Spotted this week at TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley, was the newly launched social photo-sharing app Rewind. As its name implies, the idea with this app is to give you and your friends a way to look back on your most recently shared photos and posts, which you can do quickly by sliding your finger to scroll through Rewind’s “timeline” feature. But the twist with Rewind is that none of the shares are permanent – instead, everything disappears from the app after 24 hours.
According to Rewind co-founder and CEO Anthony Duca, who previously founded and sold several other technology startups, most recently visualization software Bunkspeed in 2013, the app lets users share as many photos as they want, without feeling like they’re spamming their feeds or “being too noisy.”
In that way, Rewind is almost the complete opposite of something like Instagram, which forces you to slow down and carefully consider which of your many photos is worthy of being edited and shared. Rewind simply encourages you to share them all.
And with the understanding that the photos are gone after only a day, it also hopes to elicit the same sort of spontaneity that you might find on Snapchat, for example. Rewind’s timelines are similar in spirit to Snapchat’s Stories, except they stick around for a bit longer.
Using Rewind is easy enough – you just install the app and add friends. To follow a user, you currently have to enter in their Rewind username, but Duca says that address book integration is being prepped for the app’s next release.
To capture and share a photo, you swipe up on the camera viewfinder – in fact, Rewind has filed a patent on this particular, unique interaction. You can only post photos you take within the app, too, so you won’t be tempted to edit photos from your Camera Roll prior to sharing.
And you can take a series of photos – like the iPhone camera’s burst mode – by pressing the button and holding it.
Afterward, your friends on Rewind can view your past photos and text posts by scrolling back through your timeline. The timeline also offers a visualization at the bottom that shows which hours of the day have more photos. You can scroll through the timeline by dragging your finger, so you can move through their shares as fast or as slow as you please.
You can also like your friends’ photos by favoriting them, but Rewind only shows a “like count” for the whole day. That addresses one of the limitations to sharing that takes place on Instagram with its younger users: because likes are a proxy for popularity, photos they believe won’t receive enough likes aren’t shared, while those that fail to amass a certain number of likes in a period of time are deleted. On Rewind, you have the chance to keep growing your like count throughout the day since, even if one photo is a dud, the following ones may make up for it. (I know, kids these days, right?)
The San Diego-based startup has been testing the Rewind app ahead of its official launch with over 100 high schoolers, and found that its format seemed to inspire heavy engagement. Users were opening the app 10 times a day, and sharing 35 photos per day, on average.
The app also launched with Apple Watch support, so you can view these “rewinds” right on the watch’s small screen.
Rewind, also co-founded by Todd Blanchard, Rodney Rumford, and Sunil Rawal, has $450,000 in seed funding and is a free download on iTunes.
