I met @jjflex several months ago and he showed me a buggy version of Chime (at the time it was called String). It's come a long way since then and while the playful, almost over-the-top aesthetics may not appeal to everyone, it definitely sets a playful tone when swapping videos with friends.
@jjarex setup a special Product Hunt Chime for those downloading the app direction from this post (deeplinking, ftw). You should see a nice welcome message that looks something like this:
@rrhoover :) this is bringing back memories of being kicked off of the facebook design team. too much snes final fantasy VII chocobo inspiration. haha. so glad to be here. thank you also @illustriousalex for helping setup our branch.io deep links. As a result, everyone who joins from product hunt will be able to see each other and comment in person.
No love for Android users ? :( . I look forward to using it . its a good idea .everyone from Skype +Qik to Sessmic to Airtime have tried some variation of Video conversation . But I feel all of them were ahead of time . Now is the time ...with Low cost bandwidth , video capable phones , social graph and general excitement in this space thanks to Periscope and Meerkat i think you have a good chance of making it big , I like the way you explained the problem . your spin on the domain is better than Meerkat/Periscope ( not all of us are celebrities with audience ) and Its not totally random like AirTime . its conversation centric . I look forward to using it . :)
@pacificleo Hi! I’m Pratik, part of the founding team at chime. I’m hard at work building an android app, and we’re currently debating if the quality of it is high enough to release it. It's very very baseline. Not even skinned to match the Chime look and feel but it allows you to watch and record to chime. To make it match the look and feel would take me away from some of the iOS features for a month- maybe more. Hard tradeoff!
Hi everyone! I'm Jared, CEO/Founder of Chime! That's me and the team in the top left. We started working on Chime a year ago to create a richer, more personal way to connect to the people you care about most.
The way we represent conversations in Chime is as a string tying together subsequent messages - a visual metaphor that comes from playing with tin cans & string as a child - part nostalgia / part you're so close to the person you can reach out and touch them. As the conversation unfolds, the playhead shifts to show you the next participant. You can see @rrhoover as the second person, followed by @joshelman and my friend Kelsey.
The problem we are trying to solve is, at its core, one of loneliness.
Chime is designed to create this “anti-loneliness” magic. In a world where most of social media helps people create a facade of only their very best moments it’s easy for us to think our lives are subpar, Chime is designed to be inclusive and lower the barrier to connect with other people - creating a comfortable environment for even our most mundane moments.
There are a lot of talented people who have thought of or are working on this problem and we hope you'll send us your thoughts - either as comments here or by recording to the Chime we created for the community, which you can join by downloading the app from the product hunt link (or tapping this: http://chimewith.us/producthunt). Thank you, thank you, thank you! Excited!
Congratulations @jjflex@brandonmbrock! Great to see Chime rolling out to more people. Have had lots of fun seeing it evolve.
Using photos/video as a medium to converse is something folks like Snapchat, Taptalk, or Riff have taken a shot at. Clearly you guys have a fresh take — what's your thinking behind what makes Chime unique?
@dtrinh Thanks!
We love those apps, use them, and look up to them. 👻
Our core hypothesis is that there's something really special about how people interact when they are in groups. The ego of the conversation shifts away from the person and more to the group - one more of belonging and less of creating content that might be seen by everyone. We think this feeling is humbling and authentic and inclusive.
This not a replacement for apps that let you operate as an individual, crafting your content and your identity, but we do feel that it's a strong need. When my sister Chimes with my mom and me about her day at work - be it a great day or a crappy one - I can't help but smile. Even right alongside watching her Snap of her emerging triumphantly from the subway and scanning the NYC skyline.
Riff - this app is well done. When it first came out (from Facebook, my alma mater), my heart skipped a beat, it felt similar to some of the ideas we were tackling. When Chime first launched, we described our app as "one big game of telephone". However, one of the things we learned in early testing of Chime was that the "one big game of telephone" approach to content creation felt like a bit of a party trick. This is cool, if it happens, but we didn't have a core human need to be creative at a party on a daily basis. Our most rewarding Chimes were 1:1, or with the people we were already building relationships with. That led to design decisions about illustrating the conversation as a string that lengthens, a metaphor for the strengthening of a relationship.
Taptalk - <3. Speed to share to the people you care. Love this. More aligned with our vision around intimacy and inclusion. Like Snapchat, it has "bcc:", or the ability to very quickly reshare / repurpose content and send it as a "communications gift" to a lot of people. This removes friction, but that friction can mean something - it means I made a tradeoff in my day to think about you, face you, and talk to you.
Snapchat - one of our biggest inspirations. One of the catalysts for the development of Chime was receiving a bunch of snaps, of which maybe 5% were people facing the camera, talking directly to me. I'm looking at you @brandonmbrock. We wanted to create something where every notification signaled that content just for me was waiting for me when that badge count went up. A conversation. This led to our design decision to keep Chime videos around until their deleted, to illustrate the back in forth dynamic of a conversation.
What do you think @dtrinh?
big congrats to @jjflex and team - i've loved using Chime primarily for the serendipity it introduces - my favorite one was when i recorded a random guitar riff one sunday morning, and that turned into a big game of guitar telegram with friends i didn't even know played instruments
@anjneymidha thanks! I remember that specific Chime with you and the guitar - and it inspired a whole series of karaoke and lip dubbing Chimes. So good.
@eriktorenberg that was a real crisis. We were taken out of the app store - unexpectedly - though not without warning, and had to scramble to decide what to do, including not picking another name that would lead to trouble. It was a very emotional time for me, sitting at my computer, no less than 20 splash pages with different names and logos staring back. Writer's block. I remember one day where @patdesantis really stepped up - pulling the team outside and leading a name brainstorming session. I was set on some concepts and was trapped in my own head. The team pulled me through here. We knew we wanted a name that was an object that reminded you of childhood, could be a noun (Chimes) and a verb (Chime In), was one syllable, and focused on inclusiveness. @jb_bakst came up with Chime. And in that moment / week, the app went from being Jared's String app to our Chime. Looking back on it, it doesn't feel as bad as it was, but it was a rough rough week. I wrote a blog post about the ordeal, including what not to do, here: https://medium.com/@chimewithus/...@brandonmbrock@themindsymbol@jb_bakst@patdesantis@dave_canada how do you remember it?
@jjflex@eriktorenberg Definitely the most stressful week that I've experienced during my time at Chime / String / Stitch / Thread / Twine / Toy / Telly / Camp / Loop / Warlord (per @dave_canada's request). On the one hand, trying to continue pushing forward to build a product that we're proud to share with you all today, but on the other, feeling almost paralyzed, knowing that every minute we spend without settling on a name is another minute that we are out of the App Store, unable to sign on new users and confusing our existing ones. It just felt like our whole identity was being stripped from us, right as we were starting to figure out exactly who / what we were. We were in the thick of finishing what is now Public Chimes, so a LOT was changing, all at once. But now that we're out other end of it, I couldn't be prouder of our whole team for enduring it all, for checking each other's egos while we were deciding on a new name, and for not settling for something mediocre just to try to bandaid the problem. And at the end of the day, I think we settled on a great name, and I can't wait to develop a whole new identity and culture around it!
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Congrats @jjflex! This app is freaking awesome!!!
So you've been working on social products for years--would love to know more about the origin story for Chime. What was the genesis? What was lacking in all the social products you'd worked on or played with in the past that led to building Chime?
Congrats again!
@noah_l thanks!
Ha. The origin story. It's a funny half/embarassing one. I was walking home one night from a bar in Tel Aviv two summers ago and felt a strong desire to connect with all of my friends 7000 miles away, so I recorded a half nostalgic, half euphoric selfie video and posted it to a Facebook group "SF Boyz" (13 boys, 2 girls, by the way). It was an unrehearsed, intimate message about why Israel was so different from my expectations and how everyone should visit. In my mind's eye, I saw my friends in a dozen return videos, and the 11 likes and 3 comments just left me feeling empty and alone. FAIL.
There's something about being abroad and having a language barrier that distills you to core language/interpersonal functions. Instead of texting while I was abroad after I had made a new friend, I'd record myself and send that via What's App - I felt that was a much more intimate and expressive way of conveying my meaning. Only I never ever got videos back. Just LOL's. FAIL AGAIN. When we built the first version of Chime and I sent it to some of those same friends, and their faces, talking to me came back, I felt we had built something really special. Now we have "SF Boyz" in Chime, though we call it "San Friendship", and it's one of my favorite Chimes. :)
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