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?
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!
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.
@jjflex - congrats on the launch! Do you think all chimes should be permanent? Makes it hard to be super silly with friends some times if it lives forever
@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
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!
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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. :)
Congrats guys! I'm super excited to see this go live. I've always felt that there's something magical and untapped about being able to go back and relive old conversations with friends and family. It's crazy that this is so hard to do with voicemail and video chat.
@jjflex - I really enjoyed your comments on Quora last year about FB's early growth: http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Har.... How did that thinking shape the specific product decisions you made with Chime (e.g., the friend model, public vs. private chimes, etc.)?
@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.
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