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Zyl — The social network of memories
Zyl makes you rediscover the memories buried in your camera roll and your friends' ones, everyday.
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Vjeko Skarica
Hey guys! How exactly is this different from tools already available in Google Photos and iOS Photos?
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Hey @vjekoskarica, Apple Photos and Google photos are utily app, we strongly differentiate ourself building a social app with interactions between users around their memories.
They are working on this memories subject, but they see it as a feature of a bigger product, we see this feature as a whole social product.
And about the tech, we differentiate with emotional deep learning approaches and have more design freedom.
@vjekoskarica @mathieuspiry
I don't know about Google Photos, but iOS Photos has shared albums, likes, comments and notifications. How is that not "social"?
@vjekoskarica @mathieuspiry @elfitz_ Hi ElFitz ! That's social, but it's not the main feature of their product, whereas in Zyl, it's all about memories, that you discover day after day with your friends. If I had to make an analogy I would say it’s like comparing Fast Food and Haute-Cuisine : In both you get beef, lettuce, sauces… But how you put things together matters. So I would love to say that we try to make memories delightful 😉
Hmmm.. I’m not crazy about the Terms of Service.
Particularly with personal photo exchanging between friends and family; which should be private.
I wouldn’t even install it as it is at the moment.
@lyondhur For us the first step was to run the image analysis on device only in order to avoid sending every single memories to our servers. End-to-end encryption is next on our roadmap. 🙂
I really like the idea of this. How do friends control what photos are shared with each other and those that are not?
@benjidisciple Thank you ! Zyl suggests the photos to share (or add to an existing story) and the user has the final choice.
Hi guys,
Let's be honest, you take many photos but don't do anything with 99% of them.
Your friends do that too.
And yet, this huge amount of photos contains so much emotions, all lost in the depth of our phones.
We've been on a mission to use these photos from the past in a social app for the past 3 years. Zyl is now the closest thing to a social network built on your photo gallery and your friends' ones.
We understood the weakness of camera roll ⇒ we have too many photos and it's impossible to go in the past manually. Big photo utility apps out there try to bring back memories to their users but we felt there was too much friction in reliving and sharing these memories (often limited to anniversaries).
So we spent more than 2 years working on our tech stack that is now able to score the level of emotion your photos can provide to you and your friends in the present. One of our main challenges was to embed our deep learning models on-device to protect our users's privacy.
Each day, Zyl selects ONE of your best memories and shows it to you through a gorgeous story.
And then, it's where the magic happens: you share it with your friends that were part of this moment and they can react or complete the story with their own photos, in a fun and very engaging experience.
At the end, Zyl aims to build the social graph of your memories, being the quickest access to your history and the one you lived with the people you care about.
Looking forward hearing from you all.
Ask us anything
What do you do about sad memories. That’s the worst on Facebook when you’ve recently lost someone and they hit you with a memory with them in it. Are you doing anything to mitigate this?
@terryatvotingsmarter That's a tough subject. Yes we worked on it. After seeing a sad or even a bad memory, you can delete it and the app will ask you why in order to optimize the kind of memories it will show you in the future
@mathieuspiry it would be cool if you could tag places, people, dates, and pets that you want reminders of. But the shouldn’t be permanent because as you grieve you want/need those memories.
@mathieuspiry, great job on building this 👌 Love the idea 😍
How exactly does the interaction between users happen?
@basheerak Thank you 🥰 Everyday, Zyl AI-builds a story with a set of your photos from the past. When you share this story via a link with your friend(s) through whatsapp/messenger/..., the memory is added to their app and they can complete the story with their photos from the same moment (the app suggests the photos to add). Welcome collaborative stories ⚡️Very soon, people in the same Zyl (= memory) will be able to react with zylmojis and vocal reactions to photos.
Am a big, big fan and user of Timehop. I use it almost everyday to resurface items from my camera roll (and Twitter and FB) and to connect, reconnect, ping friends, clients, etc. No connection apart from being a fan.
@mathieuspiry: Would love to hear specifics about how this is different better than what TH already does. Thanks and good luck!
@sree Hi, thanks a lot for your comment! We’re both working on reliving memories, but are not doing it in the same way. First of all, I’d say Timehop isn’t a social app but more an utility app that shows you anniversary photos from different years and lets you share them outside the app.
We are more focusing on reliving one specific moment with your friends and family.
With Zyl, the experience is 1/ You get one memory per day from the same moment that our AI selected (photos that are going to be meaningful for you and not a photo of your groceries list for example) 2/ When you share the memory, we’re going to look at photos from the same moment in your friends’ galleries (so you’ll finally fetch the photos your friends told you they were going to send you 2 years ago!)
So I guess Zyl is quite different from Timehop because we don’t offer the same UX, features and we don’t search your memories in the same way 😀
@mathieuspiry Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Will download and try it for a while. Back here soon. Good luck.
Amazing app, I've been using it for years now. I tested the beta of the new version, and it's way better in terms of sharing memories! Great stuff!
I like this idea very much, while I was studying CS I had a project where memories were only accesible from the location you took the photos or videos at. I think this is n awesome product!
@felipe_otalora Thanks :) The location based discovery is an interesting feature too and thruth to be told, it has been listed somewhere in our ideas pool :)
This is actually an interesting concept - I'd certainly love my future family to be able to look back in time and understand who I was, what I did, and the legacy I wanted to leave behind!
@mgk4313 Hi Martin ! Legacy is a way to use memories that we are also exploring, as of today Zyl is not designed for “transmission” but more as a way to stay connected with your friends/family on a day to day basis. But still it might be coming in a near future 🙂
@mathieuspiry Nice job and congrats on the launch. Good luck with the growth! The daily trip down memory lane is a cool angle, especially with group events.
As we are building our platform, I hate the "how is this different" question - which implies there's only room for one. I prefer to come at the "what are you doing better" approach. With that being said, how are you guys addressing the person that takes TONS of photos of the same thing? The AI of google photos and Apple Photos is not good at filtering similar shots out, and I can tell the events/times that I haven't gone back and edited, because the memory is a lot of the same or random shots. Are you guys able to address that or aide in that journey?
@geoffism Hi,
Thanks for your comment! It’s funny that you’re asking about duplicate photos, as it was one of the main feature of one of the past version of Zyl 😀 We used to have a feature enabling you to optimize the space on your phone by deleting duplicates photos and only keeping the best one. The algorithm is based on a series of criteria such as timestamps, image analysis and metadata.
So we kept the tech behind this while building Zyl as a social network for memories and we shouldn’t show you similar photos in your memories.
Awesome product, I love the way you guys re-thought the picture sharing experience :)
@varathavc we answered this question above : for us the first step was to run the image analysis on device only in order to avoid sending every single memories to our servers. End-to-end encryption is next on our roadmap. 🙂
