New Gossip Social Media App “Pop” Targets College Students
“People create profiles and groups and send each other direct messages. “
A few years back, there was another application similar to this called Yik Yak. It caused a lot of problems.
Inside Higher Ed reports:
New Gossip App Hits College Campuses
Despite their relatively short shelf life, the development of campus-based social media platforms isn’t slowing down. Pop, the latest social media app to target students, is hoping to become the next big thing on college campuses.
Like other college social media apps before it, Pop takes elements of other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Slack, and brings them together with the aim of creating a digital community.
The goal is to help students find each other, said Alex Kehr, the CEO of Pop. The app has only been launched on two college campuses so far, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Oregon. Kehr says his team picked the colleges at random.
Pop didn’t start out with the intention of becoming a social media platform for students. It was originally an online marketplace for emoji, animations and GIFs called Sticker Pop. Its name was changed to Pop last February, and a group chat function was added. A couple of months later, the app introduced new location-based public groups called communities. Students can still buy stickers through the app through monthly subscriptions, and while sticker sales will continue to provide a revenue stream, they will no longer be the focus of the app, said Kehr.
You don’t have to be a student to join the UCLA or the Oregon Pop community, but you do have to be on campus and have an iPhone, explained Kehr. Once you’ve joined a community, you can talk to anyone else in that community. People create profiles and groups and send each other direct messages. There is also a page called “the wall,” where anyone in the community can post anything, which is similar to Yik Yak, the controversial anonymous messaging app that launched in 2013 and shut down four years later, but without the built-in anonymity.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
