Why Shot.ly?

Needs for a new way of communication for more privacy

This year we tried to start a new project but it wasn’t easy to do something completely new. After a series of market research, we decided to develop a new service called Shot.ly.

Shot.ly is a new messaging service based on ‘self-destructing’ photos, not texts. In the US, Snapchat first started this type of communication and teenagers have been using it heavily, but now it’s slowly expanding the demographics to other generations.

The advent of visual communication era

Since social network services became a part of our everyday lives, people are sharing their moments on the internet. Then how they share? People used to write, but more and more they are using photos as the main mean of communication.

It’s been a while since Facebook became the world’s biggest photo sharing service. Recently, Facebook restructured their Newsfeed to a whole new way in order to make photos stand out even more. Instagram, a SNS solely dedicating for photo sharing, had successfully built its own world of aesthetics.

Not only on those SNSs, also on instant messaging services such as KakaoTalk, the amount of traffic related to photo sharing has been increased dramatically. According to the biggest messaging service Whatsapp, they are transacting photos as much as 320 million photos a day.

On the 2013 report of Internet Trends by KPCB, Mary Meeker said photo sharing is explosively growing but still in its early stage, while remarking the fact that more than 500 million photos are uploaded and shared every day. The advent of visual communication era might have been already here.

More involvement on SNSs, more concerns on privacy

The most side effects of SNSs are related to privacy issues. Although people tend to share their moments only with their approved friends, but it does not mean that they are maintaining full control of the contents they have produced. It applies to shared photos as well. It can be leaked, or shared by a third person. Sometimes photos are much more personal than texts, so sharing with a wrong person can cause devastating results.

Shot.ly, the visual communication method free of privacy issues

Shot.ly is trying to solve the problems above. It doesn’t leave any records, so you don’t have to worry about unwanted future consequences. You can set the amount of time that the shared photo can be shown, and when the time is up, it will be deleted. For good.

Shot.ly is not the service to replace the other SNSs or messaging services such as KakaoTalk or Facebook. If you want to keep the photos with your friends and family, you might need to rely on the existing SNSs. But just for fun? Shot.ly might be a better method.

At this moment, I would like to ask this question. How many times have you actually tried to look for the photos that your friends shared on Facebook?

We believe in the creativity of our users

While developing Shot.ly, we were able to receive various kinds of reactions. Some users felt it’s inconvenient to take a photo every time they want to send, and some even criticized that it’s not even a messaging app because photos get gone.

Despite of those negative reactions, many users found it “fun” though, and it was quite remarkable that a groups of ‘middle aged men’ actually enjoyed a great deal of it.

As the unexpected reaction of middle aged men, some of mobile services were able to be successful due to some of unpredicted user behaviors from the original aim. We also do not know how Shot.ly will be used, but we strongly believe in the creativity of them.

Did you know that Twitter didn’t have the general ‘comment’ feature? That has always been one of main barriers for new users to try Twitter. However, Twitter recently implemented “Conversation View” so that users can read through the replied tweets sequentially along the blue lines. Have you seen Korean users who used this functionality quite far from its original aim?

Shot.ly has just started as a mean of “privacy-issue-free” communication but we still don’t know how it will be used, and actually we are looking forward to see the unexpected user behavior as “weird” as possible.

We cannot deny that Shot.ly is quite alike as Snapchap now, but it will be evolving along with user reactions. Some might think it’s a quite “quirky” service, but we even expect that Shot.ly could even become a whole new way of communication in near future.