Lightt (for iPhone)

Who would have guessed that an app that lets you apply filters to your iPhone photos would have caught fire to the point that its user engagement justified a billion-dollar price paid by the most trafficked site on the net? I'm talking, of course, about Instagram and its purchase by Facebook. Well, I can't say that Lightt (free), a new iPhone social-visual that app launched today, will achieve the attention that Instagram has, but I personally consider its premise more compelling than the photo colorizer-and-sharer's.

Like any truly innovative piece of software or service, Lightt doesn't lend itself to quick description or comparison with existing products. Okay, I'll try: It's a shareable, cloud-based visual timeline with social network connections and discovery. What does that mean? Not much. It's probably easier just to take you through the process of using Lightt. It shares some similarities with Color (free, 3.5 stars), SocialCam, but major differences quickly become obvious.

Lightt has two key ingredients: It uses flipbook-like sequences of photos called "highlights" rather than actual video, and, for every user, these are spliced together into one continuous movie that's skimmable from beginning to end—your "channel." It's all accessible to any other Lightt users, as long as you post the highlight as public. Unlike some competitors, it's not about postproduction filters like some of the "video Instagram" wannabees.

Interface
Lightt has a really polished feel. It's not your typical iOS app that was programmed by a high-school kid on the weekends. And the stuff it does—combining and hosting skimmable images and forming social networks—isn't exactly a small-time project. The first time you run Lightt, you can go through its "Let's Get Started!" tutorial. Right away, the fluid interface becomes apparent, letting you swipe back and forth. Once you're in, your main screen has just three main choices, the largest is Happening Now, below which are ME, and Featured. Below this is the camera button and a … to call up more choices, including Friends, Me, and Activity.

Unlike Color or SocialCam, Lightt doesn't let you just sign in with your Facebook account, instead you have to create a new Lightt account. You can optionally record a "profile highlight," a 10-second moving image of your face that's used as your profile image.  Your profile page displays this moving image, and you can optionally add your real name, location, website, and short bio.

Also shown on your profile page (à la Twitter) are your number of followers, of those you're following, and the number of highlights you've created. The ability to browse other users' followeds and followers gives Lightt that same addictive quality that's familiar to users of Instagram. When you get new followers or comments, you'll see iPhone notifications, but you can turn these down or off in the iPhone's Settings app.

Shooting your highlights is a simple matter of touching the big camera button at bottom center. This opens a simple camera interface, with another camera button you tap to actually start recording the 10-second highlight. I kind of wish that you could adjust the time length for events that warranted it, but you can record back-to-back highlights. During recording time, a progress bar makes its way across the screen with the text "hang on…" beneath. After the shooting time, your highlight will play in a loop.

As noted, you can record multiple highlights in one shooting session, and you'll see a gallery thumbnail at lower left, with the number of highlights available. Tap this. Your highlight will play, and you'll see a small Edit link and a large Next button. If you don't like your image sequence a tiny X button lets you delete it. The Next takes you to the sharing options.

Sharing
You can share your highlights not only on Lightt itself, but also via Facebook and Twitter. Right after you shoot you get these options, but you can also share after the fact by tapping on your playing highlight reel to pause it and then on the share button. Tapping on anyone else's highlights offers these same options, along with the heart and speech bubble icons for liking and commenting. Other options here include saving an individual photo from the highlight to your camera roll, or reporting it as inappropriate.

Whenever I started uploading a highlight, an "approved" message appeared immediately, but my account was probably greenlighted since I was testing under the company's auspices. It's likely that the company will activity screen images for inappropriateness, since they're so accessible to the public.

Highlights are either completely private (only you can see them) or completely public. For this kind of service, a middle ground would seem essential—choosing just accepted friends to view my life stream. During testing, any other user could subscribe to my channel, and I didn't have to approve them. In this way the service resembles YouTube. There's no private account option as on Twitter, and no different levels of viewer as on Facebook (Friends, Friends of Friends, Public, etc.).

Watching and skimming through a contact's entire highlight history is much faster than it would be if Lightt recorded full video rather than a string of still photos. The playback, though jerky, does give you more of a feel for the experience recorded than stills would, but occasionally playback still had to wait for the network download speed to catch up.

Let there Be Lightt!
Lightt is a new service, and still has some kinks to work out. But it does something useful with your mobile camera—unlike Instagram, which tries to give interest to ordinary photos by cropping and applying artistic or retro filters to them. With its 10-second highlights, Lightt seems to fit our short-attention-span world, and its potential for giving us mortals glimpses of both our social connections and celebrities lives is exciting. In some ways, I prefer Color's non-sped up video clips complete with sound, but Lightt's continuous skimmable stream and social appeal are unique and compelling.

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