Snapchat has reached the pinnacle of social media — namely being tied to stories of dumb criminal behavior and being misused to violate the privacy of strangers. It also gets imitated a lot, both established social networks and by upstarts. The app’s latest competitor, however, might just give it a run for its money.
Hype, created by the founders of the dearly departed Vine, is pretty much Vine meets Snapchat. See for yourself:
There’s a lot of, ah, inspiration from Snapchat here, especially in that, if you want, you can pack the frame with digital stickers, effects, and the like. While some of it, like any Snapchat inspired app, feels a bit cluttered or frenetic, it’s also easy to see the appeal of combining all that with livestreams, especially if you’re trying to do something a bit more content-dense. And adding aspects like polls and other interactive features has some genuine use.
That said, at its worst Hype can look like a science fiction parody of the news of the future, packed with graphics but lacking in any actual depth. A little fiddling with the iOS app found that Hypers, as the site’s users will likely be called, are still messing with it to see what works. But if Hype can find the right users and a niche in the social media ecosystem, it might just live up to its name.
(Via The Verge)
