By: Chardae Sanders, Staff Writer
First launched on the campus of Texas A&M University in May 2014, the Unseen app focuses on the idea of anonymity through photo sharing. This app is rapidly becoming quite popular on over 200 campuses including Kennesaw’s campus. It focuses on creating a platform that allows collegiate students to anonymously link with fellow collegians by simply capturing a moment and uploading it to the app.
Unseen creates a place where you can be yourself without limiting your personality to a profile or history. Unseen prides itself on never collecting any personal information and is sure to encrypt all data that could possibly link your anonymous postings back to your phone.
Unlike its competitor Yik Yak, Unseen does not gather your geolocation information and cannot trace your post to your exact location. In fact, they stand firm that they would never collect any data like that, so Unseen has no clue who or where their users are.
The Sentinel was able to catch up with CEO and co-founder Michael Schramm to get an intimate perception of the Unseen app.
The Sentinel: What was the inspiration behind the birth of Unseen?
Michael Schramm: My partner Munjal Budhabhatti and I had worked together for several years building collaboration tools for businesses and consumers. After several projects ranging from crowdsourcing answers to group messaging, we created Unseen with the understanding that users are looking for better, more meaningful ways to connect with others.
The Sentinel: Why target the collegiate audience?
Michael Schramm: For one thing, college students today have grown up using social media — it has pervaded pretty much their entire existence as social beings. But more importantly, college is a huge turning point in anyone’s life.
The Sentinel: What separates Unseen from competitors like Yik Yak?
Michael Schramm: Yik Yak’s feed is entirely text. Unseen is different in that our feed is centered on pictures, and we give you a bunch of photo editing capabilities.
The Sentinel: With an app that promotes “anonymity” what steps have you taken to prevent cyber bullying or the uploading of explicit content?
Michael Schramm: Our job as moderators isn’t to be the thought police, or to determine what’s right and wrong. In order to be in the app store, we have to take down photos depicting full nudity. And legally, we have to take down posts that solicit the sale of drugs. But beyond that, nobody wants to be in an app full of trolls. We moderate 24/7 to take down content that’s graphic or offensive purely for the sake of being graphic or offensive. [Which includes] posts that are clearly just hateful or meant to hurt a specific person.
The Sentinel: What’s one major achievement for the Unseen brand?
Michael Schramm: Recently, during the College Football Championship game, some players from Ohio State were posting some really cool photos of game day. Unseen users got an exclusive glimpse of what was going on behind the scenes, including pics from the locker rooms and from their practices. That was the first time such a highly publicized event was being captured live on Unseen. It was a really cool and exciting moment for us.
The Sentinel: What’s one of your favorite aspects of the app and what flaw do you feel should be corrected?
Michael Schramm: Honestly, I’m delighted every time I open Unseen. Our users are hilarious and creative, and never fail to impress me.
In terms of improvements, as I write this, there is a new version of Unseen being reviewed by the Apple App Store. We’re fixing some bugs with the notifications and adding options that will make it easier for users to post and sort content.
The Sentinel: Anything new features coming soon?
Michael Schramm: We’re also rolling out a cool new feature called Flicks, which will allow users to capture looping gifs from their phones. Flicks will only be released to a limited amount of users at first. In order to unlock Flicks early, we’re asking users to get two friends to download Unseen.
The newest version of Unseen, which includes the new feature Flicks, will also include an option that makes it easier for users to create attractive text based posts, in addition to a new sort option that allows users to browse for or only pictures and French and Portuguese language support.
For more information visit www.getunseen.com or follow them on twitter @GetUnseen
