From the Windows Phone Store description:
Social Scene is a new and exciting way to view and share the world around you. Social Time Lapse Photography is fun and rewarding. Simple take a shot of an interesting scene, later someone else will visit that same scene and take the same shot. You’re now into social time lapse photography!
Features :
- Browse featured, popular and nearby scenes
- Browse top scene creators and contributors
- View maps of nearby scenes and get driving instructions to them
- Watch scenes change over time with the scene player
- Rate, like and comment on scenes
- Create your own private or public scenes
- Contribute to public scenes
- Create and update your user profile and settings
It sounds fun - who could resist 'social time lapse photography', after all? Here's a brief walk through Social Scene:
Presentation is very slick, with even the opening timeline-sorted thumbnails of scenes 'animated'; (right) swiping over, you can sort according to location, here showing a grand total of four Social Scene creations in the whole of the UK - none of which contain sequences of the same scene, so they're either people checking the app works, or they haven't got the hang of it!
Swiping across again, the social tab brings together scene creators, sorted by activity - I'd have expected a way to 'follow' people explicitly, but maybe this is something to be added in a future version? (right) Creating a 'social scene' from scratch is as simple as taking a photo, but the idea is that you make it easy enough to get to and easy enough to replicate that others do in fact come and help create the 'social time lapse'.
Tapping through to a scene in the database brings up its essential photo and sharing stats and (right) swiping across gives its location - tapping on 'route' deep links to Windows Phone's mapping system and gives route instructions on how to get here and take your own shot....
Tapping through again brings up the scene in landscape and (unsurprisingly) pressing the play control starts the basic 'cycle through photos' animation. It's nicely done, even if the images aren't of very high resolution.
The same scene, this time at night...
Also available for each social scene are creator information (from each relevant sharer) and (right) comments from users.
Logging in to share a scene can be done through any of the networks pictured, though (confusingly, as shown right) a 'Social Scene' account also gets created - a slight rewording here might help! ("No, I don't want another Facebook account", etc.)
The huge issue with Social Scene is, as you might imagine, that it's so new and so restricted (to Windows Phone) that there's not much content being created. Such a system will live or die based on whether it reaches critical mass. Not helping this fact is that, unlike other social networks, in order to fully participate, most of the time you've actually got to travel to scenes you wish to add to, involving a certain expense.
The imaging purist in me also points out that real world social scenes will never match up as perfectly as some of the examples currently in the system, plus there's no way to save the images or animations in any format, so it's all utterly reliant on the Social Scene servers staying up and unburdened.
But it's early days for the concept. Do you think this could take off, perhaps with some cross-platform love as well?
As both a concept and implementation on Windows Phone, Social Scene impresses though - it was awarded first runner up in Nokia’s Future/Capture competition 2013 and recently showcased at Nokia World Abu Dhabi 2013.
You can download Social Scene here in the Windows Phone Store.