For almost one year now Josh Fleming, Tony Muse and Chris Taulborg have been hard at work building Des Moines’ newest startup, VineMe. VineMe is billed as a “social platform that allows the world to crowdsource content by time, tags, places and people.” And, as of today, it’s available for the world to start using. When I asked Fleming what the goal of VineMe was, he described it like this:
“We want to curate life through visual content. I always enjoy discovering content in new ways. It’s why people flocked to the internet. It’s why Google quickly became a verb. It’s why apps are so popular. The combination of discovery and ease of use is what is driving technology today. We think VineMe offers both.”
The concept of building a timeline from users who already have an abundance of digital photos makes VineMe a very interesting concept. With tools that are easy to use, VineMe allows users to very quickly create a timeline of their life. It could be a timeline (vine) of a child’s little league career or a collection of U.S. presidents. Either way, due to the extensive tagging system built into VineMe, users will be able to quickly archive the content of the world. Archiving the world’s content in a new social platform will be a very difficult task to say the least, but the potential for exponential growth is certainly there as more and more users join the site, upload images and curate them accurately.
“The combination of discovery and ease of use is what is driving technology today. We think VineMe offers both.” – Josh Fleming
As with any social platform, especially one where images are the primary content, privacy may be a concern for users. Fleming said that privacy on VineMe is completely up to the user to define.
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“We believe privacy on VineMe is all about you, the user,” Fleming said. “Only a user can define what privacy means to them, and we don’t have the right to tell you who can see the things you choose to share. We’ve implemented a ‘Family’ feature that allows you to share content only with your family members. This is quite different than the experience people are used to on Facebook. We think the term ‘friend’ has become pretty vague these days, and while I might want some people to see me in a bathing suit on Facebook, I certainly don’t think everyone Facebook has defined as a ‘friend’ should be subject to that. The idea that some guy you met at a conference two years ago can see pictures of your kids on Facebook isn’t ideal for a lot of people.”
With the recent hype of the photo sharing application Color, questions have been raised about how VineMe is different than Color. Fleming described Color as “… more of an instantaneous, ‘here-and-now’ type of platform.”
“We offer an experience that incorporates the past and present from a life standpoint,” Fleming said.
I think users will agree with this because VineMe has done an excellent job of building a user interface that screams timeline instead of the collage of images seen in most image sharing and social sites today.
VineMe certainly has a number of more established competitors as well — for example, Flickr. It’s not uncommon for Flickr users to have high-end cameras and to be judged more on the quality of a photo than on the content. As Fleming put it, VineMe’s “goal is to have the best depiction of times, tags, places and people. If that content finds its way to vineme with less than award-winning photography, we’re just fine with that. The last thing we want to have happen is for someone to think their photos aren’t good enough to be on the site.”
A screenshot of co-founder Josh Fleming’s profile page offers a glimpse of VineMe’s capabilities. Screenshot from VineMe.
Think about how many photos are on your cell phone right now. Personally, I’m at 1,265 images. Not all of them are things I want to share publicly, but many of them are. Since they are stored in a timeline, as I scroll back through them I’m reminded of events in my life and when they happened, and that creates an emotional connection for me. As I see it, this is exactly the emotion that VineMe wants to encourage.
Going back to the comparison between VineMe and Color, the topic of funding and revenue comes front and center due to Color’s $41 million funding round announced last week. VineMe, by contrast, is funded by its founders, Fleming said. But revenue generation is a prominent consideration now that VineMe is getting out of beta. Fleming indicated some advertising-based opportunities could be used to generate revenue, along with consumer purchases and private label possibilities.
With all of this talk about the past, I wanted to get a better idea of what the future will bring for VineMe. Fleming indicated that integration with other social platforms is on the short list, as is enabling users to subscribe to a particular vine. Building more stickiness into the site is also a goal, since bringing users back to the site will be critical to VineMe’s success. Many of these ideas are already in the works, so we’ll have to wait and see what the team produces.
For a brief video introduction to VineMe, see below.
Video from VineMe on YouTube.
