As a company, we think we know a thing or two about visual communications. Cooliris introduced better ways to browse media with products like Coolpreviews, Cooliris (formerly known as Piclens) for the desktop, and more recently the Android Gallery (the media app for all Android devices – shipped over 300k daily), Discover for iPad (#1 across the app store for multiple weeks across multiple countries) and now Decks. With over 40M downloads, 25M monthly page views and more than 8M monthly active users, we think we’ve done well and will continue to push the edge on media browsing.
So where do we go from here – what is the future of communication?
What we are seeing is this:
In browsing through photos, videos and other rich media, our user base wants to share that content, but they also want control over how they share it – both at a broadcast level (all friends on Facebook or all followers on Twitter) and narrowcast level (targeted people that would care specifically about the content shared with them). Enter LiveShare.
LiveShare enables conversation around context. Users can communicate and share with content they have created (using the camera or text on their phone or laptops), or chat about existing content (using the public section in LiveShare that brings in relevant, interesting content based on location and global interests around the world).
LiveShare does two subtle things differently from existing services (a) it does not assume context – the service doesn’t presume that you want to broadcast or narrowcast, it enables you to do either one based on what’s important to you as a user; and (b) it doesn’t draw a line between content and communication. Navigating to Parishilton.com and reading an article or seeing pictures there is akin to reading an email or seeing photos received from a friend. In either case, users want to be able to consume relevant content and communicate around that.
The four contexts around which LiveShare is looking to enable communication and sharing are space, time, interests, and relationships (internally referred to as the STIR framework). Instead of silo-ing the users or having them switch apps and services every time (which gets expensive b/c each service requires learning different interfaces, comes with a different social graph etc.), users can communicate flexibly around what’s important to them at the moment. Some of the use cases we wanted to highlight include:
Bachelor(ette) party – Definitely not a broadcast scenario (unless you’re Charlie Sheen). If you go out with five friends, of whom you know three, LiveShare allows you to set up a quick group based on the fact that all the users are at the same time, space, and have a temporal (elastic) relationship in context of the party. Once you add the three friends you know, they can add the other two (much like a real world scenario) and you immediately have a group that you are in full control of. You don’t have to be life-long friends or followers of any of these folks unless you want to.
U2 concert – A thousand fans rocking to awesome music. Being able to connect with fans around you (all fans in the same space and time with a shared interest and a temporary relationship) is easy through LiveShare. Simply navigate to public, find the concert/event/topic you’re looking for and start posting photos. LiveShare automatically pools all the photos together based on the shared context. Again, you don’t have to be life-long friends or followers of any of these folks unless you want to.
There are several more scenarios that we’ve begun to see cropping up in this nascent space and service and we will continue to push the boundaries of enabling contextual conversations easily.
More to come – stay tuned.
