Real talk: You have a ridiculous number of photos that live on your smartphone and social networks. So do your friends. That means some real gems tend to get buried in the massive collections you’re storing—making it that much harder when you’re desperately searching for Throwback Thursday ideas. But a new Boston-based startup is looking to change the game. Syft, which just launched the public beta of its iPhone app today, pulls from your Facebook and Instagram accounts and sends daily curated batches of old photos, so you can reminisce with no effort on your part. And in addition to offering up a dose of nostalgia, the app allows you to instantly publish them for others to see, and seamlessly spark private conversations with the friends who played a role in those memories. In other words, it’s like a turbocharged Timehop with a social spin.
Founders Eben Pingree and Max Montegalas met while attending Williams College in Massachusetts a little over a decade ago. While Pingree was attending Dartmouth College to get his MBA, he began working on a social trivia app. Meanwhile, Monteglas was launching his own mobile gaming company. The duo reconnected, and began talking about their complementary skill sets. After Pingree moved back to Boston in 2013, they decided to partner up on the project that would eventually become Syft.
In its original form, though, their product was a group chat app with all kinds of curated content meant to inspire new fodder to keep a conversation going. After a couple months of testing out the app, it became clear that the most popular feature—by a landslide—was feeding in old pictures from friends’ social media accounts. That feature, in fact, was responsible for a big spike in engagement. Realizing that they would need to change the app’s focus, they decided to start from scratch and build Syft as it exists today.
“What we learned in our first product is that it’s actually your friends photos that are more valuable than your own photos,” Pingree told me in a phone interview.
Now, the duo is working out of Raizlabs' mobile development incubator in Downtown Crossing. The startup is currently hunting for a head of design, which is particularly crucial for a consumer social product. Ideally, Pingree says Syft will be bringing on two engineers in conjunction with raising a seed round over the next 18 months. For now, the funding goal is $1 million. But already, Syft has banked a pre-seed round from serial entrepreneur and angel investor Lars Albright—founder of SessionM and Quattro Wireless—along with Boston Syndicates. Albright, who is also a Dartmouth alum, acted as an advisor at Pingree’s previous startup and is once again offering guidance on his newest venture.
Pingree emphasized that the real purpose of Syft is to help people rediscover forgotten photos they haven’t accessed in a long time.
“The theory behind it is that with cloud storage, we’re taking and using photos in different ways,” he told me. “We’re using them as a note taking tool, to take screenshots and snap selfies. The more you take, the harder it is to find the best ones. Syft is about taming your photo collection so looking through them is something you actually look forward to each day.”
When you open Syft, it automatically shows which of your friends on Instagram and Facebook have the app (provided you’ve linked it up with your social accounts). And photos still get texted to friends even if they haven’t downloaded the app yet—they can immediately click on them to join the conversation. While the first version of Syft is pulling all photos from social media, Pingree noted that the next version (currently in approval for the App Store) will also be capable of feeding in those from your phone’s camera roll. He also revealed that they’ve already begun building some machine learning technology into the app so that it can respond to user behavior better. For example, if you tend to start conversations about photos with one particular friend, the system can then improve the curation of each daily photo batch and make it more relevant. In other words: More snaps of those beer pong matches with your college BFF, less of those awkward moments with a high school buddy you don’t talk to anymore.
Image of Polaroids via Shutterstock. All other photos courtesy of Syft.
