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The Daily Wildcat

The Daily Wildcat

 

    A month after release, is Peach social media app already dead?

    Photo+illustration+of+a+student+opening+the+Peach+app+onto+the+splash+screen.+The+app+is+intended+to+fill+a+social+media+void+with+college+students.
    Tom Price
    Photo illustration of a student opening the Peach app onto the splash screen. The app is intended to fill a social media void with college students.

    Facebook is fun, Twitter is tight, Snapchat is super, Instagram is innovative, Tumblr is terrific, Vine is vibrant and Pinterest is perfect. But don’t you ever feel like your online social presence is lacking something?

    Peach launched Jan. 7 from Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann, and became an overnight success. However, some say the new social media app is already dead after having fallen drastically on the iTunes app charts.

    Peach, which is currently only available on iOS devices, “was fun for the first few minutes, but then it got boring because there’s not a lot of users I know,” said Neha Kwatra, a physiology freshman. 

    Kwatra recently downloaded Peach and has already noticed the reason for the decline of the once-popular app. 

    “It’s very easy to use, but it was boring because there isn’t much to it,” Kwatra said.

    Because the app is new and already going downhill, there aren’t many users, and as a rule social media necessitates  mores user in order to promote interaction between friends.

    Shiv Kanth, a computer science graduate student, has been a Peach user since the day it was launched. “It’s beautifully designed, simple and clean,” Kanth said.

    One of the unique features on Peach are the “magic words,” which are keywords that act as commands within the app. 

    “If I hit the letter ‘s’ Peach prompts a ‘song: what’s playing’ option,” Kanth said. 

    Like the Shazam app, this listens to music currently playing, recognizes it and gives an option to post it in just one click. There are many magic words the user can find in a page of the settings of Peach. Sharing about his use of magic words, Kanth said, “‘m’ is for sharing the distance I walked today, ‘d’ for draw, etc.”

    With so many other popular social media sites around already, Peach isn’t as original as one might hope. “It seems to me like a mixture of Snapchat and Twitter with some Facebook elements,” Kwatra said. 

    Unlike Twitter and Facebook, Peach does not have a live feed of friends’ posts, and instead users can select who sees each update. “That’s the biggest weakness. Who needs another social media app? There are so many already,” Kanth said.

    A completely stand alone app, Peach possesses no option to add friends through Facebook or Twitter. Users want to connect through social media, not feel separated on an island. 

    “With no way to share my Peach posts on Twitter or Facebook and my friends activity declining, it looks like an uphill battle for Peach to stay in place,” Kanth said.

    When reached out to for comments about certain criticisms of the app, and predictions for the future, the Peach app headquarters failed to comment. 

    Will Peach be the next Twitter? Or will it fall by the wayside with all of the other failed social media apps? Time will (quickly) tell.


    Follow Casey Aldava on Twitter


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