Back when Twitter was new in the mid-to-late-2000s, I’m sure someone would have tweeted, ‘I just brushed my teeth’. Now, no one bothers to share such mundane things on Twitter 🙂
The premise of Foursquare was real-time ‘check-ins’ to offline locations. It informed people where you are (you did so, by choice).
Snapchat launched ‘Stories’ in 2013. It’s just normal content, but with an artificial lifespan of 24 hours.
Instagram copied ‘Stories’ in 2016.
Facebook copied ‘Stories’ in 2017.
Both Twitter and LinkedIn copied ‘Stories’ in 2020, and killed it in 2021.
Last year, I wrote about a new app called Dispo that mimicked, in a smartphone app, the film roll! It’s a camera/photo app where you get only one option – flash on or off. You take photos. And then you wait till 9 am, the next day, for the photos to develop! No, I’m not making this up 🙂
The connecting link to all these—Stories, Dispo, and even Wordle—is scarcity. Artificial/forced scarcity, to be precise.
If posts on social media are permanent and endless, Stories went in the opposite direction: only 24 hours.
If cameras on phones let you take an endless number of photos, Dispo went in the opposite direction: wait till 9 am, no filters!
If casual word games online give you endless challenges, Wordle went in the opposite direction: just one word per day!
So, by this logic, if Instagram lets you post an endless number of pictures about your life and everything on the feed, what’s the opposite?
An app called BeReal is the opposite! Here’s how it works.
- Every day, BeReal pings all its users only once at the same time, asking them to share a photo.
- The ping gives users only 2 minutes to post the photo.
- Users have to take a photo using their smartphone’s front and rear-facing
- cameras at the same time (that’s BeReal’s default setting).
- No filters, no follower count, and photos last only for 24 hours.
- If users are busy or in a situation where they shouldn’t be taking photos (bathroom!), BeReal allows users to post outside of the 2-minute window, but with a catch: the user’s friends would be notified precisely how late the user is!
Much like Dispo, the idea is really tantalizing.
The premise is that you get to see the authentic self (remember that both front and rear cameras capture a picture at the same time!) of your friends (and they, yours) only once every day. Then, you go and live your life instead of scrolling endlessly on a timeline. That way, BeReal is perhaps an anti-social app.
Unlike any other social media platform that gives you endless options to do whatever with your photos, BeReal forces scarcity in every way – the way you take a photo, the way you have to share it, and when you have to share it.
And it seems BeReal is gaining traction, slowly and steadily.
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The French app is even running a campus ambassador program to build college and school user presence, just like how Facebook started!
But BeReal’s drip-feeding approach is a totally different model from the Twitters, Facebooks, and Instagrams of the world. BeReal doesn’t seem to want to increase user ‘time spent’ (in-app). If that were the case, the app would have added as many features as needed to make it sticky throughout the day. Instead, it seems content with making us use the app once every day.
It’s a brilliant idea and is timed perfectly for a world that is overdosing on social media excesses of every kind – good, bad, and worse. And because the alert is unpredictable, it forces you to share your real, authentic self.
But I also do not think that we can put the toothpaste back into the tube 🙂 Meaning: such apps that artificially create scarcity to build occasional stickiness would continue to remain anomalies and not become mainstream the way we think of Instagram or Twitter.
We have seen the open and sweeping potential of the larger social media platforms. On how they go massively, massively viral with content. That is a very different approach and one that has firmly established as a mainstream need whether we like them or not. In comparison, creating artificial scarcity, the way Dispo or BeReal is attempting, will probably remain niches.
We, as a society, have gotten used to the unlimited freedom offered by mainstream social media platforms. We cannot go back to scarce days even if they are created as a fantastic gimmick.
For all you know, I won’t be surprised if Facebook adds BeReal’s features as part of Instagram soon and creates a separate section for it the way they did with Snapchat’s Stories 🙂 That would obviously kill the very point of BeReal, but that’s also Facebook’s business model anyway.