Losing trust Socialcam hard to recover

Socialcam is the mobile video site of the Justin.tv team's main social element, the slogan is "Share video with Friends" (share videos with your friends, instantly). App has been downloading more than 250,000 in the first month since it was launched this year in south-West Texas Music Festival (SXSW).

Socialcam's performance was particularly interesting after Instagram's huge acquisition by Facebook. And its performance at the end of April was really satisfying, such as a 4 million increase in the number of users over the weekend, giving people another Instagram illusion.

Recently, the momentum of the company but because of its own "unjust move" into a swirl of public opinion.

May 2, Socialcam became the first place in the App store's free apps list, and the Next Web Socialcam actually used Freeappaday's promotional services to help them reach the top.

Freeappaday is a foreign well-known limited recommended application, its own millions users. From that point of view, Socialcam should have paid for a freeappaday (not yet confirmed) recommendation, which naturally brought a considerable degree of exposure and user volume. While it's odd that Socialcam is on a free platform, it's understandable, after all, that the App Store's recommendations are very limited, and app developers will naturally look for other exposure methods.

But what happened later was less understandable.

On the May 10, the Next Web exposed Socialcam directly from Youtube, a well-known video-sharing site, to the recent popular video, and "accounted for its own", became Socialcam user uploaded content. Obviously, this is very unkind.

The wonderful thing is that the unkind things are not over yet. Matt Galligan, one of Circa's founders, Socialcam another "trick" on his blog.

They (Socialcam) do not respect the willingness of users not to automatically share the videos they watch in Socialcam. By default, the video that the user watches in Socialcam is automatically shared to Facebook, and the app has an option to turn this feature off, but it looks like a setup. Because if you exit the application again, this feature will automatically open again. What's worse, after a few seconds the switch will be replaced by the Socialcam Logo, and you can't shut it down.

It is clear that this may Socialcam "little tricks" to improve user participation. For such misleading, they should give the user an account.

After this series of revelations, Socialcam's CEO Michael Seibel responded by making a clear list of videos pulled from Youtube and upgrading the app to fix the "bugs" that Matt Galligan proposed.

However, "Trust is like a piece of white paper, once it is wrinkled it is difficult to return to the original." It's really important for a start-up to boost the growth of the user and increase the exposure, but that doesn't mean you can lose the bottom line. We do not evaluate Socialcam's practice is intentional or unintentional loss, but no matter what, the injured is the user. Once the start-up company lets users feel that they are not "respected", it is the user's "punishment".

Look, is the punishment coming? This is the same as no one will drink three deer milk is a reason. (Wen/fan)