With smartphones and social media, it can be hard to keep your scandalous and incriminating items a secret, especially when you're wasted and don't realize until the morning after that you've shared your drunk shenanigans with your entire social network. Bruce Yang of Emeryville knows this all too well. After having to meticulously remove all content related to a particularly debaucherous weekend in Vegas off the internet, he developed an app that would do it for him.
Aptly named Sobrr, Yang's social media app erases all records posted to it after 24 hours. Anything from messages, photographs, and even friendships and connections posted during this timeframe are set to self destruct, working like the messaging service Snapchat. And much like the dating app Tinder, users can swipe right, left, and even down to indicate their approval, indifference, or opposition to items. The idea behind is the app is to "live in the moment," which happens to be the tagline.
Since launching a beta version to 200 select people in July, the app now has over 10,000 users and counting. Sobrr uses GPS location services and posts photos and content from the 500 people (who have the app, obviously) nearest you. Users can then stream the items, swiping right to ‘cheer’ the item (similar to a ‘like’ on Facebook), left to see the next item, or down to delete it. They can also make comments, all of which are set to disappear, unless both people ‘cheer’ the selection. Sobrr is supposed to give users the opportunity to post freely and take the permanence out of social media blunders, but as this Bustle article notes, so far, most of the photos that appear on Sobrr are pretty yawn-worthy stuff.
Yang explained to Re/Code that he's looking into monetizing the app, offering businesses a chance to offer coupons and discounts that expire within 24 hours.
[Via: Bustle; image via Thinkstock]