Peach Talk & Future of SMS hybrid Social Media

A Craving for Reality in Apps 

Peach is glance content, and user-created drawings, it's a notepad of GIFs, images and video. The 'magic words' slack-like commands for some people, are a real differentiator. But in this peachy world, is it just hype?

What happens when Tumblr meets Snapchat, frivolity or revolution? And digital marketers scramble, like they do, since a hot new channel is good traffic. And if I tell my story of the day there, will an audience come? What if I don't own an IoS device? Snapchat has taken us to 7 billion videos and some brands struggle to do anything there, are we seeing the digital user channels become less accessible to brands that can't adapt? It seems to be the case with a lot of SMS. 

What can we learn from Snapchat, Instagram and maybe Peach? That glance content and digital attention is changing and its likely to be permanent. We live in a multi device world with competing channels for our attention. This is competing with real-life relationships, video on demand services like Netflix and well, our work environment. Social media is embedded in the gamified consciousness of young Millennials and iGen. As engagement invariably drops off at Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn, the alternatives are flashy, glamorous and often just plain more social. 

Magic words are a bit gimmicky on peach. Likely not as enduring as the selfie revolution was on Instagram. Or the time-urgency posts of Snapchat. Those were true revolutions in digital media. Just like there would be one, if twitter actually did move to 10k characters. 

Visual first mobile feeds are nothing new. Pinterest has very sustainable growth and has an inspiration factor and Millennial Mom power, that cannot be denied. Tumblr is authentic, not many could easily emulate its micro blogging underground charm. The interface is immediately intimate. These are the legitimate channels of glance content. 

We talk about Facebook as if it's still relevant, but in many ways it's not. It's clamored after quantity and not quality, it's monetized after $, not user experience.  While aspects like its messenger remain useful, there are at least ten other SMS varieties as useful. I don't suspect live streaming on Facebook will be as fun as Blab.im for instance. Maybe only augmented reality social media can save facebook for B2C. For B2B, brands will still pay a lot of $ for targeting and retargeting. 

With twitter struggling, daily engagement on LinkedIn quite low, time spent on Facebook dwindling amidst the closure of accounts who have over-dosed on it, one wonders is there a future for social media truly? There is a future for user-generated content, for sure. But when algorithms take over distribution of posts and content, the human experience changes and the intimacy of an interface is quite often lost.

Peach is a glorified SMS app, there's little doubt about it. It's a hybrid glance app with a strong social emphasis.  It's friend posting, and inner circle following. It's not meant for an anonymous or semi-public network. It's a personal tool, in a crowded sea of digital failures. 

I'm waiting for such an app, but with location targeting, dating integration and a whole lot more. Peach is not going to fulfill me, just as vine was a micro video novelty. For apps to be truly social, they have to let us know what's going on in our area with regards to our interests in real-time, with reminders, the meet ups and the cultural events, the real world. I don't particularly care for magic words and voice commands, if you are a social app, then do your job well. 

The world does not need more gimmicks, that have no real substance of unique selling propositions. Another network to hop on to just because an endless array of articles tells me to. Flash in the pan notoriety is not a CTA that will convert me. I don't think I'm alone. 

I was more excited about Ello, whatever happend to them. Anything that takes us further away from Facebook, that has done a lot of people a lot of serious damage is a good thing. SMS has to facilitate real connections, if it doesn't, it's garbage. We have enough "entertainment" in our society. We don't need apps and social media channels that are so gamified the are purely masquerading as social. They are literally just that, games that no longer tell us much about who we are actually close to. A lot of folks out there are starting to realize, that's not real. 

I don't care about the ROI of channels, I care about the personal experience. There's an emotional experience on Instagram, I can get a sense for who you are. I can feel the storytelling of your staged life, as in authentic as it may be. I keep reading articles on peach that seem more like advertisements than real opinions, this bothers me. What is the audience niche of Peach, I cannot even tell. Do GIFs excite me? Hardly so much. Do emoticons of throwing cakes make me inspired, not really. 

Enough with the gimmicks, give me a channel I can feel immersion with that actually taps into the virtual personal assistant that I know is coming. An app that can give me analytics on my life and connect me with the city in which I live. Give me an app that helps me make new friends and find meetups in our lonely urban sprawls and cosmopolitan messes called cities. Don't give me an app that makes me feel even more lonely than before. And whatever you do, don't give me "fake memories" that makes me want to close my Facebook account, forever.