GoKawiilBackground
We started off with a simple idea for a product; we wanted to re-use the chat interface for everything except chat. It was supposed to be just for photos but expandable later.
The idea was that most people already share their photos with others on WhatsApp or some other messaging service, which technically also ’tags’ the people who were there. So, why not turn the act of sharing into the act of organizing as well?
Whenever you want to find an old photo, your best bet for 100% accuracy is to remember the month/year the photo was taken - but this isn’t necessarily how we remember things. You don’t really remember the exact month something happened, but you always remember who was there. Therefore, since we already shared the photos with the people who were there, why can’t we retrieve them by who was there too?
PicPocket.io’s mobile interface, with last names obscured for privacy
The Problem
This worked great for organizing photos, once we culled the tens of thousands of photos we had on our phones and had them organized by people, finding a specific memory was a lot faster. The issue was that after you had already organized your photos, there was nothing left to do.
We decided to add a feed to the web client. This would serve two purposes:
It would give you a place to actually share some of your photos with others who weren’t directly part of that album. We figured, the same way we already use the chat-interface on Instagram to selectively send memes to people we think might enjoy them, why can’t we do this with everything (i.e. YT videos, articles, songs, etc.), and have them show up on a single, unified feed?
The point was to have a place where you could send anything that wasn’t worth a message. A message in our humble opinion is too instant; it requires your immediate attention, and sometimes you just want to send something to someone that says “hey, when you’re bored, you might want to check this out.”
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