Twitter co-founder launches Super, yet another way to share your opinion
A wise person once related opinions to one of many things we all have. And it's hard not to think of that when looking at Super, a new opinion sharing app launching today for the iPhone and Android. Text prompts like "the best," "the worst," and "the craziest" invite you to shout your opinions to the world alongside a relevant photo. Like Twitter, it rewards pithy text and clever wordplay. But photos are just as important, making it feel equally like Instagram. You can even double-tap on a post to "like" it, a behavior that Instagram popularized. The more I played around with it, the more Super seemed a generator for those text-heavy posts that always seem a bit out of place on Instagram. (And which inevitably get more likes than my carefully composed landscapes.)
Super is worth keeping an eye on because it comes from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, who helped transform the simple idea of microblogging into something huge. It's the second product from Stone's new company, Jelly, which released a Q&A app earlier this year. With enthusiasm cooling for that app (I honestly forgot it existed until today's news), it's not terribly surprising to see Jelly taking another stab at relevance.
Even though his last app basically flopped, Stone doesn't seem to be stressing this launch too much. "I've decided not to come up with some slick and pithy marketing description for Super," he wrote in a blog post. "I'm also not going to proclaim that it's the most innovative thing ever or that it's going to save the world. It's not, it's just fun." (He writes "fun" five times in the 81-word first paragraph of that post.) With its bright colors and cute sound effects, Super almost seems like it's trying to cram the idea of "fun" down our throats. It's clearly something targeting big personalities, which will likely work in its favor. Don't be surprised if the app's view of nearby users gets flooded with plenty of attention hogs.
