In 2018 I wrote a TechCrunch article claiming that 2018 was “the year social media stopped being social.” Reflecting on that article, I’m not sure 2018 was the turning point. But the premise of the article is still valid.
At some point, social media was no longer about connecting with your closest friends, keeping up with distant family members, and feeling a special connection with the people you love.
TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, and
And it turns out that I’m not the only one who has noticed that social media has been slowly moving away from its original purpose. lovea small team based in Paris, has been working for most of 2023 on a new social app called ID.
ID is a social app launching today on iOS that lets you connect with your friends in creative ways. In many ways, it feels like the early days of blogging, the highly personalized profile pages of MySpace, and the golden age of Tumblr.
But first, some context on Amo. There is a lot of excitement and anticipation surrounding the launch of Amo, as the company was co-founded by Antonio Martinwho was the co-founder of Zenly with Alexis Bonillo. Zenly was a popular social app focused on location sharing that encouraged you to spend more time with your friends and discover new places.
Snap spent more than $200 million to acquire Zenly and kept the same team to iterate it, as a separate app. Under Snap’s ownership, Zenly became one of Europe’s biggest social apps of all time. At its peak, the company had 18 million different users opening the app. every day.
And then… it disappeared.
As part of Snap’s cost-cutting efforts, the company decided to shut down Zenly entirely. From what I’ve heard, this move even sparked discussions between top-level French politicians and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. Many key members of the Zenly team are now working on Amo.
The second reason why Amo’s launch is so anticipated is that the startup closed an $18 million funding round in February or March at a valuation of around $100 million. new wave leading the round, and Coat and global daylight saving time also participating. There are also 80 angel investors on Amo’s cap table.
This is a very unusual funding round as it occurred in 2023 (during a drop in VC funding), Amo is a mobile consumer startup (no revenue source for now) and the startup did not have any products available .
An empty canvas
In 2010, Jürgen Schweizer of Cultivated codethe company behind the personal task management app Things, wrote a blog post Shortly after, Steve Jobs introduced the original iPad. In that post, he compared the iPad to an empty canvas.
“If you want to understand what makes the iPad special, you can’t look at what it has, but at what it has. No have. The iPad is so thin and light that it becomes the screen and the screen becomes the app. No input devices. The device disappears and becomes the application you are using. The technology is transparent,” Schweizer wrote.
And this analogy applies particularly well to the work of ID and Master as well. There are many things you can do with an ID. There are also many things we take for granted in a social app that simply don’t exist.
Identification is an empty canvas combined with creative tools that help you express yourself. You can use it to create a profile that perfectly describes your interests visually. But there is a social twist as you can see your friends’ profiles and add things to their own profiles.
Image credits: Romain Dillet
When you first create your profile on ID, you get an empty whiteboard waiting for content. You can fill it yourself in four different ways.
You can add stickers from your sticker library (more on this later), you can grab content from your photo library, you can write text or draw. When you choose a photo, ID automatically creates a crop of the main object or subject in the photo using PhotoRoom technology.
This will be immediately familiar to Pinterest users who love creating mood boards or software developers who cover the lid of their new laptop with stickers.
Each virtual object can be moved, resized and rotated. After a while, your profile becomes a kind of spatial canvas. You can make things so small that they kind of disappear…unless you zoom in on them.
You can create small islands that define what you have in mind at the moment. For example, you can have a corner of Los Angeles with your favorite buildings you saw during your vacation, group photos with your friends, the mug from your favorite coffee shop there, etc. You can also have a restaurant corner with photos of fancy food. restaurants where you have been recently.
Everything feels soft and natural. You move, zoom in, zoom out, jump from one profile to another. There is a sense of depth and space that I have never seen in any other app. Photos never feel pixelated and you don’t feel like you’re waiting for something to load.
If you’ve been using ID for a while, things can get complicated, but so can life. “And it’s OK. My personality is chaotic; our personalities are chaotic. They are multifaceted and not neatly arranged in a 3×3 grid,” said Amo CEO Antoine Martin.
Emergent gameplay
When you start browsing the app and seeing what’s new on your friends’ profile page, you might want to steal something for your own wall. ID allows you to add content from other profiles to your sticker library so you can add it to your own profile or put it on someone else’s profile.
I’ve been using the app for just over a week and can already see some trends spreading in the small community of beta users. You can see who originally created a sticker as it moves from wall to wall. Some users have put up nice shelves so they can clearly classify everything they care about. A user created a guestbook section on her profile. “If you come to visit us, leave a note here,” she wrote.
Some video games rely heavily on the player’s creativity to have fun, such as Minecraft or the recent Zelda games. In these games you can create your own fortress or build your own vehicle.
And that is also the main concept behind identification. Amo gives you the creative tools and an unlimited Figma-like canvas. Now, it’s up to the community to decide what they want to do with it. And the best thing is that it doesn’t look like any other social app out there.
Image credits: Romain Dillet
Maybe Amo will end up fostering a creator economy with exclusive content that can really make your profile stand out. Perhaps the company will add some premium features over time. For now, Amo wants to find success.
“We are prioritizing scale because my goal is to create an indestructible company. And it’s the founder of Zenly who says it! I used to think that 18 million (daily active users) would be enough to make a company indestructible. But he was wrong. I think you need 100 million (daily active users),” Martin told me.
Cure loneliness
When Amo’s team started working on ID, they wanted to find a way to cure loneliness. It seems a bit counterintuitive to create a social app, since people already spend a lot of time on their phone. But what’s happening, according to Antoine Martin, is that existing social apps don’t have your best interests in mind.
“The (World Health Organization) now calls it the loneliness epidemic. And if they say it is an epidemic it is because it is actually infectious. In other words, if you are isolated, your loved ones will be too because you are unreachable. So for the two hours you’re on TikTok, they have no one to talk to,” Martin told me.
“And at the same time, the human needs that the social space of consumption can satisfy are no longer covered by these products, as before,” he added. “In the early days of Facebook, I don’t know if you remember, the profiles were kind of a mixed bag. There were drawings, games, photographs, text. You would write long comments, it could be a poem. . . And on the other hand, it was a reminder that you mattered to these people.”
According to him, the current generation of social networks is very passive. You don’t have to do much to spend two hours on TikTok or YouTube because these companies want you to spend as much time as possible on these apps. “We aspire to go back to these previous precepts and make them work,” Martin said.
That’s also why Amo doesn’t want you to spend hours on the app. When you have a few minutes, you can open the app to check what’s new on your friends’ profiles by swiping up on the notification cards.
When you get to the last card, ID shows you a message that says “get some fresh air.” And then the app closes itself. You are back on the home screen, you can put your phone back in your pocket.
Image credits: Romain Dillet
Love and identification
ID is an opinionated version of social apps, but will it work? Given the team’s past experience and Amo’s deep pockets, if there’s one team that has a chance to try something radically new in the space, it’s Amo.
“We’re deliberately shipping something 8 or 9 months after launching the company because we swore to ourselves that it wouldn’t take us a year to get started and that we would learn more by building publicly,” Martin said.
While ID is Amo’s first idea, the company most likely has other ideas in the consumer social space – after all, Amo didn’t call its app ‘Amo’. That is why it will be interesting to follow the launch of this new application, but also the history of Amo as a company.
Image credits: love
