Fliggo, Inc.

What I want is simple: a way to share certain things with my friends, and other things with everyone. “Simple” is the keyword there because you can do that with Facebook, but it’s not simple enough. I want flick-one-switch simple, not create list, use drop-down, choose Everyone or Friends and Networks, Friends of Friends, Friends Only, Customize simple. A few startups are starting to get this level of ease — Treehouse is one of them. When we last wrote about Treehouse back in June, I noted that it was perhaps the perfect app for sharing Bros Icing Bros pictures. Sadly, that meme died at the hands of Smirnoff Ice. But luckily, Treehouse has become even more useful since then. Notably, the iPhone photo-sharing app has a revamped interface that allows you to comment directly from photo pages, swipe left and right to quickly browse photos, and swipe down to see comments, likes, and location. There are also some nice new overlays that show all this information. And you can now leave photo comments. They’ve added these features while keeping the app simple, which I like. It’s not trying to do too much, just share photos amongst your friends. That said, as I alluded to, they did add the element to make it easy to post photos outside of your social circle. On the post screen, there is now a “Friends Only” toggle that is set to “On” but default. If you swipe this to “Off”, a new option appears that asks if you want to post your photo to Facebook. You can choose “On” or “Off” for this, and if you choose “Off”, the photo is simply shared with everyone on Treehouse. Easy. Yes, I know you can basically do this type of sharing with Facebook, but it’s too convoluted with all those options. And Treehouse has the default set to “Friends Only” as it should be. I still believe Facebook needs this simple toggle to switch between sharing with your friends or with everyone (though I’d prefer “followers” like Twitter). As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is well aware, the UI and UX is very important for this sharing dynamic — and I think Treehouse has nailed it. Treehouse co-founder Chrys Bader says the app had over 100,000 downloads in August. The latest version is 0.3 which is a free download from the App Store. Read More

I love simple apps that do one thing and do it well. That is the definition of Treehouse, a new iPhone app made by the Y Combinator startup Fliggo. So what is Treehouse? It’s right there in the title: “Share Moments With Friends.” Treehouse may be the most simple app I’ve seen yet to allow you to share photos (and videos) from your iPhone with your friends. You start up the app, take (or load) a picture/video, and upload it. From there, it will be placed into your friends’ Treehouse timelines where they can comment on it and “like” it. Each photo/video is also tagged with the location where it was taken. Again, yes, it’s very basic, but it’s also very well done and fast. Sure, you could do this on Facebook, but your stream there likely has hundreds of other things going on — this is tailor-made for visual sharing and interacting. Treehouse also has a nice notification system to let you know what activity you’ve missed when you open the app — and yes, you can be notified through Push Notifications. It strikes me that this kind of app is the perfect thing to share humorous photos with friends — such as Bros Icing Bros photos. If you have no idea what that is — well, just go here. Treehouse reminds me of Radar, the photo-sharing service from Tiny Pictures (which was acquired by Shutterly in September of last year). But it’s even simpler and for now, iPhone-only. The plan is to eventually extend to the other mobile platforms though. Just as with Radar, the question will be how you make money with this kind of service. For now, the hope is just to build a strong user-base, obviously. If you’ve heard of Fliggo before it’s likely because you’ll been following the story of Twitvid.io, which then became Vidly. Founder Chrys Bader had been trying to perfect the art of sharing video over Twitter (using things like HD video and even Chamillionaire), but while developing a Vidly iPhone app, he realized that it was time to branch outside of being Twitter-centric — probably a smart move given the recent upheaval in the third-party developer community. So he went back to his initial angel investors, got some more money, and built Treehouse. Bader isn’t disclosing new new amount of money raised, but has confirmed that it’s an extension of their initial seed Read More