Casey Neistat released a video where he laments he’s not happy with the current social networking format. On social media networking sites, they let users create a “version of themselves” and he argues that social media should be a “digital or virtual version of who we are as a person” instead of this “highly sculpted, calculated, calibrated versions of who we are”.
This is why he started a new social networking app called Beme (pronounced the same as the word “Beam”) that aims to make social networking “social” again and more authentic.
He explains that all social apps tend to make users see the world by staring on their mobile devices instead of their eyes. These format tends to create a version of yourself since you can easily modify your looks by the recent use of filters which are a distorted version of yourself.
Beme attempts to rectify that by not letting people share by staring at their phones, rather you hold your phone to your chest and records whatever you want to share & posts it. This makes use of the proximity sensor on the phone as the “record button” and the app does not let you preview or review the content you are sharing.
From the demonstration of the app in the video, you can follow people where they generate a timeline that shows their beams (photos or videos) and to chose a beam to watch, you press and hold to the post to view it. The beams work like the posts on Snapchat , once you view a beam, it is gone forever. There are no conventional ways to show your appreciation to the beam like “Likes” or “hearts” but if you want to engage further with the person who posted the beam, you repeatedly tap the top right corner to send a real time selfie. This method of sending real time selfies to your beam which I think is a better way to show reactions from your followers from the beam you posted.
From what I see, Beme looks like a better version of Snapchat, in the sending of video snaps part. They are trying to introduce the intrinsic social aspect of human nature that has sadly been reduced by current social media apps into a measure of the number of likes, hearts and shares a posts gets.
The app is only available on the Apple App store and by Casey words it is a “hot mess” but promises they’ll be an update soon. It seems to be in beta because in order to use it, you need an unlock code. I hope there will be an Android version that will be released.
