the perfect New Social community In ages Is All About Selfies

there may be simply nothing that looks somewhat like Kong, now on hand on Google Play and the iOS App store. So what is Kong? it’s a social community for animated selfies. The 1/3 app from course, the company in the back of the eponymous iPhone-most effective social community, Kong’s colour pallette is a rainbow blast of Miami Vice fashion neons and pastels. The UI design parts appear to reference mid-century California design, the low-fi pixel pictures of ’90s on-line BBSes, a good the opening credits of The Brady Bunch.

but earlier than you roll your eyes, in truth try it. as a result of it may well be essentially the most legitimately enjoyable and inventive social community to come back round for a while. and i say this as a convert, who, within 24 hours, has long gone from being a Kong denier to blasting my wife with increasingly crazy selfie GIFs during the day. And, in thought, I hate selfies. (if you happen to had my face, you most likely would too.)

From the second you load the app, Kong plunges you right right into a frenetic kaleidoscope of your folks’ animated selfies, with the tile within the prime left corner reserved for your personal face. that you may exchange the filter on that box by means of swiping left or right (choices include Black & White, motel Peephole, Rainbow Starburst, and Warhol), and enter textual content into your body just through tapping on it. there is only one button, which information a few seconds of selfie, then speeds it up, loops it, and adds it to the pool of whatever channel you are in, or else shares it to different social networks or apps as both a video or animated GIF. it is simple, giddy, and unrepentantly silly fun.

“The genesis of Kong was once that we wanted to make an app that was all about faces,” says route founder <a class="fc-plugin people-page" href="http://www.fastcompany.com/person/dave-morin" data-id="fastcompanythe theory was once that your face is among the strongest methods of communique available to you, much more so than phrases in the real world, however it's one who goes mostly unused on-line. So we asked ourselves, what would a social network that used faces because the vital unit of currency be like?"

Video selfies may look like a limited form of expression, however Kong actually breaks them out into their own colourful online universe. there isn’t any finish of various channels you could join in Kong, each and every one devoted to their very own distinctive genre of selfie. Go to #uglycry and you’ll find nothing but GIF after GIF of individuals crying like cartoon characters, whereas #emoji might be where you go when you need to take a selfie with a poop emoji balancing to your tongue. #bradybunch is just a bunch of Kong users taking a look round on the selfies around them, whereas #halfies is sort of a game, the place you try to match up your face to the particular person subsequent to you. And when you have an idea for a different kind of channel, that you would be able to create it at any time. severely, there’s also non-public channels, so which you can additionally set up a again room only for you and your pals to share zany, embarrassing mugshots with one every other, with none strangers wandering in.

in keeping with Morin, Kong’s construction was once as idiosyncratic because the app itself. The app has a real digital-first feel to it, which Morin says is as a result of the truth that it was once designed solely in code, instead of mocked-up in something like Photoshop. Kong’s additionally super quick. The selfies it records are tightly compressed, which direction learned from its earlier apps used to be completely very important to helping an app achieve traction in areas where bandwidth is more limited. The group also locked in a beta neighborhood tremendous early, and made their comments the one-most driver of the design course of.

for instance, in accordance with feedback, each and every Kong user’s UI has its own unique colour, which is generated from their username, so no person’s Kong app appears exactly the like. Likewise, after early assessments resulted in sure users taking up sure channels in Kong through posting an never-ending barrage of selfies, path tweaked the provider to simply let people put up one selfie to each and every channel. post any other one, and it writes over the last one.

but an important thing about Kong’s building, says Morin, is that the app was built from the ground as much as adapt to the crazy methods people could be using it. “we’ve learned with our other apps that if you are going to create a network that is open and porous to the remainder of the internet, you wish to design it to evolve based on how customers are hacking is,” he tells me. So in a way, now that Kong’s been released to the general public, Kong’s design course of is in point of fact simply beginning. i can’t wait to look how it evolves from here. (can you inform i’m a fan? observe me on Kong @drcrypt!)

you can download Kong for iOS and Android right here.