Everyme, a Y Combinator-incubated startup with a long list of impressive investors, is launching its iPhone app today. Its goal? To create an environment where you feel comfortable sharing whatever you want with specific groups of people.
Co-founder and CEO Oliver Cameron demonstrated the app for me over the weekend. At the core of the Everyme experience are Circles — private news feeds that you create with specific groups of people. The problem, Cameron says, is that as you get more and more friends on Facebook, people who you have wildly differently relationships, the less comfortable you feel sharing updates and content.
“Two years ago, my sharing on Facebook was significantly different than it is now,” he says.
After all, the way you behave with coworkers is different from the way you behave with your family, and both are different from the way you behave with your college friends. Now you can create Circles for all of them.
Of course, Google already made Circles a central part of the experience with Google+, which Cameron calls “a step in the right direction.” However, he also says that Google+ was a disappointment, in part because “the whole experience is really strange” — for example, it’s confusing when other people put you in a Circle, but you don’t know what Circle it is.
Everyme tries to make the experience as transparent and simple as possible. Everyone can see who else is in a Circle, and they can leave a Circle (or delete it if they’re the creator) at any time. The app doesn’t allow users to share anything from Everyme to Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks — Cameron says that’s so you know that what’s shared in a Circle stays in the Circle.
The app also automates some of the sharing for you, creating some initial Circles based on its best guess as to your relationships. You can also turn on a feature called Magic Stories, which looks at your social network feeds and automatically posts important milestones, like a birthday or a promotion. Everyme uses your phone’s address book for sharing, and if people don’t have Everyme accounts, they can still see and post content through email and text messages. (It may be a little confusing that there’s another mobile startup called Just.me which takes a similar approach in a number of ways, including the emphasis on your address book as the basis of your social network.)
Everyme’s investors include CrunchFund, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, Tencent, SV Angel, Dave Morin (who is experimenting with a another approach to private sharing with Path), Joshua Schachter, and Vivi Nevo. You can download the app here.
Origami (formerly known as Everyme) is the easiest way for you to share with your family. With Origami, your family receives a private, customizable website on which to share daily updates and store lasting memories in the form of photos, videos, quotes and more.
Oliver is currently working on 9:42 AM, building beautiful and simple products for the iPhone. Oliver was previously the CEO and co-founder of Everyme, a private social network. During Oliver’s time as CEO, he raised $3.65m in investment from venture capitalists such as Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Tencent, SV Angel and more. Everyme was featured in press outlets such as The New York Times, USA Today and Forbes.
Andreessen Horowitz is a $2.5 billion venture capital firm that was launched on July 6, 2009. Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, John O’Farrell, Scott Weiss, Jeff Jordan, and Peter Levine are the general partners of the firm.
Greylock partners with entrepreneurs to help them build market-leading businesses. Over the past 45 years the firm has worked with hundreds of companies, 150 of which have gone on to IPOs and 100 of which have gone on to profitable M&A events. Such companies include Ascend Communications, CheckFree, CipherTrust, Constant Contact, Continental Cable, Decru, Data Domain, DoubleClick, Farecast, Internet Security Systems, Ikanos, Legato, Media Metrix, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Openwave, Open Market, OutlookSoft, Polyserve, Red Hat, RightNow Technologies, Success Factors, Tellabs,...
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