Sendish is a new photo-sharing app that is described by its founders as being ‘honestly anonymous.’
Released this week on iOS only, the idea behind it is to promote sharing without apprehension. You take a photo of where you are in the world without any filters or edits and it gets sent around the globe from person to person without any more detail than the location of where it was taken and the time.
Sounds good, right? Well, this is where things get a little muddled.
The aim of the app is to promote sharing worldwide without having to be insecure or worried about what others think of your photos, but Sendish will actually discard your image if it’s not liked enough by other users.
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Each image has two clickable icons underneath it that will determine its path – the company logo (a moustache) to imply you like the picture, and an X if you don’t. If your photo gets more than a few X’s it is discarded.
We spoke to Sendish CEO, Domagoj Tripalo, to find out more about the app that he describes as ‘anti-social.’
TNW: You describe Sendish as “anti-social” – what do you mean?
Domagoj: You can’t make friends or follow users – Sendish focuses on the content not the sender. Everything you do on Sendish is anonymous (like, dislike, comment, send a photo). Your location is your name. It’s not possible to send messages, know the identity of the users or get in touch.
So by anti-social we mean that users don’t connect based on who they interact with rather they connect with photos and locations.
Can you explain how the images are sent and received within the app?
Every sent photo is geo-tagged and can only be sent in real time. Our idea was to allow users to see the oddest, coolest places they have never heard about in real time. The only information that you will know about a photo is the time it was taken and location where it has been sent from.
The whole network is your audience. Every photo you send will go to a random user. If liked the photo will go to another completely random user. Sendish is not another app where you can share photos to your friends. The idea is to share moments anonymously with random people and for your photos to circle the world without limits. It is public – but not everyone gets sent the same photo.
Doesn’t deleting an image after a few dislikes contradict the idea of Sendish promoting sharing without apprehension?
Yes and no. We give people a chance to be themselves. To share photos without thinking twice, being embarrassed, or judged on their social status.
For example, a lot of people don’t put up photos of themselves because they don’t think they look good or that their photo is good enough to get likes. With Sendish we remove this barrier because we don’t focus on the actual person and judge them, but rather if the photo is good (which depends on the user – they may think it is beautiful, funny or something else).
Most photos will circle the world as we don’t discard a photo at once – we give it a fair shot so after a number of dislikes it will be removed. This is to ensure that bad luck does not remove a good photo. This also ensures that we wont spam the network with bad photos of cookies.
Using the app itself is pretty straight forward and self-explanatory. The main thing that irked me about it was that when you open an image, you are forced to click like or dislike before you can navigate away.
I struggle to see the void this app is filling though. In my opinion, the idea of sending images around the world from person to person is great, but I don’t necessarily agree that this needs to be anonymous or have such a judgemental undertone.
If I share an image from my travels on Instagram or Pinterest, I don’t have to worry about it being discarded because of someone else’s opinion.
Everyone has a different preference when it comes to sharing though so it will be interesting to see how Sendish does.
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