This article was published on November 22, 2013

Dayre could be the hassle-free solution to long-form blogging you’re looking for


Dayre could be the hassle-free solution to long-form blogging you’re looking for

It can’t be denied that social networks are all the rage nowadays — and this has probably led to people having shorter attention spans. Arguably, long-form blogging seems to have been overshadowed by micro-blogging, which just requires less time and effort (cue Twitter and its 140 characters).

However, reading a comprehensive piece can be way more satisfying than simply looking at a single picture or a 140-character statement — which is why long-form blogging remains a core part on the Internet.

To make long-form blogging more palatable though, the founders behind Nuffnang, a blog advertising community in Asia-Pacific, have come up with a nifty app: Dayre (pronounced as ‘Diary’).

Dayre stems from a simple idea: breaking down long-form blogging into bite-sized pieces. It essentially combines your separate habits on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Facebook and messaging apps into a blog.

To this extent, the app is entirely based on mobile — though you can view Dayre on the Web with a unique URL, you can’t create content there. Its interface is fuss-free — just five buttons on the homepage for you to select if you want to write some text, post a photo, a sticker (yay to stickers on a blog!), a video, or share your location.

The <3 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

Let’s say you’re already used to posting on Instagram and Twitter every couple of hours in your day. You can replicate the exact same steps in Dayre — except you get 500 characters for each component — much more than what 140 characters or a filtered photo will allow. What the app then does is accumulate these separate moments into a ‘day’ of your life.

Dayre-1

Cheo Ming Shen, the founder of Dayre, notes that with traditional blogging, you need to sit down and think about it before hashing out the entire piece. With Dayre, you can do it step by step. “We really want to put micro information into context,” he tells TNW.

A natural comparison for Dayre is obviously Tumblr, given its heavy focus on images and smaller chunks of text. Cheo notes that Dayre has a different proposition from Tumblr, which is based a lot around reblogging. Instead, Cheo wants individuals to “create their stories that are unique,” and he notes that so far the early adopters have been churning out a lot of original content.

Dayre-2

The only form of marketing the Dayre team has done is to spread the word among key bloggers in three countries: Singapore, Malaysia and the UK. This has already helped it gain a surprising amount of traction: Dayre was launched on November 8 and has now already surpassed 60,000 users.

There is still plenty of room for improvement on the Dayre app — the interface was sometimes unresponsive on my iPhone 4 and keying in another component to add to my day takes quite some time before being updated in the final post — but Cheo notes that this is still kind of a soft launch, and there will be constant updates.

Having some sort of integration with the social networks such as Twitter and Instagram would add so much more convenience to the app as well, and could help hasten its adoption. This is something the Dayre team should definitely explore.

Given the fact that long-form blogging can be quite a mammoth task, the idea behind Dayre is really pretty much ingenious — a step-by-step solution for bits and pieces of your day, all stitched together at the end. All that remains is for Dayre to perfectly nail the delivery of this concept, and from the looks of it, it’s on the way to doing so.

➤ Dayre: iOS | Google Play

Headline image via Shutterstock

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Published
Back to top