There’s a big focus on one-to-one messaging, with as little content as possible, in today’s communication trends, with the likes of Yo , and now Facebook-owned Instagram has released a new effort to compete with the rest.
Initially identified as an incoming app through a promotional banner within the app Instagram earlier in July, the app known as Bolt is finally official, and it’s available within the iOS App Store, designed for iPhones. However, while a global rollout was seemingly assumed, that’s not the case at all. For the launch, only those in Singapore, South Africa and New Zealand will get to use the app. With Bolt, the idea is to focus on visual communication, rather than a bunch of hastily typed letters, all with a focus on close friends and family.
According to a report on TechCrunch, Instagram is targeting these specific countries for several reasons, but all of them stem from a heavy usage of Instagram. Additionally, the company says that they are deeply interconnected communities, and that speaking English is also a primary reason for their selection.
Bolt works first and foremost by linking directly to your phone number, and therefore bypassing other social networking efforts â€" like Facebook. Once you’ve done that, your contacts will get integrated with the application, and you can select several of them to include in your Favorites list. From there, the real gist of the app becomes clear: Touch a contact’s face, and you’ll send a picture of whatever it is your camera is looking at. Tap-and-hold on the contact’s face, and you’ll send a video immediately to that contact.
This means that you’ll only be able to share a photo, or video, with one person at a time, so group messaging isn’t part of the plan, at least not at launch. If you want to send the photo you’re taking through the application to more than one person, you’ll need to touch on multiple faces to get the job done. Hold and repeat if you want to send more than one video to more than one contact.
If you make a mistake, and send a photo or video to someone you realize after the fact that you didn’t want to? Just shake your device within a few seconds of sending the “bolt,†and the video or photo will get deleted before arriving on the recipient’s device.
The focus here is obviously speed, with the idea that if you don’t have to dig into your Contacts list, and then into your Gallery, to select a photo or video to send, people will use the app. Indeed, the idea that you can send a photo with just a tap, to one contact at a time, is certainly a new way to go about things, and it is slightly different from the other one-to-one sharing/messaging/social apps out there, but the question is: will it take off?
Instagram is planning on rolling out the app to other countries in due time, but it will be interesting to see how the current countries adopt the app.
Does Bolt sound intriguing to you at all?
[via TechCrunch [1] ]
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