“Snap It or It never Happened”

“If you didn’t Snap it, it never happened”, my friends said facetiously when I told them I just went to Niagara Falls this summer.

Even though my friends said it jokingly, with my generation there is this constant need to validate and share my experiences with my friends, and my friends are always wanting to see evidence that I actually did what I said I did. To them — and even I’m guilty of it — if they didn’t see a Snap or a post about it, did it even “really” happen? If it wasn’t worthy of a Snap, is it worthy to be brought up in a conversation offline?

What if I didn’t want to post something for the world to see? Other than private messaging apps or using the direct message features on social media apps, there is no place for me to share my experiences and memories to a select group of people. For example, with my trip to Canada, could there be a platform where I could create a folder of my photos and videos from that trip and just share it with a small group of friends?

Is there a place where I can do that?

Well, now there is! As I mentioned in my first blog post I am an intern at Balloon, and with their platform they actually have a solution for my dilemma. With this new social media app, because everything is organized by balloons (a visual dynamic folder), I can control which balloons I want to keep private and which balloons I want to be public.

I control who sees my content (by balloons).

And the settings can be changed anytime. Even if you first create a balloon that is public, you can still change it to a private balloon in the future.

So, why do I want a platform like this?

Jeff Fromm recently wrote an article in Forbes about the user behavior of my generation — Generation Z.

“Although the number of social media platforms has more than doubled in the past decade, gen Z continues to be choosier when it comes to where and how they are sharing content … gen Z is shifting to a mentality of sharing onlyspecific stories to specific people on specific social channels”. ~Jeff Fromm

I agree with Jeff Fromm. Speaking on the behalf of some Generation Z teens and myself, we are the generation where we are hyperconnected, but we do not want everyone to see all of our stuff. We have become highly selective about who we want seeing our content. We want to be exclusive with some of our friends and have a safe space to share our experiences. We want to create unique circles with our friends and connect with people who most align with our interests.

At my high school, Brooklyn Technical High School, people were in multiple groups depending on what classes they were in, what clubs they belong to and what we were ultimately interested in. We did not belong to just one group.

For example, I played badminton in school so I have friends who share my love for the sport. With the Balloon app, I can create a balloon (private or public) with them and just post about all things badminton. I also have friends who love K-Dramas (Korean dramas) and have no interests in the badminton part of my life. So, I create a separate balloon about my interest in K-Drama and post about it with just my friends interested in the shows I like to watch.

This ability to create interest-specific balloons helps me organize my experiences based on my interests, but also gives me the control to decide which balloons should be private or public based on my comfort level.

So check out Balloon Stories. There are so many exciting ways all of the users have been using the app and I cannot wait to see what kind of balloons you create and how you use this new platform.

Balloon Stories is a next-gen social media platform where you can easily collaborate with friends on a new storytelling platform. Exclusively available on the App Store. Download it today!