs some extra work to be useful, like inferring a home city, people who live in multiple places, etc., but I feel that you could probably get pretty far inferring groupings based on metadata. It might be a UX nightmare, but we'll see...
There are 3 main problems with modern photo galleries:
- Most photos in a camera roll are unimportant and just clutter actually valuable photos
- Finding photos is difficult
- Sharing generally happens via a messaging app, which is a separate task and makes finding photos even more difficult due to fragmentation
The solution is to combine all 3 actions into a single interface:
- Sharing is still done via the convenient 'messaging' interface
- Each 'chat' is actually a collection of 'events', each event is tagged with the members of the chat
- Searching is done via people, which is faster and more accurate than face detection/NLP, and is how our brains index memories anyway.
For example, you went on a trip with your family in 2006. You want to find those photos, you can either open the 'chat' with your family or any member of the family, as chats also inherit events they are a subset of (this can be toggled). As long as you remember at least one person who was part of this event, you can find it virtually instantly.
Unlike an actual messaging platform, the tagging/chat system here doesn't require the other people in the event to actually be on the platform, or real people. For example, you can tag a baby, or a pet as a placeholder to still gain the benefit of searching via that parameter. You can also choose to assign the placeholder in the future to a real person, and they will replace the placeholder. For convenience, placeholders can also be assigned from phone contacts, and if/when they register, they immediately inherit the placeholder's events.
Finally, the effort of finding the photos to contribute to a 'shared album', or in this case an event, shouldn't be duplicated. If you are added to an event, the 'Smart Suggestions' feature simply shows you photos in your gallery in the same time range as the event.