Storehouse started life as a social network for sharing your photos and videos in an attractive narrative layout with friends, but has big news today: it’s pivoting away from the social part.
A major reboot of the platform is launching today, which removes all of Storehouse’s social features. There’s no more following, likes or timeline in Storehouse 2.0 which is now in the App Store.
That might come as a surprise for a company that received an Apple Design Award and was hyped to be the best way to share your story with friends, but CEO Mark Kawano says that the company found the social sharing model to have “major drawbacks.”
Even though Storehouse grew to 1 million active users, Kawano says it started to “feel different” and made sharing personal stories feel awkward. As a result, all those features are gone entirely and stories can now only be shared via a link.
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Kawano says the company found that by “forcing everybody to publish all of their stories to all of their followers, whether a public or private account, we saw that many people were limiting what types of stories they created” and that “stories that appeared in [other people’s] feed intimidated them from posting at all.”
A new feature called ‘spaces’ allows you to share stories privately with a group of friends. You can invite people to collaborate and contribute photos and stories to a space for things like office photos or a vacation.
As part of the update, Storehouse has also rebuilt the story creation tools to make it faster and more stable. A new ‘shake to shuffle’ feature moves your story’s layout around when you shake your phone.
Storehouse says that social features won’t be coming back any time soon, as it’ll now be focusing on layout and creation tools instead of fostering a social network.
➤ Storehouse 2.0 [iOS]
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