After about two years of development, the Just.me all-in-one social mobile app is now available to those who signed up to participate in beta testing. The brainchild of Keith Teare, best known for being a part of founding Tech Crunch and RealNames, Just.me aims to combine a number of smartphone staples — SMS, social networking, photo sharing and e-mail — in one easy-to-use app.
Aside from the convenience of combining the functions of a number of apps into one, Just.me also focuses heavily on privacy, enabling users complete control over what gets shared with whom. In other words, content such as photos and video can be seen only by the user who created it, that person's friends or everyone that person is connected to via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert) — or Just.me's own private cloud.
The app makes these privacy options easily available with "only me," "shared," and "public" tabs above content. This stands in stark contrast of services such as Facebook, which is commonly criticized for the way it handles privacy. In fact, with the strong negative response to Instagram's recent privacy policy update fresh in everyone's minds, this focus on privacy may catch the attention of many.
Just.me also allows users to compose and send messages made up of text, photos, videos or sound, much like e-mail or dedicated instant messaging apps, but aims to stand above similar services by making it faster and easier to compile content-heavy communications.
As for how the app will make money, Teare has stated that users will be able to add brands to their Just.me address book in order to receive coupons, special offers and information about upcoming promotions. Users will be protected from spamming and can of course opt out of following any brand at any time.
In its current state, Just.me is only available for iOS with language support restricted to 10 languages. However, more languages are to be added over the coming weeks and months. Meanwhile, the iOS Just.me app will go public in a month, with an Android (News - Alert) version slated for release not too far after.
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Edited by Ashley Caputo