With plenty of apps and tools out there to help users share what they’re up to via text, photos, or videos, Moment.me is looking to stand out from the pack by offering users the ability to create experiences centered around events by aggregating content already generated on popular social networks. Originally launched as an iPhone app in October 2012, the company announced today the release of its Android app, with both apps helping users capture and share experiences in real-time by collecting tweets, photos, and videos, either their own or from friends, into a single feed.
“Moment.me is the easiest way to create and share experiences, the emphasis here is on the word experience. Because there are a lot of ways you can take a photo, take a video and share it, but there is no automatic way to collect an experience which is a 360 degree view of what you’re going through,” said co-founder and CEO Ronny Elkayam in an interview with BetaKit. “When you’re at an event and you post a tweet or a photo, that’s just a fraction of the experience…Moment.me is about real-life events and about capturing from everyone who’s at the event.”
Users log on with either a Facebook, Google+, or Twitter account and create “moments,” either by taking photos to add to that moment, or uploading images from multiple photo-sharing services including Instagram, Flickr, Picasa and others. Once a moment is started, users invite friends to also add their tweets, photos and videos, while it automatically begins to use image geo-tags and hashtags to aggregate content. In addition to their own feed of personal moments, users can browse friends’ moments, moments happening close to them, and trending moments from around the world.
Though Elkayam did not disclose any concrete numbers around how many users currently use the platform, he said it was growing exponentially and that they are now in the hundreds of thousands. Some numbers the startup did release were that it has collected images from over 200 million people in seven million different locations, resulting in the creation of more than 150 million moments. In regards to Moment.me’s business model Elkayam said the startup is focused on user experience, but some of their monetization ideas revolve around giving venues the ability to have their own ‘moment walls’ which would aggregate content from people at that place.
When it comes to helping people create and share experiences, QWiki recently debuted their new iPhone app to collect photos and videos around an event to automatically create a short video, while other startups like Streamweaver look to play in the collaborative video space, aiming to give users the ability to film multiple angles of an event and create a single clip. More specific to photos, Flock lets users aggregate photos from a specific event, and LensMob recently launched to help people create group photo albums. For event organizers and businesses, Epilogger is one tool that looks to automatically archive all the activity around an event, and the fact that it’s automatic means that users don’t have to proactively add every tweet or posting from a specific event.
Where the company looks to stand out is in its ability to aggregate videos, photos, and tweets into a single feed while being completely agnostic of which other popular video or photo-sharing app is used to generate the content, so that even if no one else has the Moment.me app or is using it, users are not subject to what Elkayam calls the ‘empty room scenario’ where they don’t feel that there is no content being generated for them to consume. It seems like Moment.me is just one in a sea of startups trying to help users create a snapshot of an event online, so whether it can become the de facto app for users will depend on the ease of creating moments, and whether users actually want to archive their life’s events.