When serial inventor, pro candle maker and very early YouTube star Paul “Renetto” Robinett called me on the phone six months ago and told me he and a team were creating a new video service, I was interested. When I got to see the service on Robinett’s phone in the lobby of the Driskill Hotel at SXSW, I was downright excited. This was my favorite new app that I saw in Austin. It’s not publicly available yet, but it’s finally getting close.
It’s called Glmps and it’s a social photo service – with a very important twist. It stores the five seconds before you snapped a photo in video – and saves the whole package together for context. It’s cool; it lets you see a little bit of the story behind a picture and it turns video into a fun freeze-frame experience. Check out the Glmps I made of my lunch, below.
Glmps isn’t perfect yet. The user experience is a little rough around the edges. It could benefit from things like easier scrolling between shots and comments and some caching of the next video in line could make for a much more moving experience. The photos you take are all stored in your regular photo album, so no harm is done in experimenting.
Below, my lunch was very exciting today:
The relationship between the still photo and the video, in the final presentation, needs to be a lot crisper, too. As you can see in the example below, if the last frame of the video is the same as the photo, it just looks choppy to switch back and forth between them. I want to see “story behind a photo…snap freeze frame the photo.”
I’d be happy to just look at photos, with a link somewhere to view the story behind the picture. Right now the user experience seems heavy handed. Like it’s got one gimmick and it’s going to hit you over the head with it.
It’s a different kind of experience, taking photo+short video, and it requires different thinking. Different subjects will be better suited to this kind of media. I find that fascinating to consider.
I love the idea of this service. I’m looking forward to seeing this get polished up over the next month until it launches.
