BeReal.

Thoughts after about a week of use

created: 2023.05.05. 01:54 · modified: 2023.05.06. 15:58 ·  · license

This post was automatically translated and has not yet been reviewed by me. Please read with discretion.

Summary

1. I downloaded it because they were running a promotion with my club.
   It’s fun. I think I’m hooked.
2. Thanks to it, my desk has never been cleaner.
3. It’s nice to see so much of campus and so many familiar faces. I want to go back.
4. All that traffic concentrated into two minutes a day... a developer’s nightmare.
5. But I want to build something like this, too.

The photo is my first BeReal posted on time.

Ingenious

This is a case study in the enormous power of a single idea. You don’t have to look beyond a red ocean to create a blue ocean; you can make one by expanding its boundaries. I learned that in the first session of an entrepreneurship course I took last year, but it’s hardly easy to do—especially in social media, where an established user base is practically the whole service. Yet by offering an unusual way to share unpolished everyday moments, BeReal. has carved out a space among giants like Instagram. It now has 50 million monthly active users and has raised over $100 million in funding without generating any revenue.

503 Service Unavailable

The concept is simple, but implementing it elegantly may be harder than it looks. Traffic surges at a set time each day. It’s as if the whole world were trying to register for classes together, every single day. How BeReal. handles that flood of traffic is something I’d like to study further, but one thing is clear: it hasn’t completely solved the problem yet. Today, as I was writing this, I took a photo when the notification arrived and tapped “Send,” only for the app to crash. Another time, the app stopped working even though my notification window had already passed. Sure enough, it happened to be notification time in another region (BeReal uses four time zones to keep notifications within daylight hours). As its user base grows, this is something the developers will need to address to improve the overall experience. Or they could just count on users being willing to come back after a crash and leave it at that.

Freeze Tag

If BeReal. can manage its surges in traffic and its service model while growing its market share, it could become an even more interesting app. It’s fun to imagine people on the streets of Seongsu-dong or at Shibuya Scramble Crossing all stopping in their tracks at once to take selfies. I once wanted to make a film that started with my curiosity about the lives and thoughts of a passerby, a farmer glimpsed from a train window, or someone being interviewed live on TV. It would begin from one person’s point of view, then rapidly shift to the perspectives of the people they could see, and on from there. I think this app might be the closest way to bring that idea to life.

* There’s a documentary that similarly captures the same moment in different people’s lives, though the perspectives aren’t connected: One Day on Earth.

Thumbs Up

If the idea of posting within a limited time is the cake, RealMoji is the icing. On BeReal., instead of leaving a like or an emoji, you react by taking a photo of your face. That’s called a RealMoji. You can use photos you’ve taken in advance for a handful of preset emojis, or take one on the spot. Unless you tap to enlarge it, a RealMoji appears at about the same size as a regular emoji. Thanks to our remarkable ability to recognize faces, though, it’s easy enough to make out both the expression and the person behind it. These little photos make each reaction feel much more alive.

I don’t think I’m very good at using this feature myself. They say humans can make and recognize more than 3,000 expressions using 42 facial muscles, but after agonizing over what to do, I always end up giving a thumbs-up. I can see why Facebook chose it for the Like icon. ...