With social media ingrained into our daily lives, there now lacks a degree of intimacy in sharing with our connections. Sometimes we don’t want to share information to our entire online social community, which explains new privacy settings and all-new applications and platforms being built that make social networking more private and closed. But while these achieve in limiting a network’s size, one San Francisco startup has added another layer of flexibility and personalization to the idea of intimate social networking, and is getting help from a Facebook co-founder.
Having just come off a seed stage round totaling $500,000, Quilt is mobile sharing app that describes itself as a “real-time digital scrapbook built by close family and friends.” It allows users to create well “Quilts” that literally stitch together moments of their lives and has flexible privacy options that designate which members of their social circles they want to share with. While each Quilt is set to “private” by default, content may also be shared out to social networks if and when it makes sense.
“Quilt is delivering a fundamentally new way to create, share, and relive the experiences of our lives,” said Facebook co-founder and Quilt investor and advisor, Andrew McCollum.
Users have the option of creating as many Quilts as they’d like and range from simply sharing thoughts, to checking into places, and posting photos within a designated group. A Quilt can be designed to serve as the place to highlight a special occasion or document a relationship.
For MusiciansFor musicians, Quilt can serve as a way to intimately connect and share moments with fans. Imagine a Quilt for a particular city or show, a release, or anything else that can be (or should be) communicated intimately for fans.
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“A study of users Quilting their vacations showed that each member on average posted 600% more content to Quilt than to Facebook, and that texting rates dropped significantly during that same period," said Austin Cooley, Co-founder and CEO.
Cooley has also said that he seeks to build a “storytelling device” as opposed a simple group photo-sharing app. Since ‘Quilting’ is a collaborative process, he and his team wish to extend the concept of sharing from just one person out to an entire group to complete storytelling process and stitch moments together. The team is also focusing first on the college demographic, since they continue to show high usage of mobile sharing.
Seed funding is led by Energent Ventures, with investors including Facebook Co-founder Andrew McCollum, David Whitney, Randy Scott and a group of angel investors from Boston to San Francisco.
Quilt is available for free on the Apple App Store and in the Google Play Store.
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Hisham Dahud is a Senior Analyst for Hypebot.com. Additionally, he is the head of Business Development for Fame House and an independent musician. Follow him on Twitter: @HishamDahud
