Kevin Rose announced last month that he’s stepped down from Google Ventures to focus on North Technologies, his startup focused on creating new mobile apps. Now it looks like one of the projects it launched last year, video and photo sharing app Tiiny, is shutting down.
Marc Hemeon, Rose’s co-founder at North, posted a comment on Product Hunt after someone noted similarities between the design of new video chat app Pop and Tiiny’s grid layout. The original comment has been replaced with an innocuous “heart you :)” but we grabbed the original longer statement before it was deleted.
Hemeon wrote:
“We have learned a ton building Tiiny and at the end of the day any product or service has to solve a real problem. With Tiiny, we were trying to take away the anxiety around sharing photos and videos by constraining the form factor of the actual video (hence our grid).
While Tiiny is fun to use and has a slightly different point of view for photo and video sharing, it doesn’t materially do a better job than SMS, SnapChat, Instagram or Vine for sharing photos and videos.
Tiiny was a fun experiment, but ultimately the users have told us it’s not a strong enough product to replace their existing ways of sharing photos and videos – which is why we are pushing an update today to allow you to download all your Tiiny videos and images so we can gracefully shut Tiiny down.”
We’ve contacted Hemeon for comment and the promised update to Tiiny has yet to arrive. It may be that he let the cat out of the bag a little early. It’s worth noting that the Tiiny Twitter account has been silent for 100 days.
Still, that North has decided to shut Tiiny down shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. Rose wrote when they launched the company that “our goal is to fail fast, to launch a new project every few months.”
Update: North CEO and co-founder, Kevin Rose posted about the shutdown of the app. As someone that’s been part of quite a few startups, he did add that the company is already moving to other projects:
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So what’s next from our little app shop? Well, we’re going to continue improving our second app, Watchville (which has been doing incredibly well — already surpassing Tiiny in total downloads and active users) and then kickoff our next project once we find something that passes our bar for new apps.
➤ Tiiny [iTunes]
Image credit: North
Read next: Kevin Rose Officially Steps Down from Google Ventures
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