Community Meets Utility; A Call to Action for a Missing Type of Photo Sharing
The app that I believe is dying to exist.
There are photo apps out there for everything.
They’re one of the most ubiquitous app types in the market, apart from Flappy Bird remakes.
Why?
Why are photo sharing apps so common? What are the real unique problems they’re solving?
Well for one, it’s interconnectivity, but we currently just use it for selfies.
Is this really the best way to use the incredible power of interconnectivity we have today, available from the palm of our hands?
No, it isn’t, but here’s an idea that I believe is.
The Opportunity:
There are multiple points that attribute to the incredible opportunity for this idea, first let me set the stage.
There’s a growing movement in community and crowdsourcing.
People helping each other is powerful, and it’s more commonplace now than it ever has been in the past, on a very wide scale. The world is more connected than it ever has been, people are giving away their salary through crowdsourced communities like DonorsChoose, they’re building people’s dreams through Kickstarter, they’re creating a more useful map of the world with real-time insights using apps like Waze, and Foursquare.
People are sharing photos like they’ve never done before, in real time.
People are excited to share their lives, visually, and engage with their friends, and even make friends using real photos taken straight from their phones. Most of these photos are largely useless though, except for a moment of humor on Vine, artistic expression on Instagram, or selfies on Snapchat to share with your friends. None of them really have a point.
We aren’t really in control of what we see, just who we follow, and what they want to share, not what we’re directly interested in at the time.
Most of these apps and networks draw us further into our phones, and further away from actual social things, like spending real quality time with family or even a game of beach volleyball friends.
Google is constantly collecting data from around the world, but they can’t do real-time, location-specific stuff like “What is happening at X right now?”
These are often the most important and urgent decisions we need to make, the “right now” decisions. This is an area that is now just left to chance, and hasn’t really been solved in any tangible way, even with the massive interconnectivity we now have.
The Idea:
Combining a helpful community and info sharing with the wide range of interconnectivity we have today could make this real-time, location-specific information readily available, and change how we make decisions on a day-to-day basis. This could revolutionize our decision making process both for people and for businesses.
No longer would we have to guess what is happening at X location “right now” — we could just tap in to the community, get an answer, and move accordingly.
How It Would Work:
- A community member asks for specific information, like, “Are the volleyball courts at Pismo Beach open right now and is it sunny?”
- Another helpful community member nearby the location is pinged to respond, and simply sends a picture with a brief description back as an answer. This could be with text, a photo, the medium is less important than the info gathered.
- The community member asking knows exactly what the weather is like and if there is open space for their volleyball game, from someone who is there currently. Then, it’s time to get going to the beach.
Who Cares And Why:
We should all care!
Who likes waiting in lines, or getting to the beach when it is cold and foggy? Who likes going to bars when they’re empty? Who likes walking down to where your favorite food truck usually is and being disappointed, and wasting time in the process.
If the idea came to life it would be like a crowdsourced second set of eyes, for us to know what is going on when we need to know.
It would be on-demand, it would be instant, and it would help us move forward and be more productive.
I want someone to make this, I want this niche to be fulfilled, because I need this, and I think you do too.
We are going to do our best to take this opportunity head on and fill this void in connectivity that could help us all move forward faster, together.
If you want to know more about our approach, please check us out over at Spectafy.
