Convies Debuts A Vine-Like Video Messenger For Chatting With Friends And Groups
Fresh on the heels of Vine’s expansion into private video messaging last week comes today’s launch of a new video chat app called Convies, offering a dedicated experience for sharing short video messages with friends or groups of friends, as well as with your broader social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
The company is being incubated at Lerer Ventures’ Soho Tech Labs, where it was originally envisioned as Vine-like experience, but within a closed environment. Of course, as luck would have it, Twitter-owned Vine beat them to the punch with the launch of its own direct video messaging on Friday.
“Vine is a social application that also introduced sending direct messages,” he explains. “Convies is more of a chat application – like a WhatsApp or Line-like application – that’s completely tailored for the native video experience,” he says.
The app grew out of Loenngren’s earlier efforts with a mobile video app called TimeFreeze, which he developed as a side project while working as the lead developer for an investment bank in Japan. Lerer Ventures reached out to him, he tells us, as they were looking for people already working in the mobile messaging space.
And after some conversations with the team, Loenngren ended up quitting his job and relocating to New York where the idea for Convies soon came about.
The app is also differentiated from general-purpose messaging apps because its focus is on immediately playable native videos, which can be shared with friends or groups, and it provides a way for you to play back a series of videos in your chat stream as one single video story.
Videos are recorded in a similar way as on Vine and can be up to 6 seconds long. They can also be “locked” to prevent sharing, or made public which has them appearing in a Vine-like video feed. The app’s quick sharing feature lets you send a video to the public network on Convies, or to other social services including Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, as well as email.
Being on Vine, like being on Twitter to some extent, can feel like a public performance at times – something that has attracted a crowd of creatives to the Vine platform. Convies, however, feels more personal, thanks to its messaging focus.
Of course, video messengers, like mobile messaging in general, is a super-crowded space, where the app will have to compete not only with other video sharing services, but also the big-name mobile SMS replacement apps which these days tend to support a variety of multimedia, including video.
Convies is live now on iOS, and an Android version is in the works.