Four years ago, right around this time, everyone started getting excited about an app called Highlight. It had an obnoxious yet hypnotic logo, breathless hype, and a jump on the hot new trend of “ambient reality.” Ambient reality was another way of saying SoLoMo, which was another way of saying social-local-mobiles. Highlight led a pack of apps hell-bent on discovering the people around you, revealing them to you, and bringing all of you together.
It was a hit at SXSW. Founder Paul Davison and his bulldog were the darlings of the show, and people (including me) mostly only had good things to say about Highlight.
And then everyone went home, and no one used Highlight. It didn’t make sense in the real world, away from the saturation of SXSW. If the people around you weren’t on Highlight—and unless you lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, they weren’t—the app did absolutely nothing and your lonely world was simply replicated in the lonely app. “Hyperlocal is a tough nut to crack,” says Davison. “But we still really believe in the product.”
While Highlight still exists, the team has turned toward a new app called Shorts. It's not fixated on hyperlocal, but it is intimate. And then some.
Shorts, in short, (yes, I went there) lets people look at your iphoness camera roll. The screenshots, the two-second videos, the rejected selfies, the OOTD outtakes—it’s all fair game for Shorts. Well, mostly. You do get to decide what it shares with the world. When you open Shorts, it shows you the photos and videos you've taken since the last time you used the app, and asks you which ones to share. Then you get to see everything your friends have captured. It's like someone handed you their phones and you did that dreaded thing where you just keep scrolling past the one photo you were supposed to see. If you decide not to share something, it never hits Short’s servers. More importantly, if you accidentally share something, you can unshare it, which yanks it from everyone's phones.
The idea for Shorts started with Highlight, or rather Highlight 2. Yes, there was a Highlight 2. It added profile photos, and Davison's team noticed people were flipping through them to learn more about people. “We thought, maybe there’s another way to do this.”
Wouldn’t it be cool, they mused, if an app would automatically send you the photos your friends were taking? They built an app to do exactly that. About a year ago, the team developed a prototype that pulled absolutely every picture and tested it internally. “The very first version was very frictionless,” says Davison. “If your friend was also on the app and you were connected, if they took a photo with their native iphoness camera, it would just immediately show up on your phones.” Boarding passes, car parking spots, recipes, dinner preparations, all of it. The more tedious moments of the day, the ones not worthing filtering and sharing. Davison says early testers were obsessed. “People were glued to their phoness all day waiting for things to come in,” says Davison. “But… I mean… it was scary!” he says, laughing. “So we said, ‘Is there a way to retain the magic and the real-time sharing and eliminate the scary part?” They think they have with Shorts.
The official version, available today, has a screening feature that lets you decide what to share. There’s also a locations discovery element that feels distinctly Highlight, where you can see who around you is using it and snoop through their shared camera roll. (This is automatically on, by the way: To change your privacy settings, head to your profile, where you can make sure only your friends can see your photos.)
There’s something happening right now in social that’s very much about leaving the performative behind, or at least experimenting with alternatives. So much of an online personality is so painstakingly curated. Instagram photos, Facebook posts, and tweets are all crafted just so. Any intimacy is slowly stripped away as people use social media to hone their personal brands. But someone's personal brand often has so little to do with their real life, which is more accurately reflected in the things you don't share. This is what Davison wants to reveal with Shorts. Giving someone (fairly) unfiltered access to your phones is like letting them fish around in your purse or backpack, freely digging through everything you’ve amassed or hidden in there—it’s a frightened level of intimacy to share with most people. And it may be addicting: Davison says in testing, the more people used Shorts, the more photos they started taking and immediately sharing in the app.
Davison suggests a few use cases, like people in a relationship: A lot of the time, you want to know what your significant other is doing, not necessarily peep a beautifully edited photo with a clever caption of it on Instagram or Facebook. Shorts lets you glimpse the banality of his or her everyday life that you otherwise might not see. “When you get home in the evening, you know exactly what they’ve been up all day,” he says. Which, might not be so great. That funny story you planned to share about the mixup at the dry cleaners might fall flat if your honey's already seen the pics. Cataloging your every moment is great for togetherness when you aren’t together, but maybe not so much for when you are.
And then there's another problem: Maybe being ourselves is boring. Instagram is wildly successful for a reason. Making things prettier might just be better, and our true authentic selves are so interesting to the rest of the Internet.
Despite those hypothetical hitches, the seamless sharing feels extremely relevant. Facebook touched on this with Moments, which prompts you to share photos of friends or photos you took with them. The difference, of course, is Facebook uses facial recognition and other data to determine who should receive those photos, whereas Shorts dumps it all to everyone. But the underlying idea is the same. Another app working on this is Knoto, which is something of a mix of the two: Knoto uses facial recognition to automatically push photos to the people in them. “Making private photo sharing super easy has been the holy grail for dozens of startups over the last decade,” says Jonas Lee, CEO of Knoto. “It’s also been their graveyard, because none ever made it that much better than just texting or emailing. There was no major technical innovation.” Lee says there have been “two game changers” in recent years though: First, facial recognition has advanced greatly through neural network technology. “It’s now shockingly good, and even when it does make an occasional mistake, it’s not that jarring,” says Lee. “Confusing two sisters, or an old photo of a dad versus a new photo of his son is kind of … cute.” That and the fact the phones is now everyone's camera make it easier to develop something that uses one device to connect and share.
It’s the getting them off the phones that more and more companies are interested in solving. But it’s happening, and users have more and more choices about how to do it. While some of those choices might feel a little invasive and altogether unnatural (you want me to share all of it? With other people?!), that attachment might start to fade away. “Starting this year, photos won’t sit around on phoness anymore just because someone forgot to send them or didn’t have enough time,” says Lee. “They'll know where to go, and they’ll do it on their own.”
