[app url=”https://itunes.apple.com/app/id871746078″]
When Twitter first showed up, many couldn’t see the point. Like Facebook but pruned down to within an inch of its life, with no more than 140 characters to express yourself. It sounded rather useless. Now we can’t live without it. Where Twitter trimmed the Facebook clutter and left us with simple text updates, Whese takes a similar approach with your photos. This new app, developed by Onur Aktas and Mert Ozturk, is social image sharing at its most distilled. And once again, many might not see the point.
The point, however, is incredibly simple. Think of Whese as a social selfie platform, a place to take snaps of yourself doing whatever it is you do, and then share it with your Whese-connected mates. Tag a companion, throw in a location, slap a catchy phrase in there to give it some context, and you’re Whese’ing. No, that’s not a word… yet. Nor was Tweeting a few years ago. Hell, even “selfie” has only just joined our modern lexicon.
There’s very little that could go wrong with such a straightforward little app, so it’s no surprise that it works without a hitch. Once open, you’re faced with an image feed of all your friends latest images, and from here it’s a simple swipe to the right to the photo booth or a swipe to the left to view your personal screen with your own posts. Your iPhone’s selfie camera is selected by default, since that’s the main idea here, but the main camera is available with the touch of a button.
Whese doesn’t have any functionality issues, but one or two omissions worth mentioning. Firstly, it’s odd that the developer hasn’t included any of the lens filters we see everywhere else. Hardly essential, but very popular. It would also have been handy to allow users to import images from the phone’s Camera Roll, but since the focus here is on taking quick snaps to let people know what you’re up to on the fly, restricting users to using “live” shots probably suits the app.
The main concern when judging this app’s worth to you, the user, relates to the very heart of it: the social aspect. It’s about sharing with your friends, so Whese is nothing without connected contacts. It’s the same hurdle facing any social networking startup – getting enough people online to attract more people online. Your typical catch 22. Right now your Whese experience might be somewhat lonely, so you’ll want to use the integrated search options to check through your Facebook and phone contacts, or invite them via Whatsapp or sms.
Get enough people connected – and regularly active – on Whese, and this could become a regular stop for you when you’re doing your daily social network feed trawl. This is obviously aimed directly at serial photo sharers and selfie addicts, and could become quite addictive for that target market. It may be a simple idea, and one with some usage overlaps with massive apps like Instagram, but it doesn’t cost a cent and is a breeze to use, so there is absolutely nothing stopping you from getting in on the action.