So Nosh founder Alex Cornell came up with and shot a promo video of this parody app that allows you to review anything in the world, “launching” it on October 3rd. This is doubly hilarious because a week after the world met Jotly, superfounder Kevin Rose launched Oink, which is also an app that allows you to review anything in the world EXCEPT IT’S REAL. And really noisy.
When I tweeted out a link to this Jotly video earlier, SimpleGeo co-founder Matt Galligan tweeted back to me,”uh. @Oink much?” whereas Foursquare hiring director Morgan Missen responded with the more tempered, “There’s a legit white space between yelp, twitter & 4sq; voila the mobile social short-form review-anything app onslaught.” True. Which begs the question, why haven’t any of those three companies tried to fill that hole? Especially Foursquare.
While the “mobile social short-form review-anything app onslaught” is like a thing, Campbell insists that any similarities between Jotly and Oink are purely coincidental, “I was directly making fun of the proliferation of absolute ridiculousness when it comes to apps and startups these days. I tried to think of every cliché and trend I could, roll it into one, and create one app to rule them all,” he said, “The goal being: a fun parody … What just made the whole thing even crazier, was yes, seeing Oink launch one week after Jotly ‘launched’ with the exact same (seemingly absurd) feature set. What we came up with, as a joke one weekend (Jotly), was all of a sudden a real app in Oink.”
Still, the apps are so similar that watching these two videos in succession continues to set me into convulsive fits of laughter. Namely because Erick seriously says stuff like, “I’m oinking a lot,””mainstream version FOR YOUR MOM”?, “invite ON-ly,” and “granular” without any irony while Biggs manages to slide the phrase “best head” in without notice. See what I did just there? (That’s what she said.)
I honestly don’t know which video is funnier, even after watching them each like 15 times. Enjoy.