aNewDomain — Strings takes the best features of text messaging, email and ephemeral messaging and packages them in an app focused on meaningful personal connection. Sure there are many other messaging apps available on the market, however Strings offers the ability to share words and images with an increased level of control, so you can be both free with your thoughts and discerning about how you share them. I spoke with Edward Balassanian, Founder and CEO of Strings, to learn more about the concept, how it differs from other messaging apps currently available and to find out what’s next for Strings.
The fundamental point of Strings is to give you confidence of control. It is an interactive tool that gives us the ability to have conversations, to separate conversations, and to have control over them so we can talk about anything, whether it’s work or play.”
Unlike text messaging, which doesn’t offer any way to differentiate between strands of a discussion, Strings offers you unique threads for each separate conversation. You can easily keep the Strings containing baby photos and meaningful conversations, and delete the Strings for grocery reminders and other conversations once they are finished and no longer useful. This format also allows you to have second thoughts about a message you sent through Strings and to retrieve and delete it.
Text messaging is just broken for me. [It’s a] long continuous conversation stream that’s disjointed. If you delete that conversation, you delete the entire history including all the important stuff too. E-mail does allow for separation of conversations, but it’s horrible at interactivity.”
Strings is notably both free to download and free of the pervasive advertising content usually found in free apps. Since the app was created based on an underlying premise of control, privacy and giving you confidence, Balassanian believes mining these conversations would be misrepresenting the goals of the app.
Step one is to be the go-to app for people to connect personally. This means control, confidence and being intimate – and by intimate, I mean connected in a way that you feel you’re not going to be harmed in some way. Once you’re the go-to app and people rely on you for personal interactivity, there are many ways to explore monetizing it while still having empathy for the consumer.”
Strings is currently available for iOS devices, and an Android app is in the works. I asked Balassanian what else we expect to see soon from Strings.
Context is the key word to differentiate the way you look at sharing content with other people. When I like a page, the people who created that page have no context for how I got there, why I liked it or if I’ve even consumed the product or not. A String is a notion of context and the new release will really center around that idea.”
In a world overflowing with digital content, Strings might be exactly the interactive and intuitive tool we all need to help us share content in meaningful ways and to interact with people we care about.
For aNewDomain, I’m Becket Morgan.
All Screenshots: Becket Morgan
Featured Image: “Strings” by Alexander Boden via Flickr Creative Commons
