Chime - Group video conversations with your friends & community

@sirbenlee Thank a lot Ben! I'm actually typing this from your monitor from the early days!

@sirbenlee flipcam!!!!

@lessin Thanks for the support, Sam! Happy you like it!

@joshelman You have me thinking long and hard about this one. We've chosen to keep the segments around to show a context, a continuity, a progression of a realtionship deepening over time, but an earlier version had that and had them fall off the cliff of memory. We're currently thinking through designs that could accomplish both. The only tradeoff that would remain in that case are the memories you've wanted to keep. My SF Marathon one, for example.

@jjflex maybe a crazy option to let people put a time bomb on a message like mission impossible. And also a way to undo that if you really like it and wanted to keep it

@pdavison Thanks! For those who haven't read that quora article about "Why did Harvard students accept Facebook as cool", the TL;DR was that services like Facebook, Tinder, Snapchat, Instagram are simple enough for the coolest people in a group (who often have the least amount of time) to use and constructed in a way where those people have a very low - or no - risk of harassment or embarassment. Facebook did this in the beginning by having profiles curated by the owner and an audience that was restricted to the 2,000 people around your campus, Tinder does this with curated selfies + a double opt-in, Instagram IS the curated selfie/my photo is cool, Snapchat is even if this sucks, OK so what, it's gone - I'm not going to end up passed around my university. Here is how these themes play out in some of our core decisions: Social Graph Model - we used to have it so that you could message anyone you had been in a Chime with. This was neat because it allowed tear-off conversations from a group who attended the same party. However, I feared it violated the "control/protection" principle listed above. Cute girl participates in a Chime, receives a lot of one on one messages from people who, even when acting with the best intentions, may create the feeling of an unsafe environment. We reverted this in favor of the double-opt-in model. You can message someone if you both have added each other, or if you have their phone number. While having someone's phone number doesn't necessarily mean they gave it to you, we think it's a good enough proxy for a handshake. Review - should we enable users to review their videos before sending them? Should they even be able to watch themselves at all while recording? Should the review screen be very tiny so that all of your blemishes are invisible to you? In this discussion, the "control/protection" principle helped us decide to give you an 100% accurate representation of what the recipients would see, and the opportunity to review it. About 75% of people who start recording get through it. This is a hotly debated topic, but in the end we decided that removing review or cancel would result in much fewer overall uploads (and this is an example where the team convinced me, while I led the charge for no review). Masks - this led us to masks, which we consider an innovation, as goofy as they appear. We asked ourselves to create the analog of an instagram photo filter to video, and for video that is about conversation, and our hackathon turned into one of our favorite features of the app. Masks, effectively playful makeup, have a profound effect of lowering the recipients bar for the content and getting the sender much more comfortable being themselves, lowering the risk of "damn, why did I do that.". Public Chimes and Private Chimes - in the context of "control/protection", Public Chimes are the trickiest, because they represent the portion of the app where you get the most exposure and therefore the most susceptible to embarassment. Like instagram, if your Public Chime doesn't get that many likes, you may feel the urge to delete it. We're very conscious of this and are weighing it against the "loneliness" antidote we strive to be. Permit me to tell the brief origin story of public chimes, because it highlights why we think these are aligned with our mission.: A year ago, our friend Bud Norris created his first Chime the day before he pitched an incredible post season game last year for the Orioles. He included a group of 15 of us. The Chime starts with him saying hi and all of us wishing him good luck. You see the course of a day go back, with his close friends wishing him luck, and even his family chiming in. Then, when the day of the game happens, we're all shooting footage of him, some at the game, some in bars, I was on a flight. I don't remember the last time I ever watched a baseball game on a flight. After the game, victorious, there are videos from his teammates in the locker view, we even catch a glimpse of him getting interviewed. The next morning, he came on the chime and was geniunely moved - having never seen the lead up to a game or watched his friends and family watch him. 15 of us got to share this experience, but we all agreed there was something special about this group dynamic- something that needed to be shared. It felt more like what meeting Bud was like than any of his other social media outlets. It felt authentic and real. Now, that doesn't mean there's not more work to do as we shoot for creating a service around inclusiveness and being yourself. By the way, it was really cool to write this, thanks so much for the question @pdavison - this was a great exercise for the team.