One of the best parts about this job is watching different makers try their hand at solving a problem I have myself, and today’s problem is a fun one: photo sharing. I’ll talk about who’s fixing it and how in the next section, but first…
Today’s top headlines:
🎧 Stability AI launched Stable Audio 2.0 to generate short audio clips with text.
🤦♀️ Blue check marks are back on Twitter for popular users.
👻Apple Vision Pro added Spatial Personas so you can interact with friends.
Let’s talk about photo sharing. We’ve seen an uptick in makers trying to crack that nut, including ex-Instagram and ex-Yahoo alums.
The problem at hand is that we all have thousands of photos that never see the light of day. Major social media channels have pivoted towards curated content and influencing, so what’s a person to do when they just want to see their memories?
Retro, the app that launched last summer from makers who worked on Instagram Stories, launched a feature called Journals today. Journals lets you make shared albums easily with friends, featuring chronological order across everyone’s photos and the ability to add notes in case you forgot to take any. Retro has gotten positive reaction in social media and the App Store, but is still flying pretty low on the public's radar.
Which is exactly the opposite of Shine, a photo-sharing app from a former Yahoo CEO that got roasted last week on Twitter for its 90's era design. You won’t find me roasting anyone here (supporting emerging makers is my vibe), but the damage may already be done — one of the co-founders quit today in the fallout from the bad press.
Then there’s elogram, from a product designer who formerly worked on Dropbox, Intercom, and Segment. elogram has a similar feel to Retro but with a different UX. Retro focuses on choosing your highlights from the week, elogram starts your albums from scratch.
Solo maker Emmett Dean tackled the problem too with Photo Dump. This app focuses on making group sharing for events and trips super simple with a QR code.
As someone who has been waiting around for a maker to solve this problem for me, I’m thrilled to see so many contenders. What will you try?
- Hall is a Slack & Discord alternative for customer communities.
- SAAS GPT generates personalized dashboard starter React repo for you.
- Release AI tracks & documents API changes and generates release notes.
It’s Bubble at the top of our charts for the most shouted-out no-code tool.
I love to see how products like Bubble enable makers to bring their ideas to life. Pulkit Agrawal used Bubble to make StoryGenius, a tool to make storybooks that feature your child. Agrawal got the idea while parenting his two-year-old.
“Bubble enabled building an end-to-end usable MVP in a matter of weeks,” he wrote.