Late in the day on Fridays is typically that timeslot reserved for businesses and governments dumping news they want ignored. But Peach, the cute and strange new social network, boldly launched at the end of last week and quickly became the subject of fevered discussion on (ironically enough) Twitter. This new iPhone-only social network brings intriguing Magic Word shortcuts and a decidedly nonsocial experience that seems almost calculated to appeal to what someone read about Gen Z; that they desire privacy and love emojis. But in the end, the free Peach is like taking the Facebook out of Facebook, and the Twitter out of Twitter, and leaving you with less than either.
Branching Out
Peach is available as a free download from the App Store, and I had no trouble installing it on my iPhone 6 ( at Amazon) . Android users will be left out of this one, as it's an iPhone exclusive for now.
Setting up your account is easy, and, once you're in Peach, you're encouraged to find and friend other users almost immediately. A red button below the words Assemble Your Squad offers to scour your address book for friends, a feature I never use out of a desire to protect my friends' privacy. Swipe right, and the left-hand panel shows people you might want to friend. Open anyone's page, and you're encouraged to add that person's friends, too. While many social networks encourage friending, I've never seen one as pushy as Peach. Thankfully, Peach includes tools to block (imPeach?) other users.
Peach has a very simple, friendly interface. A sparse round-edged menu shows a preview of your friends' pages, and everything is draped over a light peachy-pink color scheme. The entire experience reminds me of the menus in Neko Atsume, and to be honest it's a refreshing change from the relentlessly blue color palette of so many other apps.
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The Fuzz
On your page, a cute tutorial shows off all Peach's features. And it's surprisingly long, considering how little you can actually do with it. You can add updates to your page and view the pages of others, but there are very few interactions between users. For all its faults, Facebook and its associated mobile apps, let you do so much: Create photo albums, find lost loved ones, organize events, build fan pages, and so on. It's clear that Peach isn't aspiring to be everything, but in the face of Facebook and its kitchen-sink approach to features, it feels paltry.
The main feature of Peach is Magic Words, which are basically text shortcuts. Type the word GIF and a button appears, letting your search for the perfect reaction GIF. Type Draw and you can doodle something in black and white. Type Song, and Peach does a little Shazam-style magic and determines what song is playing around you right now. Once you post the song, tapping it will open that track in iTunes or Spotify ($0.00 at Apple.com) . Neat! In these cases, it's clear how Magic Words quickly create more in-depth posts than Twitter while on the go.
But of the 21 Magic Word commands, those are the most interesting. Others, such as Movie, Books, and (Video) Games let you search for the same, but they don't link to anything and seemed limited in their search powers. I assumed that this would connect my posts to people reading the same book, or watching the same movie. But Peach isn't social like that.
As for other Magic Words, I don't know what Goodmorning or Goodnight do, because they didn't work for me in testing. Rate lets you choose a star rating of 1-5. Dice shows the result of throwing two six-sided dice. I was reminded how I spent a day in my high school JavaScript class learning how to simulate die rolls. There I was doing it to learn how to use a new tool. I have no idea why it's included here.
Interestingly, there is a Help command that pulls up a list of all the Magic Words, but I only found it by luck. It's not mentioned anywhere in the documentation or the tutorial.
Finding friends isn't hard with Peach, but seeing what they've posted isn't easy. You have to select each person's page (Peach Page?) individually and scroll backwards. New posts aren't highlighted, and moving through your list of Peach friends quickly becomes a chore.
Peach's lack of a feed makes each user's page personal like a diary; a book that you open and close, and not part of a larger information feed that intrudes on your life. But the advantage of the Facebook news feed or the main Twitter stream is that you see all the recent posts from everyone you follow. Peach offers a more intimate experience, but not necessarily a convenient one. I can't imagine trying to keep up with more than a handful of friends on Peach. Compare that to the average follower list in Twitter or the Facebook friends list.
All Peach posts are shareable but, strangely, only as text messages. You can't repost (rePeach?) posts from other users' Peach pages. Nor can you share them on other services. Tumblr's success, subcultures aside, is its built-in audience designed to let posts grow in popularity. Peach isn't about that.
What else does Peach offer? Well, there's a writing prompt button at the bottom, pulling up such gems as "I wish I was really good at ___." This might be helpful for some, but for me it was about as fun as a freshman creative writing seminar.
You can also poke Peach users (Peachers?), but instead of poking it's called waving. Except when it's also called cake-ing, 100ing, booping, quarantining, blowing a kiss, putting a ring on it, or hissing, each represented by its own emoji. It's cute, and at the very least I'm glad someone borrowed one of only two good ideas to come out of Facebook Rooms. But like Rooms, and all of the defunct Facebook Creative Labs projects, this and the rest of Peach feels too light to carry any meaning.
Compared to other social networks, this cake-ing and booping feels totally weightless. On OKCupid, which can potentially trigger a match to another person, or sending someone a message on Facebook Messenger ($0.00 at Apple.com) , which is a private, even intimate conversation. Even the emotionally ambiguous Facebook poke packs more punch than Peach's slice-of-cake emoji.
The Pits
It's really easy to hate every new thing, and that's perhaps the most common reaction in the world of technology journalism. But for my own sanity (and the sake of serving you) I try to retain the capacity to get excited about new things. But my problem with Peach is that I don't know what it's for, and maybe that means it's time to send me to the glue factory. Or maybe, and I'm just spitballing here, Peach isn't a fully realized app.
The Magic Words and writing-prompt button seem to suggest that Peach is meant to be a kind of journal more personal than the easily shareable Tumblr. But that's just a guess, and you shouldn't really have to guess. When Facebook was new, you could glance at it and understand what it was for. Even Twitter, which was so frequently denounced in its early days, was clearly for posting short updates. Looking at Peach is sort of like looking at a hammer and thinking "this would be great to write a novel with."
Moreover, I'm not sure Peach knows what Peach is for. The Magic Words are neat, and I would love to see other services look into similar features. But they're too cumbersome to use effectively and add so little to the very light experience. It reminds me of the /commands in Slack (Visit Site at Slack) , and given the instant messaging platform's popularity in Silicon Valley I would not at all be surprised if Magic Words grew out of someone saying, "Like Slack commands, but for Facebook" in a brainstorming session.
Room to Grow?
Right now, Peach feels like a disparate collection of tools barely held together by the illusion of a social network. But I know that it sometimes takes a while for an app or a service to find its footing. Sleeper success Flappy Bird was available for six months before it blew up. Twitter users thought up @ replies, retweeting, and hashtags long before Twitter itself incorporated those features.
With more time, more development, and a creative user base, Peach might grow into something more complete. Its sense of intimacy and lack of a news feed follows in the footsteps of Snapchat ($0.00 at Apple.com) , and might be the next evolution of what we've called social networking. Maybe these are the first days of the next LiveJournal, a service that will shape the fortunes of so many individuals, online communities, and platforms that follow. Or maybe it's merely waiting to be wiped from our iPhones and our collective memory next week. Like Yo. Remember Yo?
Peach is an iPhone-only social network that emphasizes diary-like posting, but where this half-ripe app fits in the social (or post-social) Internet isn't clear.
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