Socialcam

» see socialcam.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

socialcam came out of the justin.tv building in san francisco. that building produced apps i read about in techcrunch, not ones that reached my phone in ankara. it was a short-video sharing app, an offshoot from a live-streaming company that noticed its users cared more about recording and sending clips than about broadcasting live.

the team was michael seibel and two co-founders, out of the justin.tv ecosystem that also produced twitch. socialcam launched on march 7 2011 and went through y combinator's winter 2012 batch. it made shooting and sharing a phone clip nearly frictionless, the thing video apps did in that moment, and it grew fast on the back of facebook sharing. by july 2012 it had passed sixteen million downloads.

the speed of that growth is what got it bought. autodesk, the design-software company behind autocad, acquired socialcam in july 2012 for about sixty million dollars. it was an unusual pairing from the start, a viral consumer video toy inside a company that sold engineering tools, and the logic never really cohered.

~ the record ~

~ how it worked ~

socialcam was built for the pre-vine window when short mobile video still felt new. you shot a clip on your phone, and the app made posting it and pushing it out to facebook almost automatic. that automatic sharing was the growth engine and, later, the reputation problem, because facebook feeds filled up with socialcam auto-posts and people felt the app was noisier than they had agreed to. the download counter went up fast partly because every view could pull in new people through the feed.

~ what got buried with it ~

after the autodesk deal the app drifted. the growth that came from aggressive facebook sharing did not translate into people who kept using it, and autodesk had no clear reason to run a consumer video network next to its cad business. brand engagement fell off and development slowed. the app faded from relevance while vine and then instagram video took the short-video attention. autodesk finally shut socialcam down on october 28 2015. michael seibel went on to run y combinator itself, which is the part of this story that lasted. socialcam was the app that made his name early. the accelerator seat is what he is known for now.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »