beme

I would list Casey Neistat is a personal inspiration, he is famous for his youtube videos, which are bare-bones yet extremely well executed. Make It Count and Bike Lanes are two good examples of his style. Although primarily a filmmaker, I have always seen him as, if not a designer then a design critic. Many of his videos, such as the Gold Apple Watch and Build an iPhone Dock for $1, can be read actually as a serious design manifesto, as relevant as anything by Karim Rashid or Naoto Fukasawa.

His design manifesto, it seems, is that: A) Products are tools; B) Customisation is king; and C) If you can make something yourself, then do. This is a design manifesto which probably can't be realised as a product on the capitalist marketplace, primarily because things need to be sold, and a company can't sell the idea that you should make it yourself.

The introduction of beme, his new video sharing app, is very interesting; now Neistat is standing up as a real designer, vision and all.

His vision is to change social media, from a platform of narccisistic showing off, into a genuine reflection of how people are living their lives. The video sharing app forbids users from looking at their own image as they take videos, and uploads and deletes them in a short space of time. The message is positive, and I personally haven't gotten into Snapchat and Instagram, so it speaks to me.

I really hope it takes off, if only because I want a success story for Neistat, but there are a few obstacles in the way. Wired have just reported that they feel the problem will be that authenticity is boring. We'll see, but I do feel that Neistat's message is to 'do more' and maybe he sees his platfrom as a way of encouraging that. I don't think that really the article gets it right because Casey has shown us, in his Vlogs, just how interesting normal life can be.

Another obstacle is that it really will be hard to convince people to be authentic. It will be interesting to see how the app develops, maybe, due to the entry-code situation the positive message has a better chance of prevailing, as only enthusiastic people are currently using it now.

More remains to be seen, we are only on version 0.4, with more promised for next week, I personally wonder how beme plans to monetise, and how much the functionality will evolve, or if it will remain steadfast to change.