Beme – The new social media app

The latest buzz on the social media scene is about Beme, the new video sharing app by well-known NYC vlogger and filmmaker Casey Neistat. The app aims to promote honesty by removing the self-consciousness from “selfies”. Beme uses your phones proximity sensors to trigger recording. The idea being that instead of looking at your phone while recording, you hold it up against your chest and allow your viewers to “Be Me”. You share your experiences without effectively missing them yourself because of staring at your phone.

The Beme app, as it stands, is a no-frills affair. On triggering your phone’s proximity sensor, you hear a beep, the screen goes black and recording starts. Four seconds later a second beep, recording ends and your clip is uploaded.

Whereas other social media apps encourage you to present a highly sculpted image of yourself, (choosing the best crop, adding filters and effects before posting), Beme removes all scrutiny and self-censorship by instantly posting. There is no preview option, no undo, no delete – just instant, unedited sharing. Your recent Bemes are collated together into mini-stories for your followers to watch, and once they are viewed, they are gone forever.

Viewers can react to your Bemes by tapping the screen and sending you a “reaction” selfie.

The Beme app is already in the iPhone app store, [http://apple.co/1OjdMFR], (with an Android version to follow shortly), but there is currently a waiting list to activate. Users can reserve their username already, but must wait for an unlock code to gain access, and so far only about 10,000 unlock codes have been handed out worldwide.

Improvements

Once unlocked the app is a bit basic, although I am confident that what we are seeing now is little more than a “proof of concept”, with many more features yet to come. Here are some of the issues I highlighted, (and how I would go about fixing them):

1). Proximity sensor recording is always on

Once you open the app, recording is triggered by the proximity sensor. There is no way to disable this, making unintentional recording commonplace. (My phone has a flip cover case, so every time I close the cover without first quitting Beme it starts recording). I handed the phone to my wife, and before she could figure out how Beme worked, she had already shot a 4 second video of her lap and uploaded it. There needs to be an on/off switch for toggling the proximity sensor recording.

2). Hold to watch clips, tap to react mechanism

Currently, you have to hold your finger down for a clip to play. If you break contact at any point, the clip stops playing and is gone for ever. You also have a “tap to send reaction selfie” mechanism, but you can’t use the same finger to tap, as breaking contact will close the clip. So while holding the phone, you need to use a second finger to “react” to clips, without moving your first finger from the screen. Apart from being all but impossible to do one-handed, this means that you spend most of the time watching clips with both of your hands in front of the screen. They need to either remove the “hold to watch” requirement, or factor in a 1 second delay when releasing so that you can tap with the same finger you are holding with, without the clip closing.

3). No Individuality / Personalization

There are currently no avatars or profile pictures, and no numbers. You can’t tell if someone has 2,000 followers or 2, if they Beme regularly or have never Beme’d before. Everyone appears as a grey username with “Interesting stranger” or “Nearby stranger” after their name, but there is no individuality, and indication who to follow. At the very least, they need to allow users to select one of their own “reaction selfies”, taken with the app, and use it as their profile picture.

Beme Rumours

High expectations versus the bare-bones simplicity of the app has sparked many rumours as to what else is to come. Developers have dug through the source code and found references to functions called “GoProManager” and “ImageMotionDetect”, as well as many filters such as image sharpeners, image saturation, sepia, polka dot, pixellate, mosaic and Gaussian blur, to name but a few.

But perhaps one of the more interesting speculations is that Beme is merely the software component for some new “Google Glass”-style wearable hardware being developed. Beme founder Casey Neistrat became very interested in Google Glass about 9 months ago, and posted a video on YouTube saying that he loved the idea of having a wearable camera on you at all times, but that the 45 min battery life of Google Glass was a big disadvantage, and that it was impossible to look “cool” while wearing them. It was also around this time that he stopped producing his small movies in favour of daily vlogs, (which many see as a promotional vehicle for Beme), and started work on his “new company”. Two weeks later in his vlog we catch a glimpse of a table full of white mannequin heads at Beme HQ, sporting an array of glasses and headgear, (presumably either early prototypes, or market competetors’ products for analysis).

Is this all just coincidence? vlogging glasses, anyone?

And finally, we have Beme codes!

Today is your lucky day, because I have another four Beme unlock codes to give away! The last 5 all went in minutes, so this time to make it more exciting, I will give them to whoever leaves the best, funniest, or most creative comments below about why they want one! Also, let me know your Twitter handle, (so I can DM you the unlock code). The first five, four people to leave me a really good comment get one!

PS. To anyone who thinks I’m bluffing, I have already given away 5x Beme unlock codes to:

@alexfxingmarti1

@tammyfowler1

@olivierdeniel

@habu

@RossSneath