Introducing liketu – A new way to experience the Steem Blockchain

liketu is a new interface which focuses on pictures, tagging and words. Social media has and always is, evolving. Our vision is to build an experience which is commensurate with the trends of traditional social media, decentralising the parts which matter and aligning the platform with the interests of the common user.

We will appeal to everyone, not just crypto people.

Our journey

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liketu is a start up based in London. We are a modest team that have been involved in the crypto space for a number of years with backgrounds in various sectors. We originally conceptualised a social platform which rewarded users for their contributions and activities but fell short of building it out in full due to lack of protocol expertise. Ironically, in 2016, Steem and Steemit.com was released and for the most part, succeeded in bringing what we envisioned to reality. Fast forward to today, Steem and Steemit.com (as well as other apps built on Steem) have shown a new paradigm in how user contributions to the network can be rewarded. However, the onboarding process has been a slow trickle. Much less than we expected for a state of the art blockchain perfectly geared for social media interaction and consumption.

We ask the simple question : Why?

Social media has moved beyond the consumption of medium to long form content. The very idea of the attention economy is central to this reality. It is abundantly clear that as the sheer amount of content as well as its various forms have increased, the modern social user is conditioned to absorbing content in a very different way than they were even in 2016. It also means that their attention spans for any given piece of content is greatly reduced. We believe that modern social media users demand content that can be consumed in a short timeframe. Lowering the entry barrier to participation and contribution is therefore the challenge that must be undertaken if there is to be a chance of truly attracting “the masses.”

Enhancing the image sharing experience

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Pictures and images are a powerful content medium because they can communicate vasts amounts of information in a matter of seconds. Did you know that the average attention span for social media content is 8 seconds? liketu expands on visual content consumption by building tools which contextualise the images. The introduction of our descriptive metadata system (tagging), will enhance information transfer without compromising the user experience, in fact, it creates new avenues of creative potential.

Tagging goes far beyond hashtags with annotations linking to products, people, posts and more. This will create new options for content creators as they are able to communicate more information in a lean and digestible format whilst offering their audience actionable items relating to their images. Our metadata tagging system can be utilised with just a few clicks.

liketu differentiates itself from mainstream social media platforms by enhancing images with descriptive metadata. Therefore, our core features leverage the embedded metadata to bring new and innovative forms of engagement. For example, a mere outfit tagged with the person, product and price can become a powerful marketing tool not only for your own brand but also for businesses. It's no longer "just" a picture. liketu envisions a platform where hashtags like #ootd and #food will inherently represent much more when presented on our interface. With a free market of value driven content, liketu is giving a platform for anyone to share anything in a format that has seen wide success on traditional social media.

Project Status

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Mobile applications are an essential component for onboarding and retaining the mass demographic. A cursory glance at social media statistics tell us that as many as 90% of users consume social media through mobile apps as opposed to websites. We have worked diligently towards the production of our mobile applications and will continue to do so in the coming months.

liketu is pleased to announce that an alpha web platform will serve as our project starting point and is expected to go live in the new year. We have funded this project out of our own pockets and look forward to engaging with the Steem community during our testing phase.
Please check out our information website : https://liketu.org for more information and follow us on Steemit.com (@liketu) for regular updates.

In the spirit of community bonding, we have decided to attend SteemFest this year in Kraków....In fact, we are here right now!
Look out for the liketu photo frame and our team members hanging around the events.
It’s an exciting time to be part of the Steem community and we look forward to meeting you all.

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In the words of our captain :