After attracting millions of youngsters, Pheed finds it way to Android
The social-networking app that provides creatives with multiple media types now offers choice in mobile OS.
Pheed, a social-networking service designed to meet all the multimedia needs of today's mobile user, has launched its application for Android.
The Android release trails Pheed's official debut back in November on Apple's iOS platform.
Since then, the Los Angeles-based bootstrapped startup has racked up "a few million users," around 20 percent of whom are teens ages 15 to 17. And more than 42 percent of app users are between the ages of 17 and 22, which means Pheed is already immensely popular with high schoolers and college kids and may be one of the apps siphoning teen attention away from Facebook.
Pheed feels like a hybrid of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Users can subscribe to the channels of friends or celebrity users, or they can act as broadcasters and post "pheeds" in the form of text, photo, video, or audio posts.
"Pheed is the return of the all-in-one platform," CEO and Co-Founder O.D. Kobo told CNET. "We're all about options."
Kobo says his social app caters to creative people. He insists that Pheed isn't specifically going after the celebrity crowd even though the app has found favor with plenty of famous folks such as Snoop Dogg, Miley Cyrus, Dane Cook, and Enrique Inglesias. Brands including MTV, E!, and NASA have also shown an interest in setting up channels on Pheed.
The dominant audience, the younger demographic, has taken a liking to Pheed's audio recording feature, or "social sound" as Kobo likes to call it. On Mother's Day, youngsters were using the app to sing and record songs dedicated to their moms, and were tagging their family members in the audio updates, he said.
Though Pheed initially soft-launched as a Web app, the startup prefers to think of itself as a mobile-first company and now restricts new user signups to its mobile apps. The Android release should help solidify Pheed's mobile position and introduce the multi-purpose app to even more people. Kobo expects his app's audience to double in size in the next few months. Pheed currently has a "few million users," Kobo said, though he would only clarify the up-in-the-air figure to mean that the app has less than 4 million users.
Pheed for Android is arriving minus the service's brand-new pay-per-view option, which was added to the iOS application last week. The feature, which will find its way to the Android app early next week, lets channel owners charge would-be viewers to watch live broadcasts from their mobile devices. The startup says it's the world's first platform to offer live pay-per-view on mobile.