Social networks are becoming a dime a dozen. Most are endless variations of the same social sharing theme, and few of them are interesting. But Hi is different. In the social-startup Mad Libs game—"It's like Airbnb for boats" or "It's like Twitter for cats"—Hi is like Instagram for writers.
Hi combines the composed photographs made popular by Instagram with the option to either dash off a brief caption—what the site calls a "sketch"—or dive deeply into the story behind the photo. You can quickly submit a sketch and return to it later to expand on it, turning your 100-word blurb into a short story or epic poem.
This isn't LiveJournal or some other teen-oriented microblogging service. Hi's users are introspective people with thoughtful things to say about their cities.
Hi greets you with a map, from which you can explore sketches from around the world.
Capturing the zeitgeist
Location is key for Hi, which claims "narrative mapping the world" as its mission. The network grew out of a Tokyo-based literary journal called Hitotoki. Hi cofounders Craig Mod, a former product designer at Flipboard, and designer Chris Palmieri took the digital magazine, which collected short stories about Tokyo, and turned it into Hi, which is designed to collect stories from around the world.
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon