For those of you with a constant instagram/Facebook/Twitter feed proliferating in the tabs of your work screen, there’s a new startup to watch.
Treevo, based in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, created a self-titled app designed to unify social media accounts and followers. From the app, users can post to any of their social media apps, as well as view everything someone else has posted on all accounts – be it the three mentioned above, Youtube or anything else. The Idea, Founder and CEO Tywande Barnes said, is to create a single, streamlined and centralized social media presence and experience that keeps an audience in one place.
For users, that could mean freeing up phone space by consolidating everything into a single app. But for content creators, the CEO thinks that could mean a more focused audience in a streamlined environment.
“One thing I saw in social media was fragmentation among followers,” Barnes said. Technically. “So I thought, why not create an application that eliminates this fragmentation and, in addition, creates a user identity on the web in terms of social media accounts?”
When social media was just getting started, Treevo’s creative design director Michel Ogunyemi said, many users only had one or two accounts. Now people can have between six and eight, or even more, especially if they have international connections.
For the founders of Treevo, it also suggests the potential for fraud, as it can be difficult to track fake accounts with so many services. With Treevo, they want to create a single centralized identity for all social media applications. To achieve this, the application studies Facebook APIs when creating Treevo accounts.
Some have tried to achieve this with options like Link tree or related #linkinbio tools, Ogunyemi said, but they don’t go as far as the Treevo team.
“You’ve seen people try to integrate all their platforms into one, but the problem with some of these platforms is: they’re not real platforms, they’re just websites” , Ogunyemi said. “You can’t really upload anything, do much editing or customization, and it’s not really yours.”
Last week, the startup secured a $100,000 investment from the Maryland funding agency TEDCO Building Fund. The fund supports in-state founders who are considered economically disadvantaged. Treevo said the funds will go largely to marketing and development as it rolls out its tokens and begins moving into phase two of the company’s plans. Barnes said the next phase is to roll out its tokens, along with a few other goals such as interface completion and potentially a paid tier for users.
On Treevo, the pair want to establish a crypto token known as $EEVO. The native token will be used as the currency of Treevo on the platform, for which for all paid aspects users are interested (users should buy Bitcoin then convert it to $EEVO).
The idea of a centralized social media experience, Barnes believes, is the future of the industry. Even big apps like Facebook are moving through the metaverse (hence the company name change) and creating ways for users to move between apps and new site features.
“That’s where apps go: an immersive environment ecosystem for anyone who wants to live cohesively in this kind of world,” Barnes said.
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