Justin Bieber's Hot New Startup: A Selfie-Only App Made By a Brony
I've got some bad news: you just died and now you're in hell. The first thing you'll encounter in hell is this TechCrunch post, which is 1,200 words long, and about "Shots For Me," a Bieber-backed venture dedicated to taking selfies, which you can already do with other apps.
"Now think about teens on social media," TechCrunch's resident teen-at-heart Josh Constine urges us. Take a moment and think about teens on social media, please.
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OK, we're back. Here is Constine's pitch for Shots Of Me:
Selfies — photos you shoot of yourself, often with the front-facing camera. That's what you do on Shots of Me. Take selfies. Share selfies to the app's Instagram-style internal social network or to Twitter (with Instagram sharing coming soon). Like Selfies from other people. The premise is that simple, but it hides the amount of work and detail that went into Shots of Me.
In fact, you can only use the front-facing camera on your phone in Shots Of Me. It's like Instagram, but with half of it missing, no filters, a worse name, and the possibility of profiting Justin Bieber. Constine goes on to write roughly one thousand words justifying the existence of this software, which has raised well over two million dollars in venture backing. Highlights include:
- "No uploading means the emotions you see in a newly uploaded Shot Of Me is how that person is feeling right now."
- "Overall, Shots of Me feels refreshing because every face is fascinating. There are no botched attempts at artful photos of stale scenes cluttering the feed."
- "Shots of Me has a direct messaging system where you can ping anyone who follows you, similar to Twitter. This way, any drama stays private and randos can't troll you."
- "Some will undoubtedly say Bieber has no business investing in tech, but if he can consistently sell millions of record and huge numbers of concert tickets, he must have a knack for understanding what kids want."
The sunshine, "no drama" ethos might have something to do with the fact that this guy made it:
Here’s an app I’ve been working on for the last couple months: Shots of Me. http://t.co/kJnZjDKBF6
— Steve Streza (@SteveStreza) November 12, 2013
Bronyism, Justin Bieber, TechCrunch, selfies—if you could congeal the online zeitgeist and then force-feed it to someone until they died of burst organs, it might have a similar effect on society. The real alarm will come after considering that this could, despite all reason and decency, become an app success. Just read the single non-insane thing Constine writes in the course of 1,200 words of fungal growth:
With any luck, Shots of Me will get Bieber to share selfies exclusively on its app to attract some of his 47 million Twitter followers and 57 million Facebook fans. It could blow past Frontback if just 1 percent of those people checked out Shots of Me.
Evil is real.