Povio, the polite photo app that students love, joins YC’s winter batch

Definitely a good &quot;disruption&quot; to all the noise that is broadcast on twitter + instagram by all those that you follow. I think they also nail it pretty much with their tagline: <i>Play photo ping and stay in touch with friends</i><p>If the founders are reading this, was this the original idea ? If not, I&#x27;d love to know what did you all start with, and how you all pivoted to this particular idea? (Crunchbase says: founded in October 2012)

What did I just read? I have really, really low standards for web content, but this seriously reads like a fifth grade book report. &quot;Povio is for now 100% focused on growth. It actually sounds like Povio has some kind of shot in the space.&quot;

Interesting idea. A couple of suggestions: 1) Don&#x27;t do the auto countdown thing with the camera. Just let me take a picture. 2) My knee jerk reaction when I received a photo was to ping my friend for another one right away. In fact all my friends did this until we got fed up with each other. Maybe limit pings to once an hour or something. 3) Give comments more focus. If someone sends me a photo I want to interact with them about it. Maybe that&#x27;s why I&#x27;m heading to ping them so quickly...<p>Otherwise I&#x27;m happy to see a novel approach to social networking.

Instead of creeps silently going through photo feeds, they can directly ping you for more photos!<p>Seriously though, I hope this idea catches on and it can possibly be the start of a trend of social media users becoming more &quot;humble&quot;. It would be nice to see things flipped on it&#x27;s head and move away from the push model of &quot;here I am, here is a constant stream of useless shit about me&quot;.

Is this thread being astroturfed? So many lo-karma&#x2F;zero-karma commenters.

&quot;Photo apps today are about a traditional feed model — you post, and it gets pushed out. The problem with that is it does not work terribly well with shy people – and into that category fall millions of teenagers.&quot;<p>Shy people still won&#x27;t ping others. Don&#x27;t see how this will solve that problem.<p>Oh well.

I really liked the idea, so I just tried it out on my android tablet. Of course critical social networking mass isn&#x27;t there yet, so I wanted to invite some friends.<p>Here are a couple of things I noticed * It took me a while to figure out that the app wanted to send invitations via SMS, which of course want working on my tablet. * you can&#x27;t uninvite the people you&#x27;ve invited (tapping should toggle the invite state) * there isn&#x27;t any OK button to send the invites.

Really nice idea, and I love the name! Out of interest, does anybody know how they went about seeding it in a university? The article just skips over it as a quick step along transitioning to SV, but it sounds really hard to do.

I like the concept, and event want to use this, but maybe you can have more thought put in to the example friends. I do not categorize my friends as Mr. Example, Miss Hotty, and Best Buddy....especially as a woman. The Miss Hotty is especially creepy - you want guys to send pings to just hot girls? This feels like harassment.

One of the things I liked about Snapchat was the ability to find friends <i>without</i> using Facebook. I think that would be a good addition here.

How is it &quot;joining&quot; the winter batch? Isn&#x27;t that batch just about done now?

Great success story. @matevzpetek would you mind sharing more detailed steps on how you seeded the app at Santa Clara University? Impressive stats - Inside 4 weeks, 30% of the University’s students – 1,200 students – signed up for Povio

Android user here - anyone else having a difficult time using this app? So much of it feels like a hackathon hack. It&#x27;s shoddy, unresponsive, and overcomplicated.<p>Take pinging for example, when I added a new friend (and she accepted) I couldn&#x27;t ping her. The orange circle never showed up. I had to navigate to several different views for it to activate. Also, commenting on a photo opens a.... popupbox? What?<p>I think the idea is kinda fun and I hope these guys succeed, but I also think they need to rethink their UI.

I like that this both starts a conversation and provides a conversation topic in the form of an appealing picture. Definitely would use this if it was in my area.

This looks pretty interesting (I just saw a demo); the old facebook strategy of winning a specific college campus, then replicating to other campuses, seems to work well.<p>(It&#x27;s also interesting how a world-class athlete has gone into startups; there are definitely a bunch on wall street and in sales, but doing a startup, outside sports, isn&#x27;t as common I think. Pretty awesome.)

I&#x27;m always taking a photo of my screen. I need blur functionality, because I don&#x27;t want people to read my code. I solve this now by shaking the phone, but since I did this 500+ times already, you might consider a feature.

I&#x27;ve been using Povio for the last 3 months; pinging friends is incredibly fun, and the network effect it has is amazing.<p>Povio is a great way to stay in touch with remote friends.

Very well done product video on their site. No voice over or explanation at all. Right into showing the product in a perfect use case. Catchy tune also!

I&#x27;m addicted to POVIO! my friends and I are having a ball using it. much better and more chill than snap chat in my opinion.

I still don&#x27;t get how this is different from just texting.. I must be too far out of the loop on this stuff.

I really like this concept. This actually sounds like a photo app I would use, not just browse occasionally.

been using this since the start and the evolution of the product is just amazing. The team is doing a wonderful job at simplifying everything around a very good core experience.<p>I hardly open Instagram these days and don&#x27;t use Snapchat, but have been using Povio 5+ times&#x2F;day over the last year.

It&#x27;s a really polished application (iOS), I was quite impressed when trying it out.

How does Povio make money?

I&#x27;m using it on a daily basis, more than twitter actually.

Love it! Way more useful than FB or Snapchat!

I love this app. It is the most used 3rd party app on my iPhone. I cant imagine better way for fast communication with frends. Keep up the good work !!!

I like this, I can see it being popular.

Simple, fun &amp; fun. I love it.

The easiest way for staying in touch with my friends and family, love the simplicity.