Automattic has been working on Mesh for a while. I first posted about it in March, around when they rolled out an early alpha for employees and created the landing page. Now it’s on the iPhone and available as a web app.
The signup process for Mesh is pretty simple and the app has promise. It’s a simple photo gallery sharing app and the web app at least seems to work as advertised. My one gripe is that it currently crops photos to the viewport unless you click the photo twice — which is fine if photos are taken and viewed only from the phone, but not so much when you are on the web app with a million viewport ratio options.
What I like most about Mesh is that you can curate a gallery from your phone or desktop and then either link it directly to someone or embed it somewhere (like a WordPress blog!). As a new parent, something like Mesh is attractive. I created a simple website to share photos with my friends and family — so as to not completely wash my Instagram feed with my kid — and posting to it with the native WordPress app is okay but not awesome. Mesh has promise for such a scenario.
On the broader spectrum, this is another app by Automattic that could someday be big. Team Skunkworks at Automattic is meant to do bold projects. If one of those projects blows up, it could make for a big user acquisition opportunity and later revenue stream for Automattic. Ten such apps could be flops but it only takes one to take off to completely change Automattic’s priorities.
And that’s why it matters to keep track of this kind of stuff. Not to mention, it helps to keep an eye on what Automattic is doing on anything mobile, as it can hint toward what they are thinking for mobile evolution on WordPress.com, which isn’t really what I’d call the most mobile friendly software right now.
For more Mesh visuals, the Daily Post screenshots for the new app does it more justice than I can describing it. Or you could just sign up and play around, as it does have some neat components.
