Moment.me Gathers Event Pics, Videos & Tweets From All Over

By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.

At first blush, Moment.me struck us as one of those startups we’re not supposed to cry for. People already spend seemingly every waking minute updating their stati and taking sepia-toned pictures of their feet.

Do we really need another social network — especially one that doesn’t add anything new, but simply piggybacks on top of all the other ones to give us another way to waste yet more time on the same stuff?

Well, yes.

Until the world evolves separate, intertwined social networks for every vertical interest (“I connected my BadmintonNet to my RamenSquare!”), it turns out that Moment.me (free on the web and iOS with Android to come) can actually be useful.

Say you are a big fan of man of the hour Neil Young, and you missed his recent concert at Jay-Z’s new Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn — you know, the one that has finally Manhattan-ized Brooklyn traffic. Or say you were there. What’s the difference? You might still want to see these 507 photos and videos, which were taken by 197 people at the show yesterday.

These photos and videos are spread across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr, and Google+, so you’d have to be crazy to track them all down manually. But, like a giant hashtag crushing the sun, Moment.me scours all of them for public photos and videos of that show, so you can get hundreds of glimpses of what it was like to be there.

As of today, Moment.me says 85,032,671 moments have been shared using it. That is a lot. One key to why that number is so high: Moment.me doesn’t ask anyone to install anything new in order to add photos and videos to its system. Instead, it uses some sort of secret sauce called HintMachine — “blending geo-location, contextual analysis, facial recognition and other tools” – to figure out which photos and videos were from the event in question (including non-musical events).

Then it gathers all that stuff into a nice photo album that you can click or tap in seconds. Easy!

Basically, Moment.me is a multi-platform chaos wrangler. We can all use one of those right about now, even if we’re not curious about shows by our favorite artists.

Now that that’s figured out, maybe someone can find Neil Young some bigger amplifiers.