In 2018 I wrote a TechCrunch article that said 2018 was “the year social networks stopped being social.” Reflecting on this article, I’m not sure 2018 was the tipping point. But the premise of the article still stands.
At some point, social networks were no longer about connecting with your closest friends, communicating with long-distance family members, and feeling a special connection with the people you love.
TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) are slowly evolving to become the same infinite scrolling stream of algorithm-optimized short videos from top performers.
And it turns out I’m not the only one who has noticed that social networks are slowly drifting away from their original purpose. Amoa small team based in Paris has been working for most of 2023 on a brand new social networking app called ID card.
ID is a social networking app out today on iOS that lets you connect with your friends in a creative way. In many ways, it resembles the early days of blogs, the highly personalized profile pages of MySpace, and the golden age of Tumblr.
But first, some context on Amo. There is a lot of hype and anticipation surrounding the launch of Amo as the company is co-founded by Antoine Martinwho co-founded Zenly with Alexis Bonillo. Zenly was a popular social networking app focused on location sharing that encouraged you to spend more time with your friends and discover new places.
Snap spent more than $200 million to acquire Zenly and retained the same team to replicate it as a separate app. Under Snap’s ownership, Zenly became one of Europe’s biggest social apps of all time. At its peak, the company had 18 million different users open the app every day.
And then… it disappeared.
As part of Snap’s cost-cutting efforts, the company decided to shut down Zenly entirely. From what I’ve heard, this move even sparked discussions between French politicians at the highest level and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel.
Many key members of the Zenly team now work at Amo. In fact, there are 10 co-founders. In addition to Martin, Corentin Kerisit, Michael Goldenstein, Claire Pluvinage, Charly Delaroche, Julien Martin, Quentin Perez, Nicolas Fallourd, Alexis Druon and Jean-Baptiste Dalido are all co-founders of Amo and all former Zenly people.
The second reason Amo’s launch is highly anticipated is that the startup closed an $18 million funding round in February or March at a valuation of around $100 million with New wave leads the round, and Coatue and DST Global also participates. There are also 80 angel investors at Amo’s table.
This is a highly unusual funding round as it happened in 2023 (during a downturn in VC funding), Amo is a mobile startup (no revenue source at the moment) and the startup had no product out there.
An empty canvas
In 2010, Jürgen Schweizer from Cultivated Codethe company behind personal task management app Things, wrote a blog post shortly after Steve Jobs introduced the original iPad. In that post, he compared the iPad to a blank canvas.
“If you want to understand what makes the iPad special, you can’t see what it has, but what it has It does not suit I have. The iPad is so thin and light, it becomes the screen and the screen becomes the app. There are no input devices. The device disappears and turns into the app you’re using. The technology is transparent,” Schweizer wrote.
And this analogy is especially true for the work of ID and Amo. There are many things you can do with ID. There are also many things we take for granted in a social networking app that simply aren’t there.
ID is a blank canvas combined with creative tools to help you express yourself. You can use it to create a profile that perfectly describes your interests in a visual way. But there is a social twist as you can see your friends’ profiles and add things to their own profiles.
Image Credits: Romain Dillet
When you first create your ID profile, you get a blank board waiting for content. You can fill it yourself in four different ways.
You can add stickers from your sticker library (more on that later), you can grab content from your photo library, you can write text or draw. When you select a photo, ID automatically creates a cutout of the main object or subject in the photo using PhotoRoom technology.
This will feel instantly familiar to Pinterest users who love to build mood boards or software developers who cover their brand new laptop lid with stickers.
Each virtual object can be moved, resized and rotated. After a while, your profile becomes this kind of spatial canvas. You can make things so small they disappear… unless you zoom in.
You can create little islands that define what you have in mind at the moment. For example, you can have a corner in Los Angeles with your favorite buildings you saw during your vacation, group photos with your friends, your favorite cup of coffee there, etc. You can also have a restaurant corner with food photos from fancy restaurants you’ve been to recently.
Everything looks smooth and natural. You can scroll, zoom in, zoom out, jump from one profile to another. There’s a sense of depth and space that I’ve never seen in any other app. Photos are never pixelated and you don’t feel like you’re waiting for something to load.
If you’ve been using ID for a while, things can get messy — and so can life. “And that’s fine. My personality is chaotic — our personality is chaotic. They are multi-faceted and not neatly arranged in a 3×3 grid,” said Amo CEO Antoine Martin.
Pop up game
As you start browsing the app and seeing what’s new on your friends’ profile page, you might want to steal something for your own wall. ID allows you to add content from other profiles to your sticker library, so you can either add it to your own profile or place it on someone else’s profile.
I’ve been using the app for a little over a week, and I’m already seeing some trends spread among the small community of beta users. You can see who originally created a sticker as it moves from one wall to another. Some users have put up nice shelves so they can neatly categorize everything that matters to them. A user has created a guestbook section on their profile. “If you stop by, leave a note here,” she wrote.
Some video games rely heavily on the player’s creativity to have fun, such as Minecraft or the recent Zelda games. In these games, you can build your own fort or build your own vehicle.
And this is also the main idea behind ID. Amo gives you the creative tools and an unlimited Figma-like canvas. Now, it’s up to the community to figure out what they want to do with it. And the best part is that it’s unlike any other social app out there.
Image Credits: Romain Dillet
Maybe Amo will end up fostering a creator economy with exclusive content that can really make your profile stand out. Maybe the company will add some premium features over time. For now, Amo wants to find a hit.
“We prioritize scale because my goal is to build an indestructible company. And it’s the founder of Zenly who says this! I used to think 18 million [daily active users] it would be enough to make a company indestructible. But I was wrong. I think you need 100 million [daily active users]Martin told me.
Healing loneliness
When Amo’s team started working on ID, they wanted to find a way to cure loneliness. It seems a bit counterintuitive to create a social networking app since people already spend so much time on their phones. But according to Antoine Martin, existing social networking apps simply don’t have your best interests in mind.
“THE [World Health Organization] now he calls it the loneliness epidemic. And if they say it’s an epidemic, it’s because it’s actually contagious. In other words, if you are isolated, your loved ones are also because you are unreachable. So during the two hours you’re on TikTok, they have no one to talk to,” Martin told me.
“At the same time, the human needs that can be met by the social consumer space are no longer covered by these products, as was the case in the past,” he added. “In the early days of Facebook, I don’t know if you remember, profiles were kind of complex. There were drawings, games, photos, text. You would write long comments, it could be a poem. . . And on the other hand, it was a reminder that you mattered to these people.”
According to him, today’s generation of social networks is very passive. You don’t have to do much to spend two hours on TikTok or YouTube because these companies want you to spend as much time as possible on these apps. “We aspire to go back to those earlier principles and make them work,” Martin said.
This is also why Amo doesn’t want you to spend hours on the app. When you have a few minutes, you can open the app to check what’s new on your friends’ profiles by swiping up on the notification cards.
When you reach the last card, your ID shows you a message that says “get some fresh air”. And then the app closes itself. You return to the home screen, you can put your phone back in your pocket.
Image Credits: Romain Dillet
Amo & ID
ID is an accepted view for social networking apps, but will it work? Given the team’s past experience and Amo’s deep pockets, if there’s one team that has the opportunity to try something radically new in the space, it’s Amo.
“We’re intentionally shipping something 8 or 9 months after the company launched because we swore to ourselves that it wouldn’t take us a year to launch, that we’d learn more by building publicly,” Martin said.
While ID is Amo’s first idea, the company likely has other ideas in the consumer social space — Amo didn’t end up naming its app “Amo.” So it will be interesting to watch the launch of this new app, but also the history of Amo as a company.
Image Credits: Amo
