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Kevin Rose updates his micro-photo sharing app with Tiiny 2.0

Kevin Rose updates his micro-photo sharing app with Tiiny 2.0

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Images are no longer ephemeral, still very tiny

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Sharing photos of your day has become a ritual for billions of smartphone users around the planet. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and now investor with Google Ventures, has taken his own stab at crafting this into a unique experience. It's called Tiiny, and today the service is launching version 2.0.

Tiiny tries to make sharing images as quick and easy as possible. The iOS app opens to the camera screen, and you can tap for a photo or hold for a video. The images appear as a tiny, postage stamp-sized unit on a grid of other photos in your feed. The idea was to remove all the stress of having that perfectly cropped and filtered image, to encourage people to share lots of quick-and-dirty moments instead. To further reduce any friction or worry, the images disappeared after 24 hours.

According to Rose people like it, with over 350,000 posts on the service over the two months since launch. The main thing people were asking for, however, was a way to save certain stuff so that it wouldn't vanish after a day. So in Tiiny 2.0, everything is permanent by default. Users will also get a full blown profile where all their photos and videos will be collected.

Tiiny is a product of Rose's new company, North, which works to quickly prototype and launch new apps, see what gets traction, focus on that, and throw out the rest. It's the model used by the Obvious Corp that resulted in Twitter and embraced by Elepath, which has produced some cool apps. Rose says Tiiny was created in three weeks, but showed real traction and a strong community, signs that convinced them to double down and create this new version.

"The big idea for us is grouping content together based on these memes that are happening," says Rose. Clicking on images now brings up the option to reply, showing a list of everyone who has responded to the post. "It really helps conversations to grow and to spread across the network."