Selfie – Pronunciation: /ˈsɛlfi/ (also selfy), noun (plural selfies)
“a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website:occasional selfies are acceptable, but posting a new picture of yourself every day isn’t necessary”
It’s now in the Oxford Dictionary and is therefore very much a real thing (somehow); the selfie has blown up in the past year or so with the introduction of higher quality front-facing smartphone cameras with everyone from teens to celebrities now taking pictures of themselves at arm’s length with a smartphone and uploading it to a social network. Now, one of the world’s biggest popstars has helped to launch an app dedicated solely to the taking and sharing of selfies.
Shots of Me is a new app developed by RockLive with the financial backing of both Justin Bieber and the boxer Floyd Mayweather, with Bieber contributing most of a recent $1.1 million round in funding. The app is available now as a free download from the App Store and is only available on Apple’s iOS devices, so Android and Windows Phone-owning selfie addicts will have to make do with Instagram, for now.
The app’s main rival is indeed Instagram, though its creators RockLive believe that the Facebook-owned photo sharing network contains too many pictures of food, which is apparently boring. Speaking to TechCrunch, CEO John Shahidi explained that the idea came from looking at the growing craze of taking self-shots and realising that, “People enjoy looking at humans. Not just yourself. People like looking at other people. It doesn’t ever really get old.”
So how does Shots of Me work? It’s a pretty simple idea: you take a picture of yourself and upload it to the app’s own Instagram-like network. There’s also an option to share your images on Twitter and, ironically, an Instagram sharing option is coming soon. That’s pretty much it.
Asides from being a pretty straightforward app for the incredibly vein, Shots of Me is a well designed app with a slick iOS 7-like interface. If you were wondering what stops people from posting things other than selfies, the app only allows use of your phone’s front-facing camera. You could of course still shoot other subjects using your front camera but anyone who has tried this before will know it’s neigh-on impossible to get right.
The app is available now as a free download from the App Store for iOS devices.