San Francisco start-up Hipster wants to give you a new way to share what you’re doing and who you’re with. They’ve done so with today’s launch of the Hipster.com website and Hipster iPhone app, which allows users to “send” digital “postcards” with a bit of cross-processed flair.
Hipster isn’t just an app or a website – the two work together to deliver a kind of social network that centers around photo and a location-sharing. If Instagram and Google Maps mated, they’d give birth to Hipster.
To start off, you can visit the website and log in by authorizing Hipster as a Facebook app, or through a standard email registration. Once you’ve done that, you are prompted to create a log in for the site (email and password).
Next, you have to download the free iPhone app, which is the heart and soul of Hipster. Through the app, users can create and post their Hipster postcards, which are nothing more than a photo (with a color-altering filter, of course) that automatically includes GPS location information. The location name is displayed on the photo, with a number of design options available. You can also add a short (140 character) message, as well as indicate “who you’re with,” all of which appears on the “back” of the postcard. Postcards can be automatically posted to Facebook and Twitter (once the apps are authorized). Users can also see postcards taken at nearby locations, as well as update profile information, settings and a few other options.
Once you’ve posted a postcard, it appears on your Hipster web profile, overlaid on top of a Google Maps map,which shows where the postcard was taken. You can also see postcards taken by your friends, or those you follow. It’s all pretty straight forward, with good design and a nifty functionality. Not groundbreaking or revolutionary, but we can see where they’re going with it. And hey, the name’s easy to remember. They’ve got that going for them.
We first learned about Hipster back in June when the company began recruiting engineers at the SXSW festival by offering them $10,000, and all the Hipster-y accessories they could think of, including a lifetime supply of PBR beer, a fixed-gear bicycle, Buddy Holly glasses, a mustache grooming kit, skinny jeans, old boots and a bowtie. That offer, we should point out, still stands.
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