Another Snapchat? Mobli Releases MIRAGE, A Social App That Allows You To Send 15-Second Photos

The creators behind the wildly popular (and often mocked) social application Yo! and mobli, a platform for sharing photos and videos, announced the release of MIRAGE, a new social app that rivals the likes of Snapchat.

Like Snapchat, MIRAGE is a camera messaging app that allows users to send  photo or video messages that disappear after being viewed for 15 seconds. However, contrary to Snapchat, files can be sent to anyone with a single tap, regardless of whether they have downloaded the app or not.

Fifteen-seconds of fun with your contacts

The announcement on MIRAGE comes mere days after a leak revealed Instagram might be coming out with its own Snapchat competitor, a one-tap messaging app called Bolt.  While some may question the need for another Snapchat (or in this case two), which already sees 700 million images shared on its platform daily, the mobli/MIRAGE team believes the market for disappearing files has not been fully tapped.

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Mobli is hoping that the simple interface of MIRAGE, which is already available for iOS and Android devices,  may draw users to its app. In order to send a photo message, all a user needs to do is tap the profile picture of the person they want to connect with. Longer taps allow users to send up to fifteen-seconds of video instantaneously.

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Whether MIRAGE will succeed in getting a piece of the Snapchat pie remains to be seen, but judging by the success of ‘Yo!’, the ridiculously silly app which mobli recently released and which is already valued at $10 million, they may have a decent chance (‘Yo!’ allows you to send messages to contacts but limits those messages to the word ‘Yo!’.) It also doesn’t hurt that mobli is backed by celebrity investors like Serena Williams, Toby Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Moshe Hogeg, the man behind mobli, Yo! and MIRAGE

In an exclusive interview with NoCamels, Moshe Hogeg, the CEO and co-Founder of mobli and the brain behind ‘Yo!’, says: “We shared MIRAGE with a handful of people in Silicon Valley and in just a couple of days several dozen more users adopted it as it spread virally from user to user. We are already seeing some high-usage from this small handful of early adopters and we know that MIRAGE has the potential to shake up the messaging industry,” he adds.

“Our vision as a company has always been to bring people together through visual content. We built MIRAGE as a messaging tool to extend our natural daily conversations that in real life are simple and unrecorded. The technology enables us to send temporary messages to anyone without being limited to the ecosystem of the app.”

But while Hogeg seems to have a knack for game-changing apps, he may have a tougher time breaking in with MIRAGE as a myriad of Snapchat copycats were recently released, notably Facebook’s ‘Slingshot’.

In any case, whether mobli’s social and temporary messaging app will rise to the success of Yo! or remain a ‘MIRAGE’ remains to be determined, but one thing is for sure—temporary messaging is sealing its place among our common methods of communication.

Photos: Courtesy/ Moshe Hogeg (Google Plus)