I gave Peach a try for 10 minutes (even though I’m on a break). Here are my thoughts:
- I don’t know if text-based commands will triumph over buttons. Path had buttons for many of the ‘shortcuts’ that are built into Peach, such as sharing your location, and that never “took off” relatively speaking. Will people type them in instead?
- Peach doesn’t have a main feed — a place where you can see every post from your entire network in reverse-chronological order. You can see each friend’s latest post and then choose to dive into their account to see more. An interesting approach but I’m not sure if it is for me.
- Peach does not have public accounts. For any social network to get the celebrity effect they will need to have public accounts. Perhaps they do not want that for Peach.
- The “Add Friend” and “Find Friends” buttons are confusing. Tapping “Add Friend” allows you to search for a specific username and then also search your Address Book for friends. The caveat here is that Peach doesn’t show you the friends that are already on… so you’re left with just a bunch of invite buttons. The “Find Friends” button does not allow you to search your Address Book. Why?
- The username grab on Peach has been interesting to watch. Several of my friends and family have already lost their usernames. Will there be a secondary market for these usernames?
- I read that some of the team behind Vine is making Peach. So I wouldn’t bet against them as they’ve had a smash hit with Vine.
It is still early days for Peach so I do not want to judge it too soon. I’m always glad when I see new ideas springing up in this space as I think there is still so much better we can do than Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. And we can do lightyears better than Ello. I hope Peach has a long enough run to truly try out their original vision.