In 2018, I wrote a TechCrunch article stating that 2018 was “the 12 months social networks have been now not social.” Reflecting on that article, I’m unsure that 2018 was the turning level. However the premise of the article nonetheless holds up effectively.
In some unspecified time in the future, social networks have been now not about connecting together with your closest buddies, maintaining with long-distance members of the family and feeling a particular reference to folks you like.
TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Fb, YouTube and X (previously Twitter) are all slowly evolving to develop into the identical infinite scrollable feed of algorithm-optimized brief movies from high performers.
And it seems that I’m not the one one who has seen that social networks have been slowly drifting away from their unique objective. Amo, a small group based mostly in Paris, has been working for the higher a part of 2023 on a model new social app known as ID.
ID is a social app launching at present on iOS that allows you to join with your pals in a inventive approach. In some ways, it feels just like the early days of blogs, MySpace’s highly-personalized profile pages and the golden period of Tumblr.
However first, some context about Amo. There’s lots of hype and anticipation surrounding Amo’s launch as the corporate has been co-founded by Antoine Martin, who was the co-founder of Zenly with Alexis Bonillo. Zenly was a well-liked social app centered on location sharing that inspired you to spend extra time with your pals and uncover new locations.
Snap spent greater than $200 million to accumulate Zenly and stored the identical group to iterate on it, as a separate app. Beneath Snap’s possession, Zenly grew to become considered one of Europe’s largest social apps of all time. At its peak the corporate had 18 million totally different customers opening the app daily.
After which… it disappeared.
As a part of Snap’s cost-cutting efforts, the corporate determined to shut down Zenly altogether. From what I’ve heard, this transfer even triggered discussions between French politicians on the highest stage and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel.
Many key members of the Zenly group are actually working at Amo. Actually, there are 10 co-founders. Along with Martin, Corentin Kerisit, Michael Goldenstein, Claire Pluvinage, Charly Delaroche, Julien Martin, Quentin Perez, Nicolas Fallourd, Alexis Druon and Jean-Baptiste Dalido are all Amo co-founders and all former Zenly folks.
The second motive why Amo’s launch is extremely anticipated is that the startup closed an $18 million funding spherical in February or March at a valuation round $100 million with New Wave main the spherical, and Coatue and DST World additionally taking part. There are additionally 80 angel traders on Amo’s cap desk.
This can be a extremely uncommon funding spherical because it occurred in 2023 (throughout a VC funding downturn), Amo is a cell shopper startup (no income for now) and the startup didn’t have any product on the market.
An empty canvas
In 2010, Jürgen Schweizer from Cultured Code, the corporate behind private activity administration app Issues, wrote a weblog submit shortly after Steve Jobs launched the unique iPad. In that submit, he in contrast the iPad to an empty canvas.
“If you wish to perceive what makes the iPad particular, you can’t have a look at what it has, however what it doesn’t have. The iPad is so skinny and lightweight, it turns into the show, and the show turns into the appliance. No enter units. The gadget vanishes and turns into the appliance you’re utilizing. The know-how is clear,” Schweizer wrote.
And this analogy applies notably effectively to ID and Amo’s work as effectively. There are various issues that you are able to do with ID. There are additionally many issues that we take as a right in a social app that merely aren’t there.
ID is an empty canvas paired with inventive instruments that aid you specific your self. You need to use it to create a profile that completely describes your pursuits in a visible method. However there’s a social twist as you possibly can each see your pals’ profiles and add issues to their very own profiles.
While you first create your profile on ID, you get an empty whiteboard that’s ready for content material. You may fill it your self in 4 other ways.
You may add stickers out of your sticker library (extra on that later), you possibly can seize content material out of your photograph library, you possibly can write textual content or you possibly can draw. While you select a photograph, ID routinely creates a cut-out of the primary object or topic within the photograph utilizing PhotoRoom’s know-how.
This may really feel instantly acquainted to Pinterest customers who like to construct temper boards or software program builders who cowl their model new laptop computer lid with stickers.
Each digital object could be moved, resized and rotated. After some time, your profile turns into this form of spatial canvas. You can also make issues so small that they form of disappear… until you zoom in.
You may create small islands that outline what’s in your thoughts proper now. As an example, you possibly can have a Los Angeles nook with the favourite buildings you noticed throughout your trip, group pictures with your pals, the cup of your favourite espresso store there, and so forth. You may as well have a restaurant nook with pictures of meals from fancy eating places the place you’ve just lately been.
The whole lot feels easy and pure. You scroll, zoom in, zoom out, bounce from one profile to the opposite. There’s a way of depth and area that I’ve by no means seen in some other app. Images by no means really feel pixelated and also you don’t really feel such as you’re ready for one thing to load.
Should you’ve been utilizing ID for some time, issues can develop into messy — however so is life. “And it’s tremendous. My character is chaotic — our personalities are chaotic. They’re multifaceted and so they’re not neatly organized in a 3×3 grid,” Amo CEO Antoine Martin mentioned.
Emergent gameplay
As you begin looking across the app and what’s new in your buddies’ profile web page, you could need to steal one thing in your personal wall. ID enables you to add content material from different profiles to your sticker library so as to both add it to your personal profile or put it on another person’s profile.
I’ve been utilizing the app for a bit of bit greater than every week, and I can already see some developments spreading across the small neighborhood of beta customers. You may see who initially created a sticker because it strikes round from one wall to a different. Some customers have put good cabinets to allow them to neatly categorize the whole lot that issues to them. A consumer created a guestbook part on her profile. “Should you’re dropping by, please go away a word right here,” she wrote.
A number of video video games rely closely on the participant’s creativity to have enjoyable, akin to Minecraft or current Zelda video games. In these video games, you possibly can create your personal fortress or construct your personal automobile.
And that’s additionally the primary idea behind ID. Amo provides you the inventive instruments and a limitless Figma-like canvas. Now, it’s as much as the neighborhood to determine what they need to do with it. And one of the best half is that it doesn’t appear like some other social app on the market.
Possibly Amo will find yourself fostering a creator financial system with unique content material that may actually make your profile stand out. Possibly the corporate will add some premium options over time. For now, Amo desires to discover a hit.
“We’re prioritizing scale as a result of my objective is to create an indestructible firm. And it’s Zenly’s founder who’s saying that! I used to assume that 18 million [daily active users] can be sufficient to make an organization indestructible. However I used to be unsuitable. I believe you want 100 million [daily active users],” Martin informed me.
Curing loneliness
When the Amo group began engaged on ID, they needed to discover a method to remedy loneliness. It appears a bit counterintuitive to construct a social app as folks spend a lot time on their telephone already. However, in keeping with Antoine Martin, it’s simply that present social apps don’t have your greatest pursuits in thoughts.
“The [World Health Organization] now calls it the loneliness epidemic. And if they are saying that it’s an epidemic, it’s as a result of it’s truly infectious. In different phrases, in case you’re remoted, your family members are too since you’re unreachable. So throughout the two hours you’re on TikTok, they’ve nobody to speak to,” Martin informed me.
“And on the identical time, the human wants that the social shopper area can fulfill are now not lined by these merchandise, whereas they was once,” he added. “Within the early days of Fb, I don’t know in case you bear in mind, profiles have been form of a mash-up. There have been drawings, video games, pictures, textual content. You’d write lengthy feedback, it could possibly be a poem . . . And however, it was a reminder that you just mattered to those folks.”
In accordance with him, the present technology of social networks are very passive. You don’t should do a lot to spend two hours on TikTok or YouTube as a result of these corporations need you to spend as a lot time as potential in these apps. “We aspire to return to those earlier precepts and make them work,” Martin mentioned.
That’s additionally the rationale why Amo doesn’t need you to spend hours within the app. When you’ve a couple of minutes, you possibly can open the app to test what’s new in your buddies’ profiles by swiping up on the notification playing cards.
While you’ve reached the final card, ID exhibits you a message that claims “get some contemporary air.” After which, the app closes itself. You’re again on the house display, you possibly can put your telephone again in your pocket.
Amo & ID
ID is an opinionated tackle social apps, however is it going to work? Given the previous expertise of the group and Amo’s deep pockets, if there’s one group that has a shot at attempting one thing radically new within the area, it’s Amo.
“We’re intentionally transport one thing 8 or 9 months after the launch of the corporate as a result of we swore to ourselves that it wouldn’t take us a 12 months to get began, that we’d study extra by constructing in public,” Martin mentioned.
Whereas ID is Amo’s first concept, the corporate most definitely has different concepts within the shopper social area — Amo didn’t identify its app ‘Amo’ in spite of everything. So it’s going to be attention-grabbing to comply with the launch of this new app, but in addition Amo’s story as an organization.
In 2018, I wrote a TechCrunch article stating that 2018 was “the 12 months social networks have been now not social.” Reflecting on that article, I’m unsure that 2018 was the turning level. However the premise of the article nonetheless holds up effectively.
In some unspecified time in the future, social networks have been now not about connecting together with your closest buddies, maintaining with long-distance members of the family and feeling a particular reference to folks you like.
TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Fb, YouTube and X (previously Twitter) are all slowly evolving to develop into the identical infinite scrollable feed of algorithm-optimized brief movies from high performers.
And it seems that I’m not the one one who has seen that social networks have been slowly drifting away from their unique objective. Amo, a small group based mostly in Paris, has been working for the higher a part of 2023 on a model new social app known as ID.
ID is a social app launching at present on iOS that allows you to join with your pals in a inventive approach. In some ways, it feels just like the early days of blogs, MySpace’s highly-personalized profile pages and the golden period of Tumblr.
However first, some context about Amo. There’s lots of hype and anticipation surrounding Amo’s launch as the corporate has been co-founded by Antoine Martin, who was the co-founder of Zenly with Alexis Bonillo. Zenly was a well-liked social app centered on location sharing that inspired you to spend extra time with your pals and uncover new locations.
Snap spent greater than $200 million to accumulate Zenly and stored the identical group to iterate on it, as a separate app. Beneath Snap’s possession, Zenly grew to become considered one of Europe’s largest social apps of all time. At its peak the corporate had 18 million totally different customers opening the app daily.
After which… it disappeared.
As a part of Snap’s cost-cutting efforts, the corporate determined to shut down Zenly altogether. From what I’ve heard, this transfer even triggered discussions between French politicians on the highest stage and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel.
Many key members of the Zenly group are actually working at Amo. Actually, there are 10 co-founders. Along with Martin, Corentin Kerisit, Michael Goldenstein, Claire Pluvinage, Charly Delaroche, Julien Martin, Quentin Perez, Nicolas Fallourd, Alexis Druon and Jean-Baptiste Dalido are all Amo co-founders and all former Zenly folks.
The second motive why Amo’s launch is extremely anticipated is that the startup closed an $18 million funding spherical in February or March at a valuation round $100 million with New Wave main the spherical, and Coatue and DST World additionally taking part. There are additionally 80 angel traders on Amo’s cap desk.
This can be a extremely uncommon funding spherical because it occurred in 2023 (throughout a VC funding downturn), Amo is a cell shopper startup (no income for now) and the startup didn’t have any product on the market.
An empty canvas
In 2010, Jürgen Schweizer from Cultured Code, the corporate behind private activity administration app Issues, wrote a weblog submit shortly after Steve Jobs launched the unique iPad. In that submit, he in contrast the iPad to an empty canvas.
“If you wish to perceive what makes the iPad particular, you can’t have a look at what it has, however what it doesn’t have. The iPad is so skinny and lightweight, it turns into the show, and the show turns into the appliance. No enter units. The gadget vanishes and turns into the appliance you’re utilizing. The know-how is clear,” Schweizer wrote.
And this analogy applies notably effectively to ID and Amo’s work as effectively. There are various issues that you are able to do with ID. There are additionally many issues that we take as a right in a social app that merely aren’t there.
ID is an empty canvas paired with inventive instruments that aid you specific your self. You need to use it to create a profile that completely describes your pursuits in a visible method. However there’s a social twist as you possibly can each see your pals’ profiles and add issues to their very own profiles.
While you first create your profile on ID, you get an empty whiteboard that’s ready for content material. You may fill it your self in 4 other ways.
You may add stickers out of your sticker library (extra on that later), you possibly can seize content material out of your photograph library, you possibly can write textual content or you possibly can draw. While you select a photograph, ID routinely creates a cut-out of the primary object or topic within the photograph utilizing PhotoRoom’s know-how.
This may really feel instantly acquainted to Pinterest customers who like to construct temper boards or software program builders who cowl their model new laptop computer lid with stickers.
Each digital object could be moved, resized and rotated. After some time, your profile turns into this form of spatial canvas. You can also make issues so small that they form of disappear… until you zoom in.
You may create small islands that outline what’s in your thoughts proper now. As an example, you possibly can have a Los Angeles nook with the favourite buildings you noticed throughout your trip, group pictures with your pals, the cup of your favourite espresso store there, and so forth. You may as well have a restaurant nook with pictures of meals from fancy eating places the place you’ve just lately been.
The whole lot feels easy and pure. You scroll, zoom in, zoom out, bounce from one profile to the opposite. There’s a way of depth and area that I’ve by no means seen in some other app. Images by no means really feel pixelated and also you don’t really feel such as you’re ready for one thing to load.
Should you’ve been utilizing ID for some time, issues can develop into messy — however so is life. “And it’s tremendous. My character is chaotic — our personalities are chaotic. They’re multifaceted and so they’re not neatly organized in a 3×3 grid,” Amo CEO Antoine Martin mentioned.
Emergent gameplay
As you begin looking across the app and what’s new in your buddies’ profile web page, you could need to steal one thing in your personal wall. ID enables you to add content material from different profiles to your sticker library so as to both add it to your personal profile or put it on another person’s profile.
I’ve been utilizing the app for a bit of bit greater than every week, and I can already see some developments spreading across the small neighborhood of beta customers. You may see who initially created a sticker because it strikes round from one wall to a different. Some customers have put good cabinets to allow them to neatly categorize the whole lot that issues to them. A consumer created a guestbook part on her profile. “Should you’re dropping by, please go away a word right here,” she wrote.
A number of video video games rely closely on the participant’s creativity to have enjoyable, akin to Minecraft or current Zelda video games. In these video games, you possibly can create your personal fortress or construct your personal automobile.
And that’s additionally the primary idea behind ID. Amo provides you the inventive instruments and a limitless Figma-like canvas. Now, it’s as much as the neighborhood to determine what they need to do with it. And one of the best half is that it doesn’t appear like some other social app on the market.
Possibly Amo will find yourself fostering a creator financial system with unique content material that may actually make your profile stand out. Possibly the corporate will add some premium options over time. For now, Amo desires to discover a hit.
“We’re prioritizing scale as a result of my objective is to create an indestructible firm. And it’s Zenly’s founder who’s saying that! I used to assume that 18 million [daily active users] can be sufficient to make an organization indestructible. However I used to be unsuitable. I believe you want 100 million [daily active users],” Martin informed me.
Curing loneliness
When the Amo group began engaged on ID, they needed to discover a method to remedy loneliness. It appears a bit counterintuitive to construct a social app as folks spend a lot time on their telephone already. However, in keeping with Antoine Martin, it’s simply that present social apps don’t have your greatest pursuits in thoughts.
“The [World Health Organization] now calls it the loneliness epidemic. And if they are saying that it’s an epidemic, it’s as a result of it’s truly infectious. In different phrases, in case you’re remoted, your family members are too since you’re unreachable. So throughout the two hours you’re on TikTok, they’ve nobody to speak to,” Martin informed me.
“And on the identical time, the human wants that the social shopper area can fulfill are now not lined by these merchandise, whereas they was once,” he added. “Within the early days of Fb, I don’t know in case you bear in mind, profiles have been form of a mash-up. There have been drawings, video games, pictures, textual content. You’d write lengthy feedback, it could possibly be a poem . . . And however, it was a reminder that you just mattered to those folks.”
In accordance with him, the present technology of social networks are very passive. You don’t should do a lot to spend two hours on TikTok or YouTube as a result of these corporations need you to spend as a lot time as potential in these apps. “We aspire to return to those earlier precepts and make them work,” Martin mentioned.
That’s additionally the rationale why Amo doesn’t need you to spend hours within the app. When you’ve a couple of minutes, you possibly can open the app to test what’s new in your buddies’ profiles by swiping up on the notification playing cards.
While you’ve reached the final card, ID exhibits you a message that claims “get some contemporary air.” After which, the app closes itself. You’re again on the house display, you possibly can put your telephone again in your pocket.
Amo & ID
ID is an opinionated tackle social apps, however is it going to work? Given the previous expertise of the group and Amo’s deep pockets, if there’s one group that has a shot at attempting one thing radically new within the area, it’s Amo.
“We’re intentionally transport one thing 8 or 9 months after the launch of the corporate as a result of we swore to ourselves that it wouldn’t take us a 12 months to get began, that we’d study extra by constructing in public,” Martin mentioned.
Whereas ID is Amo’s first concept, the corporate most definitely has different concepts within the shopper social area — Amo didn’t identify its app ‘Amo’ in spite of everything. So it’s going to be attention-grabbing to comply with the launch of this new app, but in addition Amo’s story as an organization.