All right friends, here’s the deal. Don’t pretend that it isn’t annoying to juggle every social media profile you have, especially when you’re uploading the same photo to every one of them. And don’t pretend you’re not keeping score of how many “likes” you get on a useless photo you took of cake.
Personally, I’m the not-so-proud owner of six social media pages. And trust me, when I snap a photo of a beautiful sunrise, the moment isn’t so special after I’ve wasted over five minutes uploading it to every profile.
Despite my impatience, I‘ve now added a seventh: Momentage.
Created by JoAnn Ippolito and George Castineiras, this new app seems to be a blend of sites like Instagram and Facebook. After a free download, you’re off to profile creation. One you create a username and password, you enter a very Twitteresque profile setup: you choose your display name, a profile photo, a background photo, and a one-liner to go under your name. I picked “there is no spoon”. That means you can’t steal it.
The app offers some features similar to other social media apps, such as 20-second video recording and the ability to edit and combine photos, import media from your iPhone, and share your uploads through Twitter and Facebook.
What separates this app from others out there is how effectively it combines videos, audio, and photos. The biggest thing Momentage brings to the table is the option to record audio over photos. It allows 30 seconds of speech over any photo, and your message will play when it’s viewed.
Ippolito spoke with me about the newest social media platform this week. She says the idea for Momentage came about six or seven years ago, when Castineiras would rely heavily on video cameras to capture significant moments in his life. When the smartphone started to become more popular along with new versions of the iPhone, he got the idea to build a solid video app.
“Momentage is really more the next evolution of social media,” says Ippolito. “And what I mean by that is that it’s multimedia. You can go ahead and then communicate as you normally do, and it has a lot more dimensions.”
Amid the competition of similar apps, Momentage is already laying the groundwork to becoming another app we can’t take our eyes off of. Ippolito feels it differs from Twitter’s count of followers who validate our sense of humour or the number of likes on a selfie that provide a shot of self-esteem. “Our community is more about breathtaking moments, or capturing photos and sharing what their day was about,” Ippolito says. “It’s less about putting them in the spotlight. It’s less about selfies and more about experiences in [users’] lives.”
With an Android version releasing in the summer and phenomenal feedback so far, Momentage isn’t going anywhere. “There’s so much out there, but everybody is pretty much one-dimensional,” Ippolito says. “Everybody’s doing one thing and I think we’re tired of having multiple apps to communicate.
“We’re still in the infancy of what the app can bring to the table,” she concludes. “We’re adding new features and things people haven’t seen yet. Overall, we’re creative people who are coming up with new things.”
