A couple weeks ago, I learned of a new social media app called Anchor that looks promising. Imagine a cross between Twitter and podcasting, and you have Anchor – an app that lets you record and respond to short (less than 2 min. audio posts).
The sign up process was fairly easy (once I got past issues with the iPhone 6) and intuitive. Once I was on, it was pretty easy to figure out and add friends from my phone’s contacts and Twitter.
The user interface is incredible, and it’s one of the nicest designed apps I’ve seen released in quite some time. To record, you press the big red button and hold the phone to your ear like you’re talking to someone. In addition to it’s user simplicity, there are so many little touches that make it stand out: lots of white space, visible like and listen counts, easily-to-see replies, hashtags for search, the ability to share outside of the app, and more.
Thinking ahead for the success of the app, they also seem to have a couple of community managers to get people talking and creating content, with a fairly active #QOTD stream (Question of the Day). From what I’ve heard so far, it seems to be a lot more casual than podcasts, and the 2 minute time limit keeps users on point and make it easier to listen to (knowing it can’t be that long).
Every year in the month leading up to SXSW there seem to be a handful of new apps that pick up buzz. Â I haven’t heard much about this one, but think it has a lot of potential, especially at an event like SXSW. Â When Meerkat and Periscope took off last year at SXSWi, they weren’t the first live video streaming apps, but they were able to reinvigorate interest in it at exactly the right time (a week before SXSW). Perhaps Anchor can help reinvigorate interest in podcasting, but then again, it could also be the next Peach or Ello.
Unfortunately for Android users, the app is currently only available on iOS, but it is planned for and the Web later this year.
No responses yet