[su_spoiler title=”Click Here To Read The Idea In Brief” icon=”plus-circle”]
- Create a simple iPhone/Android app that lets you tag each photo you take with easy to remember keywords (“anniversary”, “Juno”, etc.)
- App contains a search box where you can search for photos that were tagged with specific keywords
- Build traction for this app so thousands of users use this search tool
- When you have enough traction, build an additional feature to make your photos public/private
- All public photos are now part of your social media profile – the next Instagram where millions of people are sharing photos and videos with others
[/su_spoiler]
Instagram got acquired by Facebook for a cool $1 billion. Snapchat, if they had agreed to their acquisition from Facebook, could have been bought for $3 billion.
There really is a lot of money in building the next big social network; especially one that’s driven towards visual content on mobiles.
But isn’t this space already saturated? How do you go about launching the next Instagram? Here is possibly one way to get there.
So think of that really funny video or photo you captured several months back. If you have to go find it again, how do you do it?
This is what I do – I start scrolling the photo gallery on my Android phone while at the same time trying to remember when that photo was taken.
Maybe September last year? So, I quickly scroll to September and then try to dig out the photo from here.
That’s a lot of messy work. Imagine having to find a photo from sometime in 2017! Or from so long ago, you don’t even remember when it was taken.
What if we had an easy way to search for photos?
Imagine an app that allows you to add a little detail to every photo or video you take. Something like “Baby’s first words”, or simply tags like “Sydney opera house” or “Taj Mahal” is enough for you to look up photos taken when you were visiting one of these popular places.
If you are feeling adventurous, you can also go ahead and create filters that allow you to add descriptions to several photos at once. For instance, you can tag every photo captured at a particular geographical coordinates or those captured at a particular time with a particular tag or description.
This simple feature creates a search engine right within your phone’s photo and video gallery.
Quite nifty. But how does this become the next Instagram?
That’s step 2. We get there when you have already built a solid number of users who use your tag feature to map their photos with the relevant description.
You now have tens of thousands of people using your app to tag their photos and search for them. That’s a database of billions of photos. Of course, this is easier said than done, but that is something you have to figure out on how you can do it.
Anyway, at this point, you introduce a simple feature – the ability to make your photos public. You may choose which of your photos to stay private and which ones to be public.
So in one swoop, you have thousands of users sharing millions of photos through your application.
At this point, you must consider seeking the user’s permission in accessing their contacts. When they do give you permission, you can identify other people in their network who use your app as well. In one tap of a button, your users can start following all these different people from the app.
There you have it – a visual social network made with simple features that I wonder why we do not have on our phones yet.
