Introducing Blink 😎

What’s on your screen, right now?

This is the question that inspired us to create Blink to be the fastest and most visual way of communicating out anything you see on your mobile.

It all began with the mobile screenshot. As it turns out people like to take a lot of them…of pretty much EVERYTHING you can possibly imagine as a way to save and share visual information.

At the same time, according to research, almost 40% of people are visual thinkers. These people perceive information in the form of images better than any other medium, yet still primarily use text to communicate.

When we first started building Blink, we examined the most common ‘jobs’ that people ‘hire’ mobile screenshots for, including:

1. Saving and sharing product or design inspiration.
2. Sharing funny memes, jokes and photos.
3. ‘Exporting’ a text message, image or quote from one app to another.

In almost every case, sharing a screenshot isn’t about the screenshot itself…but some specific snippet of content on your screen, usually an image, text, or a combination of both used to express a thought, idea or just some information.

What followed from this realization were the three key attributes that we felt Blink needed to posses in order to truly ‘supercharge’ the experience of sharing visual content on mobile.

#1) Speed

Sharing a screenshot is all about speed.

In many cases sharing a screenshot is a faster way to share information than sharing a link or simply using text to communicate a thought or snippet of information. In some other cases, it’s also the only way.

Since screenshots are all about speed, we realized we needed to make sharing a screenshot through Blink at least as fast as the current method, if not even faster.

Sharing a screenshot via Blink’s ‘Instant’ screenshot notification

1. ‘Blink Instant’ — once you enable push notifications, Blink is able to send you a push alert after you take a screenshot (within a 15 minute window of opening up the app), so you can quickly take action (save/edit/share) your screenshot, no matter which app you are currently in. We are also currently working on a way of allowing Blink to stay open indefinitely called ‘blink instant‘ background upload so that you can always receive the push notifications to save or share through.
2. ‘3-click sharing’ — even if you don’t have ‘Blink Instant’ enabled, we wanted to make it so that you were always three clicks away from sharing a screenshot from anywhere within the app.

#2) Context

We wanted Blink to be the best way to communicate the full context of what you were seeing on your screen. To achieve this, we ended up building features to enhance a blink’s context including:

1. Highlight, Blur and ‘Reverse’ Crop— for selecting or hiding parts of your screenshot, Blink has three features to hide or call attention to parts of your screenshot. The reverse cropping feature gives you the power to fully ‘remix’ anything you see on your screen in a new way.
2. Annotate & Emoji-fy — since sometimes you want to communicate more than is on your screen and adding text below just isn’t enough. With Blink’s annotate feature you can more fully express your POV in a visual way.
3. ‘Hot-linking’ beta — brings you back to the source where you took the screenshot, whether it came from a mobile website or within an app. This can be a good way to preserve context for the viewer and for yourself.

#3) Fun

It was important for us to make Blink not only the fastest and most advanced way to share what’s on your screen, but also the most fun.

That’s why we built Blink as a network from the ground up for sharing your most interesting and amusing screenshots and memes with the world.

1. Explore section — lets you browse through popular Blinks as well as ‘Stacks’ which are topical collections of Blinks submitted and curated by the community. Blinks here are often informational, entertaining or simply inspiring.
2. Sharing screenshots & memes is more fun with friends. That’s why we made it easy to share them with your contacts using your phone’s address book. Share privately to one friend on Blink, or to many. Sharing to your ‘Blink stream’ allows you to quickly share a glimpse of your screen with the world.
3. Blink Search — search for nearly any keyword to find blinks shared around almost any topic. This can be a useful way to discover new apps and trending memes and also to find screenshots you saved privately without having to infinitely scroll through your camera roll to find them.

What’s coming next?

We will continue to build out Blink to be the best way to re-mix & share what you are currently seeing on your screen right now, including:

1. Support for new formats (photos, gifs, videos etc), because today some things on your screen can’t be easily captured by a screenshot.
2. More annotation tools and enhanced capabilities for creative expression (hint: more than just arrows and boxes).
3. Even simpler sharing options and enhanced user profiles.

Interested in trying out Blink for iOS? Download it here, or leave your email address for the android version when it’s ready.

Have feedback/suggestions? Tweet us up @blink______.

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Adam Breckler is the Founder & CEO of Prism Labs, makers of Blink.

You can find him on twitter @adambreckler, tweeting screenshots (from all different kinds of apps).

More reading:

9 reasons that screenshots are still broken

What do your screenshots say about you?