Did you get on the Vero Hype?

Aaah, I do love a good bandwagon - I can't remember the last one that people so eagerly jumped on in their droves or, where it started but last Saturday night my twitter feed become a torrent of people sharing their Vero user names and / or people asking what the hell Vero actually is. With that that there also came some discrepancies about their Privacy Policy (that, credit to them they soon amended) as well the fact that the app experienced technical difficulties due to the amount of people signing up (I bet they were buzzing at Vero HQ) I finally managed to get in myself and have a good nosey around as well as read the Privacy Policy, Terms of Use and smartly named, Manifesto. So here's my first impressions of what has been hailed the new Instagram.

What the hell is Vero?

Vero is essentially all of our favourite social media accounts combined, as well as images, links, music, book and places, if you have a link, photo or simply something to say then you can share it all in one place. Vero has also integrated with Apple Music allowing sharing tracks with friends as well as following artists more accessible (remember those good old MSN days when we could show all our mates that we were listening to MCR and were therefore dead deep and thoughtful). From what I can gather music was initially at the heart of Vero and tracks can be bought with the connection of Apple Pay or, added via that afore mentioned Apple Music integration. 

Vero has noticed that social media users are wanting to take control over who sees our content and has given users the smarter connecting tool, followers can be categorised into Close Friend, Friend, Acquaintance or Follower - neither user will know which category they have been placed in (so your Mum can't get offended and find out she's just a follower) and, you can control which group/s see your content. This option is something that would work with more intimate family photos that you wouldn't want your entire audience viewing but would still like to share with your close friends etc. You can also filter your user's posts so that blogger that posts too many videos of her cats can have her videos turned off but you can still have her totally amazing blog posts and images pop up in your stream. All the content that your users share are automatically filtered into your collections on your stream so you can find all their shared music, images and videos etc. in the relevant collections to allow smarter searching. 

Merchants can apply to be approved to use the Buy Now option allowing customers to purchase products directly from their Vero post via Apple Pay rather than have to be directed to another site - this is something that may appeal to various Etsy sellers...I dunno, I'm not one.

Why the Hype? 

I still haven't worked out what made Vero suddenly blow up. They already had a steady stream of artists signed up sharing exclusive content that would have drawn in some attention. The main thing that seems to have attracted bloggers and influencers is the ad-free user stream that means no algorithms and no data mining; exactly what weary Instagram users have been crying out for; yep content being shared in chronological order. I think part of the sudden scurry of registrations on Saturday night was due to the fact that Vero were waiving their subscription fee to the first million subscribers, not being ones to pass up on a bargain the blogosphere naturally boarded the bandwagon en masse thus causing the technical difficulties with logging in and registering. The subscription fee is something I definitely wanted to mention - at present there isn't any indication in Vero's Manifesto or Press Release as to how much this would cost but the reasoning behind is that Vero users become customers meaning that the App doesn't have to rely on advertisers to keep going or, monetization and that all users are provided with the same features and functions resulting in total equality. 

Vero have also stated that users are not permitted to use bots or spam in their Community Guidelines but haven't stated that this is something they will actively ban or that they have put something in place to prohibit it - the Vero team seem pretty on the ball when it comes to responding to queries so maybe this is something that they will address in time. I can imagine that right now getting through the numerous glitches due to the amount of users they have signing up is a priority.

Worth the Hype?

It's too soon to tell isn't it, I can see why this could potentially blow up but I think it would be very hard to persuade the old school generation of social media users who regularly use the likes of Facebook and Twitter to hop over to a service they have to pay for, Influencers and bloggers however, have been gutted since Instagram started using it's algorithm and those that haven't already believed the hype probably wouldn't have a problem paying a small fee upon seeing some results if it does blow up the way that people are anticipating that it will. 

So far I've managed to sign up and search for a few bloggers who I remembered tweeting about it - some aren't coming up via the Vero search tool and some are. I've also managed to create my profile and add a link to my blog - I've tried changing my name to my blog name but it doesn't seem to have worked and at the moment I'm unable to share any posts - this seems to be because I don't have any followers so I'll try again when I get one. Annoyingly, I can't view my stream as I seem to be stuck on the share your first post section. I'm not going to write Vero off, as we all know they've experienced a lot of difficulties and it'll take a while to settle down. It'll be interesting to see if Vero does take off and how it affects the blogosphere considering the recent bot and follower scandals. Could it really be the new Instagram? I guess we'll have to wait and see. I hope this post has answered some questions people have a bout Vero and that I've made use of my pregnancy insomnia.