(Note: This post first appeared on the PNConnect Blog)
If you were still online last Friday after 5PM Central you suddenly saw a flurry of people in your Twitter Timeline talking about Peach. What is Peach? It’s a new social network that wants you to share what you’re doing, what you’re listening to, where you are and more. The app comes from the founder of Vine, which helps explain why it caught the attention of the tech press at a time when many of them were still focused on news coming out of CES.
So, really, what is Peach? Aside from the usual status network type of things, Peach has a few unique features that make it different than Twitter or other existing networks. One of those is “magic words” which are essentially commands that allow you to take some special action. So type “draw” as a magic word and you can doodle something. Type “song” to share something from Spotify or Apple Music. There are more you can find here.
Peach offers its own spin on engagement as well. A “Wave” amounts to what on Facebook would be a Poke or a DM on Twitter, sending a push notification to the recipient There are other reactions you can post to someone’s update like “put a ring on it” and more which seem like the company is trying to be overly clever on something as simple as reacting to other people’s updates.
Unfortunately Peach seems to be off to the same rocky start on one front as almost every other network: It’s besieged by fake celebrity profiles. That’s a trap that has been sprung by countless other networks and it’s shocking at this point that “celebrity account verification” is not part of a new app’s launch process. Considering the incredibly important role stars can play in attracting people to an app, that’s a big missed component.
It’s a safe bet that a fair percentage of content marketing types have already added a “Peach Strategy” slide to the next deck they’re presenting to their bosses or clients. For those of us who remember the rush to set up a Pownce profile, though, there’s still time to figure out what’s going on before we jump on board.
With one weekend under its’ belt, it’s still up in the air whether Peach has legs. It’s not hard for a new app to get news with a well-known founder and some funny reaction actions. But whether or not it can survive its first Ello (a unit of time that covers announcement hype to becoming primarily the butt of jokes) remains to be seen. As with any new status network or app, it needs to become popular enough with early adopters that the second tier of people who follow them get active, attracting their friends and creating a critical mass.
Have you downloaded and begun trying out Peach yet? Let’s see where things stand in a week or two and see if the “hiss” is still the hot new social interaction.