Silicon Valley is now obsessed with ephemeral messaging: self-destructing pictures sent via Snapchat, one-word emails sent through the app Yo, imploding texts traveling through Wickr, short-lived messages on FireChat and Facebook's Slingshot.
But Caterina Fake thinks this obsession will fizzle like so many snapped chats. It will be replaced, she believes, by content that's created carefully rather than quickly, that engages people with their surroundings instead of distracting them, that enables meaningful connections rather than social peacocking.
Fake is the founder of Findery, whose app, launched earlier this year, is built to help catalyze this shift. It asks people to post substantive reflections about where they are---think: a few paragraphs or more---and it encourages them to read reflections posted by others. The idea is that you will show up in a particular place and read the "notes" left by others. Just a few months after launch, Findery is packed with these notes, particularly for spots in and around San Francisco, where the company is based. "When Snapchat is forgotten," says Fake, perusing a particularly long Findery post, "I want this shit. This stuff lasts."
>It asks people to post substantive reflections about where they are, and it encourages them to read reflections posted by others.
The community that has built up around Findery since it went into beta testing a year and a half ago resembles the community that formed around Fake's first big startup, Flickr, a pioneering photo-sharing site: vibrant, close-knit, and deeply interconnected. Findery also hearkens back to the long-lasting online communities Fake was involved with when she worked in and around San Francisco in the late 1990s: The Well, Electric Minds, and Netscape's online communities.
But Findery isn't a nostalgia trip. There are plenty of other people betting on a shift to more substantive, longer-lasting forms of online sharing and more durable communities. One is Ev Williams, a Findery investor whose startup, Medium, is an online hub for stories and ideas--- writing that's longer than the 140 character limit imposed by microblogging service Twitter, which Williams co-founded. Medium raised an initial $25 million round earlier this year.
Another is Atavist, which publishes stories of 5,000 to 30,000 words on the web and via a mobile app. And then there's Automattic, the company behind blogging site Wordpress.com, which in early April acquired Longreads, a hub for articles of more than 1,500 words. Investors valued Automattic at more than $1 billion in a round this spring.
If these countercyclical startups can turn their revolt against ephemera into a full-fledged movement toward more enduring forms of content, they will change not only the way people share but also how they consume, elevating and enriching a mobile and online discourse that has been overtaken by often shallow micro-expressions such as likes, favorites, status updates, tweets, retweets, quick pics, and texts. That, in turn, would help usher in the acceptance of smartphones and tablets as first-class content creation devices, able to capture stories, memories, and diatribes as well as they capture photographs and videos.
Still, sparking deeper creativity on the net is going to be hard. The venture capitalists who fund tech startups typically want to exit their investments after just a few years. In other words, they want fast growth, not the long slog of depth and substance. "That makes it almost impossible" to create products like Findery, says Anil Dash, a longtime technology entrepreneur whose former blogging startup Movable Type bumped up against the same issue. "There is another category of creation in the digital realm that is interesting and isn't being explored right now... The problem is, we don't have a narrative for these longer, iterative, meandering paths toward things."
Fake says the inspiration for Findery came from a number of sources. One was the early days of Foursquare, when finding a note from a friend at a particular location felt like finding "a note in bottle" washed up on the beach. Another was Fake's own curiosity about her San Francisco neighborhood, where the Grateful Dead once lived and where gothic horror novel Interview with a Vampire was written.
To keep the Findery from feeling like an empty restaurant, Fake and her team spent a year and a half stocking the site with content from a select group of early users, everyone from Findery staff and interns to friends of Fake's to former hard-core Flickr users. This early group quickly established what Fake says is the perfect length for Findery's core unit content: the note. A note, she says, should be "longer than a tweet but shorter than a blogpost"---somewhere around three paragraphs.1
Stocking the site with content was a laborious process and a far cry from the rapid-fire success that's common among quick messaging apps like WhatsApp and Snapchat. "It's more like Wikipedia," Fake says. "Someone comes to Wikipedia. They enter a new subject. Someone else comes by two months later and makes it better. You're just cruising for time, and at some point, it's ubiquitous. It tips somehow."
Findery may be tipping in the same manner. A local historian details a camp in San Francisco's Glen Park for refugees of the 1906 earthquake. Another user, who goes by "oonie," left a series of notes across the country for her seven-year-old niece to read when she gets older. Chris Mann, a singer whose bio says he was a finalist on TV competition The Voice, leaves notes detailing stops along his music tour. Self-described local polymath Ministry of Culture assembled a global tour of sundials, which also includes notes from other users.
Another Findery user, residential real estate brokerage Corcoran Group, is an example of how Findery could eventually make money. Corcoran posts not only tips about its home base of New York---collections like "NYC's Best Parks for Dogs" and "Best Things To Do In New York In The Summer"---but also property listings. Right now, these are free, but Findery could eventually charge the company to promote them. Or it could promote posts from, say, American Eagle Outfitter, which showed up on Findery unsolicited. To avoid a backlash, Findery has preemptively warned its users that such "sponsored notes" are part of its business plan.
You can open the Findery app nearly anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area and find interesting reflections on the neighborhood you're in, if not the exact spot. But Fake is proud of just how far Findery users have ranged. Clicking around on Findery's map view, she pulls up notes in Quito, Ecuador; Riga, Latvia; Paris, France; and various U.S. cities, from Cincinnati to Seattle to Chicago to New York.
But will the trend toward enduring content continue to develop? Like Fake, other believes that it might be the inevitable outgrowth of maturing use of mobile devices and social media. Quick, shallow sharing tools like Twitter and Instagram made sense when people mainly used their devices in transit, according to blog post from Facebook product manager and Betaworks venture capital partner Josh Miller. But as people gain experience using social networks and begin using their devices in more places---like at home in bed or on the couch---we should expect them to share more substantive content.
"My strong hunch is we'll see more heavy-weight media creation tools gain popularity in the near future," Miller wrote in an April post on Medium. "By now, we’re very used to typing, tapping, and creating on the small screens of our phones...[and] as we use social platforms over time we tend to get better at them."
Investors certainly see the worth here. Findery has raised $9.5 million in two rounds, the most recent led by Redpoint Ventures. Fake says she's not interested in quick profits. She wants to build an app that lasts. This begins with treating each user not as a mere number but as "a participant in the world," one of the people around you. "So much of our experience is instant, real-time, and 'consume, consume, consume,'" she says. "Our world needs more relishing."
Homepage image: Richard Morgenstein via Wikimedia Commons
1Correction 11:46 EST 08/27/14: This story has been updated to correct Fake's description of the length of Findery posts.
