Over the years I’ve noticed that photos on Facebook, the world’s largest photo sharing platform, are getting more and more contextless as people upload every single vacation picture they’ve taken, or just upload one picture at a time from their phone without any description. What’s missing, according to Rewindy‘s Chris Winquist is the story behind the photos, or actual stories. To combat this the Helsinki-based company has created a a story platform built off of uploaded photos, and short descriptions to build a narrative.
Being sent a collection on Rewindy allows you to scroll through photos, much like a Facebook or Google+ photo gallery. But the service offers a gentle nudge to share stories rather than just pictures. At the top of each image you have a short title, and underneath they give storytellers a place for more details to be shared.
According to Winquist, they’re tapping into people’s fascination with both stories and pictures. “Stories give the context and the feeling, while photos provide the visual and beautiful part to the whole thing.”
Rewindy founder Chris Winquist tells us he thinks this format works well for telling stories in the digital era. People have stories to share (and the pictures to match) but still need a better home that encourages deeper content. Uploading and describing photos feels like a familiar process, and the service also gives a handful of filters or themes to choose from.
Rewindy isn’t trying to build its own social network by connecting people to each other within the service. Instead, they feel that their target audience are people who are already sharing on other platforms, but are just looking for a better way to present their stories. Links to the Rewindy can be shared privately and publicly, which also hits the demographic of people who want to only share content with close friends and family members.
The easy sharing also makes it a nice platform to share pictures with the Grandparents and other people who aren’t on your favorite social network. To test out the service, for some relatives I put together a few pictures from from a camping trip I just went on, which I guess everyone could also check out here. A few staff favorites can be found by logging into the service, and scrolling down the page a little bit. People have shared vacation photos, recipes, and other concepts.
A part of me wonders if the world needs another photo sharing site, but I appreciate that Rewindy gives people a gentle nudge to provide context and a narrative. Rewindy has just opened up their service to the public yesterday, but is holding off really promoting their product until they have their mobile app live, and tighten up a few aspects of the service. Still, it feels like a very polished product, and it will be interesting to see how the public uses the service.
