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alvin5.com

93 points by boraturan 5 years ago · 25 comments

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primitivesuave 5 years ago

The idea is brilliant, I can imagine this enabling localized social apps all over the world to take off. However, the demo is not very compelling. If you're trying to get companies to trust your infrastructure to build on top of, you should really consider dogfood-ing your product to completion - show how a competing social app might look like and what customizations it offers.

2cb 5 years ago

I can’t quite picture how this would work in practice, can anyone else? So say you’re a retailer with a commerce app. Is the idea you put a TikTok clone inside of it in the hope users sign up and use your app as a social network?

I get the end goal is targeting ads at your customers better and having user generated content to create ads at the same time, and that’s obviously an appealing concept to businesses, but who would actually sign up and use this as a consumer?

  • breakfastduck 5 years ago

    Win prizes for posting and all that crap.

    Very easy to imagine a clothes retailer asking people to upload clips in their new items to be entered for discounts etc.

    • 2cb 5 years ago

      That’ll be it, you’re right. Basically just bringing an old sales trick into the 21st century by making it look like social media.

      I can imagine teenagers jumping at this if a retailer for whatever it is kids find cool these days uses it to be honest. Win an exclusive pair of Weezys if you send the coolest skateboard video!

      (Just how old must I sound right now? Damn.)

      • breakfastduck 5 years ago

        You sound incredibly old.

        But don't worry - I read your whole comment agreeing and now feel just as old as you sounded!

  • tyingq 5 years ago

    I've seen this concept more generically via contests or rewards for posting. You incent people to upload videos, and hope for gems that you expose to other customers.

  • mrtksn 5 years ago

    Turkish e-commerce sites are experimenting on this model.

    Instead of giving you list of banners, they give you instagram like stories where each story is a promotion of a product.

    You tap on a story and quickly skim through all of the deal instead of trying to get oriented among the clutter.

    However I don’t see widespread adoption, maybe it’s not working that well for content that is essentially ads only.

    • wingerlang 5 years ago

      Thailand have next level eCommerce. Stories, newsfeeds, videos and live streams are integrated directly into the mainstream shopping app (Shoppee).

pie_flavor 5 years ago

The webpage took approximately 30 seconds while 'loading' in times new roman. And then the interactive scrollable demo is an further-infinite load spinner. Even if I thought what they were offering was a remotely good idea, I don't think I'd buy web components from people whose website screams 'we have no idea how to build web components'.

bookmarkable 5 years ago

Not sure I get the tech guts of this offering from the teaser site, but as a marketer, this is really interesting. I have zero interest in running a business account on TikTok, but this format is appealing.

dvt 5 years ago

This is brilliant. Good luck! I can see cooking apps, workout apps, etc. wanting to implement something like this. It all comes down to ease of development, but imo the value prop is big enough that CEOs/PMs will push for this no matter what.

  • Dwolb 5 years ago

    Ecommerce seems like a great one too. Seeing how clothes fit in video format feels like a way better experience than just static pictures.

  • amelius 5 years ago

    > I can see cooking apps, workout apps, etc. wanting to implement something like this.

    To replace cooking websites and workout websites?

ev1 5 years ago

Do those links have anything at all to do with alvin5? Or are they just generic "tiktok is the future" press items?

Why name it alvin5?

mrtksn 5 years ago

That’s something that I was thinking about. The “Story” interaction model seems to be very compelling for consuming serialized information on a small screen, it’s nicer than scrolling because the content covers all of the screen all the time and gets all your attention and you can very quickly decide if you are interested or not.

It’s very good on mobile, so much better than scrolling since scrolling is mentally taxing due to ads and menus and constantly requiring you adjusting the position of your content.

dcploy99 5 years ago

I like the trend, “it was an app, but now a feature”!

RootKitBeerCat 5 years ago

This is evil genius level theft and I love it.

rizpanjwani 5 years ago

there's no info on the team behind it.

darepublic 5 years ago

Nice stuff

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