By Abby Moriarty, Staff Writer
There is a new app in the town of social media apps, and its name is Trio.
An app specializing in media mash-ups made its debut last Wednesday, in the iTunes app store.
Misha Leybovich, along with his company, If This Then That (IFTTT), have been building media creation products for almost three years now. After observing the ever-growing trend of ‘media mash-ups,’ he decided to provide users with a quick and easy way to create their own mixes using other people’s assets.
In simple terms, Trio allows users to take assets such as videos from Vine, photos from Instagram, gifs or music from other people such as users’ friends, celebrities or specific brands and remix the material in your own creative way. Unlike Instagram or apps similar to Pic stitch, users do not use their own content.
“A billion other apps let you put together photos and videos, it is a well worn concept, but almost every single one requires you to go out and capture your own assets,” Leybovich said. “Trio is fundamentally different in that using your own assets accounts for a very small percentage because that’s not really what it is about.”
When asked how the concept for this app came to be, Leybovich said that his company felt that the social media world was lacking the tool set for creating derivative works that would allow people to create funny and inventive media any time of any day, no matter if users are actually doing something exciting or not.
“The nature of the social media world has fallen into a trend where people feel they have to pretend that their life is much more interesting than it actually is,” Leybovich said.
“We want people to know that you can be funny creative and clever anytime of day, any day of the week, creating stuff just like that sitting on your couch in sweatpants,” he added.
Similar to Pinterest, Trio links the users directly to the owner of the original content, allowing users the option to follow, engage and in the case of music bring you straight to the iTunes store giving you the option to buy the song you are using in your mash-up.
Trio relies on third party assets in order to work successfully and Leybuizh says this app will actually help those parties because they are gaining more exposure, as well as added value as a result of users mixing and sharing their original content.
“The whole thing is about users remixing third party assets and a lot of brands have great troths of assets: sports, action, entertainment, travel, you name it,” Leybovich said. “And brands love if they can engage a fan into doing an activity if that activity results in shareable content, and is high quality. Trio makes it super easy to do that.”
The new app, now available and free to download from the Apple iTunes Store, has received positive feedback so far, although Leybovich says it is much too early to tell.
He encourages users to send their comments and ideas to trio[at]trioapp.com as their user base is extremely important to the further development and improvement of the app.
“Trio is you. It’s your friends, and it’s the rest of the world’s assets. It’s interplay, all third party assets coming together to create innovative and exciting content,” Leybovich said.
