In 2018 I wrote A TechCrunch article states that 2018 was “the year social networks stopped being social.” Reflecting on this article, I’m not sure 2018 was the turning point. But the article’s premise still holds up well.
At some point, social networking is 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
It turns out that I’m not the only one who has noticed that social networks are slowly drifting away from their original purpose. Unclea small team based in Paris, has been working throughout the better part of 2023 on a brand new social app called Identification card.
ID is a social app launching today on iOS that lets you connect with your friends in a creative way. In many ways, it feels like the early days of blogs, very personal MySpace profile pages, and the golden age of Tumblr.
But first, some context about Amu. There is a lot of hype and anticipation surrounding the launch of Amo as the company was founded by Antoine Martinwho was a co-founder of Zenly with Alexis Bonello. Zenly has been a popular social app that focuses on location sharing and encourages you to spend more time with your friends and discover new places.
Snap spent more than $200 million to acquire Zenly and retained the same team to iterate as a separate app. Under Snap’s ownership, Zenly has become one of Europe’s biggest social apps ever. At its peak, the company had 18 million different users opening the app every day.
And then… he disappeared.
As part of Snap’s cost-cutting efforts, the company decided to shut down Zenly completely. From what I’ve heard, the move has sparked discussions between French politicians at the highest level and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. Several key members of the Zenly team now work at Amo.
The second reason why Amo’s launch is so highly anticipated is that the startup closed an $18 million funding round in February or March at a valuation of around $100 million with New wave Leading the tour and coat And Universal Daylight Saving Time Share too. There are also 80 angel investors at Amo’s table.
This is a highly unusual funding round as back in 2023 (during a decline in VC funding), Amo is a mobile consumer startup (no revenue stream at the moment) and the startup didn’t have any product out there.
Blank canvas
In 2010, Jürgen Schweitzer from Educated codeThe company behind the personal task management app Things, He wrote a blog post Shortly after Steve Jobs introduced the original iPad. In that post, he compared the iPad to a blank canvas.
“If you want to understand what makes an iPad special, you can’t look at what’s in it, but what it is no Owns. The iPad is so thin and light, it becomes the display, and the display becomes the app. There are no input devices. The device disappears and turns into the app you’re using. “The technology is transparent,” Schweitzer wrote.
This analogy applies particularly well to ID and Amo’s work as well. There are many things you can do with an ID card. There are also many things we take for granted in a social app that simply don’t exist.
An ID is a blank canvas combined with creative tools that help you express yourself. You can use it to create a profile that perfectly describes your interests in a visual way. But there is a social twist where you can see your friends’ profiles and add things to their profiles.
When you first create your profile on ID, you get a blank dashboard waiting for content. You can fill it yourself in four different ways.
You can add stickers from your sticker library (more on that later), you can grab content from your photo library, you can write text or you can draw. When you select an image, the ID automatically creates a clip of the main object or subject in the image using PhotoRoom technology.
This will look instantly familiar to Pinterest users who like to create mood boards or to 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 this kind of spatial canvas. You can make things so small that they kind of disappear…unless you make them bigger.
You can create little islands that define what’s on your mind right now. For example, you can have a corner in Los Angeles containing your favorite buildings you saw while on vacation, a group photo shoot with your friends, a cup of your favorite café there, etc. You can also get a restaurant corner with photos of fine dining restaurants you’ve recently visited.
Everything looks smooth and natural. You can scroll, zoom in and out, and jump from one profile to another. There’s a sense of depth and space that I’ve never seen in any other app. Images never feel pixelated and it doesn’t feel like you’re waiting for something to load.
If you’ve been using an ID card for a while, things can get messy, but so is life. “And that’s good. My personality is messy – our personalities are messy. They’re multi-faceted and not neatly arranged in a 3×3 grid,” said Antoine Martin, Amo’s CEO.
Emergent play
When you start browsing the app and looking at what’s new on your friends’ profile page, you might want to steal something for your own wall. The ID allows you to add content from other profiles to your sticker library so you can either add it to your own profile or put it on someone else’s profile.
I’ve been using the app for a little over a week, and I can already see some trends spreading around the small community of beta users. You can see who originally created the poster as it moves from wall to wall. Some users have placed beautiful shelves so that they can neatly categorize everything that interests them. A user has created a guestbook section on their profile. “If you are coming to visit us, please leave a note here,” she wrote.
Some video games rely heavily on player creativity to have fun, such as Minecraft or the recent Zelda games. In these games, you can create your own fort or build your own vehicle.
This is also the main concept behind identity. Amo gives you the creative tools and a limitless Figma-like canvas. Now, it’s up to the community to figure out what they want to do with it. The best part is that it doesn’t look like any other social app out there.
Amo may end up boosting the creator economy with exclusive content that can really make your profile stand out. Maybe the company will add some premium features over time. Right now, Amu wants to find a successful outcome.
“We prioritize scale because my goal is to create an indestructible company. And the founder of Zenly is saying that! I thought 18 million [daily active users] It would be enough to make the company indestructible. But I was wrong. I think you need 100 million [daily active users]“Martin told me.
Treating loneliness
When the Amo team started working on ID, they wanted to find a way to cure loneliness. It seems counterintuitive to create a social app when people already spend so much time on their phones. But, according to Antoine Martin, current social apps don’t have your best interests in mind.
“the [World Health Organization] It is now called the loneliness epidemic. If they say it’s an epidemic, it’s because it’s actually contagious. In other words, if you are isolated, your loved ones are also isolated because you cannot be reached. Martin told me that during the two hours they spend on TikTok, they have no one to talk to.
He added: “At the same time, the human needs that the social consumer space can meet are no longer covered by these products, as they were before.” “In the early days of Facebook, I don’t know if you remember, profiles were a mixture of things. There were drawings, games, pictures, text. You would write long comments, it could be a poem. . . . On the other hand, it was a reminder that you mattered.” For these people.
According to him, the current generation of social networks is too 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 on these apps as possible. “We aspire to return to these previous principles and make them successful,” Martin said.
This is also the reason why Amo doesn’t want to spend hours on the app. When you have a few minutes, you can open the app to check out what’s new on your friends’ profiles by swiping up on the notification cards.
When you get to the last card, the ID card shows you a message saying “Get some fresh air.” After that, the application closes itself. You’re back on the home screen, and you can put your phone back in your pocket.
Uncle and acquaintance
ID is a stubborn take on social apps, but will it work? Given the team’s past experience and the deep money Amo has, if there’s one team that has a chance to try something radically new in this area, it’s Amo.
“We intentionally ship something 8 or 9 months after we launch because we swore to ourselves that it wouldn’t take 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 likely has other ideas in the consumer social space — Amo didn’t call its app “Amo” after all. So it will be interesting to follow the launch of this new app, as well as the story of Amo as a company.