The road to the Queeklee app

1 second video loops and polls let users explore the world around them in a blink.

queeklee’s beta is finally out. From the drawing board to conception, Queeklee is now live on the App Store for the first users to try it out and get us feedbacks.

‎Queeklee_‎*queeklee is an experiment with time, rather than with images and videos. With *queeklee you can create and share 1…_itunes.apple.com

The idea is simple, almost virginal.

The app, available only for iPhone, allows users to create and share 1 second video loops, called queeks.

Each queek is associated to 1 hashtag and 1 location. The feed is not scrollable, rather the user swipes right or left to like or not like the queek and proceed to the next. It is a mechanism that many app users are very familiar with and that makes each queek an organic poll.

With Queeklee, we wanted to go back to the origins of social media. No news whatsoever, real or fake. No audio. No filters.

Remember Twitter and Vine? Twitter started the 140 character limit that allowed users to get smart with their tweets and get more creative. Then came Vine with 6 second videos. While Vine has forever gone — even after a try earlier this year to revitalize it with v2 — the short videos were embraced by million of users that, to this day, want the app back.

Snapchat and Instagram stories have transformed the way we use social media. Every day we tap tap on hundreds of stories and often we go to the next before it even ends.

After all our attention span is short. I remember attending a social media conference in Orlando, Florida were one of the speakers pointed out that the average attention span of humans is about 2.7 seconds, compared to that of fish at 2.8 seconds. Whether is true or not, social media has reduced our attention span and has changed our habits. We now scroll through feeds almost incessantly; we tap through story after story; we rarely watch videos more than a couple of seconds unless it really attract our attention; we see more news and ads than posts from friends and family.

Now, Queeklee doesn’t really tackle this. Queeklee is an experiment on time and social curiosity. The idea is to fully embrace hyper-short videos, and scroll through as many as possible via a feed that invite the user to scroll right or left to proceed to the next video. Queeklee shows you posts from both people you follow, and users geo-located around you.

Again, the idea is simple. We embrace social media limits to incite creativity and social curiosity.

We now invite people to try it out and tell us what they think. Does it have a future? Is there a way to make it better? Do people hate it?

Here’s the link to download it: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/queeklee/id1435791152

Please, let us know!