Reflective apps
Available on Android and iPhone
- Put your photos and videos on the map. Create spotlights of events and places and share them with your friends or the world. Control who can see what and for how long.
- Discover the world. Send rays to any place on the planet and have other users reflect them with photos and videos.
- Create interactive tours of the places you visit, complete with photos, videos, descriptions and voice notes.
- Get real, fresh and verifiable content. See what and where is happening on our planet.
- Communicate instantly and share files with your friends via built-in messenger.
- Keep track of whereabouts of people dear to you (with their permission)
Reflective vs Primitive
Psychology teaches us that people’s decisions can be motivated by thoughtful consideration from their higher reflective mind or fear-based survival instincts from a more primitive mind. When our decisions come from our reflective mind, they are more likely to lead to positive outcomes. Alternatively, decisions driven by survival instincts can hold us back. Unfortunately, most of the established social networks force their users to keep the mindless interaction going, simply to keep them glued to the screens, so that more and more ads can be shown. They invent metrics that promote the quantity of interactions over their quality, stimulating users’ primitive mind. Let’s change this trend. Let’s create the network that truly connects people and appeals to their higher sense of reasoning.
Spatiality
We live in a three-dimensional world and most of the events that happen in it take place somewhere, in a physical space. Yet, when it comes to discovering them on social media, we are at the mercy of an algorithm that decides if we want to know about them for the reasons unknown to us. Why not put such news on the map and let the users browse it freely?
Rays, reflections and spotlights
Have you ever wondered how Taj Mahal looks in the first rays of the rising sun? Or wanted to look down from the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower? Or find out how the house far-far away in which you grew up looks today? Certainly, it would be best to experience all that first-hand, but it is not always easy. And sometimes you want to travel back in time and see how something looked 10, 20, 30 years ago – and that is simply not possible. Or is it? We think it is and are trying to transcend the space and time. Please help us accomplish that.
World, interactive
One of the early slogans we had for the first working prototype of Reflective was “World through strangers’ eyes”. We later changed it to “Make your mark upon the Earth” but not because we changed the projects’s direction. The idea of helping our users to safely and productively communicate not just with friends but with total strangers is still there. Through our ray/reflection interaction we make it possible for anyone to discover more about our beautiful planet and people living on it, request and receive information about places and events, no matter if they happen on the other side of the globe or just next door. Initially these interactions would produce nothing more than a few photos or videos. Later, we are planning to add different layers like travel, services marketplace, transportation and build a foundation for AR platform. But first and foremost we hope that all these interactions would create a real human connection that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.
Rewarding content creators
Any social network depends on quality content. All such content is usually created solely by the users of the network. They publish and share it for very different reasons. Some would share something with their friends, while others would share it with the entire world. Some would share the photos of their recent vacation trip or the concert they went to, while others would share the video of the protest march they participated in. Some would share it without any expectation of the reward, others would try to monetize their content. In any case, fresh, interesting and genuine content that is posted publicly for anyone to see, is the essence of any social network. This is something we want to see more of, it’s why we keep coming back.
Amalgam
We created a blockchain and a cryptocurrency tightly integrated with Reflective network. It will be used to reward content creators and curators, to verify authenticity and authorship of the content, enable commerce within the network. It is based on extremely fast, public and permissionless blockchain that uses Distributed Proof of Stake algorithm. We named this blockchain and the currency Amalgam. It is an open source project that we run separately from Reflective. The term “permissionless” means that we would not control this cryptocurrency, anyone with enough technical expertise would be able to follow our documentation and run additional nodes for Amalgam blockchain.
Project timeline
Reverse-photo-sharing and interactive world map ideas conceived
It is s4ill relGvant, and no one has done it yet – let’s do it ourselves! We decide to implement our six-years old ideas under the temporary name Yapsha (Yet Another Photo SHaring App).
Changing name to Reflective, requests are called rays wxich other users can “reflect” (hence “reflections”) by dding tjeir own content to them.
Permissions and lifespan settings added to spotlights and rays allowing users to control who and for how long can see their content.
Spotlights introduced allowing users to post their content on the map. Other users can add reflections to spotlights.
First working Android prototype, first ray successfully sent and reflected.
Complete UX redesign, alternative main screen.
Friends and family location tracking.
Instant Messenger added.
The idea of advertisers directly rewarding the users for watching their ads via internal currency or coupons.
The idea of the network rewarding the users for posting high quality content.
File sharing in instant messenger added, business spotlights introduced.
Integration with cryptocurrency begins.
Amalgam – Reflective’s built-in cryptocurrency based on a fork of Steem blockchain goes live.
Restart of Amalgam blockchain after many bugs are discovered and fixed.
Reflective.io website, taking care of legal stuff and preparations for launch.
Testing, testing, testing
Moving the rewards algorithm from the blockchain to the backend to allow for fine-tuning it without constantly forking the blockchain. Restarting the Amalgam blockchain again.
We are live! Also, infrastructure upgrades, migration to the cloud
Development of iOS version of Reflective app.
Project roadmap
iOS version of Reflective app (in progress).
Messenger improvements: groups, channels, end-to-end encryption, backup
Voice calling
Interfaces to cryptocurrency exchanges.
Conversation history backup in Messenger.
Web-based HTML5 version of Messenger
Governance structure review and adjustements
User-to-user tipping and ad-hoc Amalgam transfers.
Interactive and business rays, services layers, reviews and feedback systems.
Preserved for eternity – IPFS storage for “supernova” rays and spotlights.
Decentralized, peer-to-peer serverless sharing.
API for third-party developers.
Read-only web browser version.
Games layer, Sojourners.
AR platform foundation.
Our leadership
Arthur Boyarsky
Founder and CEO
Yuri Zykov
Founder and lead developer