GAMETECH: Frontback to bow out of selfie world

IT TOOK her three minutes to snap. 

The girl had only just been seated when the phone came out and she took a selfie. The restaurant was a nice place, after all. Then, five minutes later, out came the phone again. (The bread looked great, to be fair). And then again. (The wine looked top notch). By the time the meal was finished, her boyfriend looked ready to snap too. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then people have been writing some pretty terrible biographies lately. ‘My Glass of Wine’ is a story we’ve all seen before, regardless of the fruity twist. But selfies are going nowhere — in some ways, they have become the cornerstone of modern social media. That reality makes the collapse of Frontback all the more intriguing. Frontback was a brilliant idea: An app designed to take pictures with both the front and back cameras of your phone simultaneously. In other words, it captured both the moment you were snapping and your reaction, at the same time, then posted the picture to its social media feed. The selfie and the subject merged. Cute puppy, meet cooing eyes. Glass of wine, meet licking lips.

Frontback attracted over 2m users since its launch in 2013. It also attracted over $3m in funding. There were rumours of an acquisition by Twitter and even the prime minister of Belgium was known to use the service. However, proving that not all good ideas are profitable ideas, the founder Fredd della Faille has announced that Frontback will shut down on August 15. “While we’ve seen exciting results with some communities, for most of the new members it takes too much time and effort to understand why Frontback is different,” della Faille posted in a blog. “[This resulted] in an infrequent use of our product. After discussions with our team and investors, we realised that we couldn’t reach the critical numbers that would make Frontback a sustainable social network.” In other words, people couldn’t be bothered. There’s something comforting in that. Maybe plain old selfies aren’t so bad after all.