Soot Puts More Social Content In Front Of Your Face

Soot — a visual catalog meets social media platform — has raised $7.7 million in funding to help design the next phase of online content sharing.

The Chaotic Picture: The vertical-scrolling feed seems to have reached its zenith with TikTok and Instagram. So, figuring out what’s next could become one of the most lucrative moves for investors.

Behind The Content: Soot — founded by Zoox vet Jake Harper and Drop Everything founder Mary Nally — doesn’t want you to look at one picture or video at a time… it wants you to look at all of them simultaneously.

• Fast Company says that Soot uses “a combination of open-source and proprietary AI, data viz, and computer graphics technologies” to show users hundreds or thousands of images at once.
• It sounds a little chaotic, but the images are grouped “by visual similarity, or by metadata like an artist’s name, with the spacing of how the photos look on the platform looking intentionally organic rather than overly rigid.”
• This organic shape can be explored further in or out, allowing users to toggle to wherever their eye is drawn — similar to laying out a bunch of open magazines on the floor to see what creative connections are made.
• Clicking on any one photo or video will display the content independently and provide any details the user has provided.

The Future: Currently, Soot is made up of invite-only personal spaces, with 25,000 users (including the renowned Guggenheim Museum) hosting a collective four million pieces of media. That content has either been directly uploaded to the platform or curated by copying and pasting URLs from YouTube or other social platforms.

Prediction: While using Soot on a browser will take a learning curve (and don’t even get us started on using it on a smartphone), the platform could find its biggest adoption with users who access it via XR headsets.