There’s a new kid in town & it is called, ‘Peach’. This recently released & much hyped iOS app is making major players in the social networking & messaging space sit back & take note. Its fresh interface & features, mixing graphical with command line components, has some users excited & others a bit perplexed.
Peach is similar to Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, in that here users share social updates with other users that they can find & befriend on the network, & have a profile picture & also ‘like’ posts from other users. A user can share his or her location, videos or GIFs. You can also share the distance you’ve walked that day & whatever music you’re listening to.
However the similarities end there. The experience & packaging of Peach is quite different to the others due in no small part to the efforts of Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann, who is one of the major brains behind this new network. Just the mere fact that he was involved in the project has given Peach a lot of street cred, especially among Twitter influencers & early adopters.
A great deal of discussion has been fueled regarding Peach’s long term viability as a social platform, as users have been adopting the current lineup of incumbents, en masse. It may look difficult to convince the billions of users of Facebook (including Messenger & WhatsApp), Twitter, & a whole slew of other platforms, to switch over to Peach & its fresh but high learning curve interface. But stranger things have happened, as we’ve seen a few years ago with the demise of Myspace.
Claim to fame
Peach’s biggest differentiator is its use of “magic words”, a throwback to the command line interface of vintage computing (unix, MS-DOS, linux CLI) as well as messaging & chatting apps like IRC. Magic Words give users fun things to post on to their space. Start typing a Magic Word, then tap the bubble that appears to activate it. These are words that you type out trigger the addition of context or Content to your status update, together with an appropriate emoji. For example, typing “battery” shows your phone’s current charge, typing “rate” followed by a number shows your opinion based on a 0-5 star rating, “song “ shows what you’re listening to in that moment.
Here is a complete list of the Magic Words currently supported taken from the Peach Website (as of the Jan 16, 2016 version of Peach):
- gif Search for a GIF
- here Add current location
- shout Say something with big words
- draw Draw something
- goodmorning Say good morning
- goodnight Say good night
- song Identify a song w/ your phone’s microphone
- rate Rate something 1-5 stars
- battery Current charge %
- weather Add current weather
- move Add movement today (steps, miles, etc.)
- events # of events today
- safari Open browser to search for link
- dice Roll the dice
- time Add current time
- date Add current date
- movie Add movie
- tv Add TV show
- game Add video game
- book Add book
The interface is a lot of fun to use, especially as you discover new magic words & the surprising data & emojis that they unearth. Another fun feature is the creation & sharing of photos that appear as animations.
The app was created by the startup Byte Inc & Peach is strictly a free iOS app for now.
Click here or here to download Peach on your iOS device.
It requires iOS 8.3 or later & is compatible with iPhone, iPad, & iPod touch.
– This post is merely a startup profile based on publicly available information & not a review. –
