One social media network your parents are not on

If you have ever felt reluctant to accept your parents’ friend requests on Facebook, Blend might be another place for you.

Blend - founded by Wharton senior Evan Rosenbaum, Matt Geiger and Akash Nigam - is a social networking app exclusively for college students. It allows users to share photos on common college themes, earning presents from the participating brands.

“Share,” “Snap” and “Score” are the three words that characterize its main feature. Users share photos that match daily themes and get “snaps” from the others, which are similar to likes on Facebook. The snaps accumulate in the user’s wallet in the app and can later be used to redeem presents from the advertisers.

Blend currently partners with roughly a hundred different brands, like Uber - a transportation company - and Verizon Wireless.

“Social networking services were getting stale with not much color or personality,” Geiger said, mentioning the app is intended to be more visually exciting than existing social networks.

Blend uses “parallax scrolling” - a feature implemented in every image where multiple layers scroll at different speeds - in an effort to be dynamic. The founders called this feature a “high-level perspective,” since users can see layers related to each picture, including people’s profiles.

In addition to sharing pictures and collecting snaps, Blend is going to add interactive features including commenting and tagging friends in the photo. It will also release a new camera feature with a “radical level of transparency.” The specifics are yet to be released.

The app also uses student photos to showcase advertised products and thus “make advertising cool,” Rosenbaum said. “We will never accept [an advertiser’s] manufactured photo. ”

The founders also decided to make Blend a mobile-only application as it would be much easier to interact through cell phones. “You’re not going to walk down Locust Walk with your laptop,” Rosenbaum said.

Blend is currently at the “growth stage of the company,” Geiger said, as it will open an office in San Francisco and increase the number of staff from six to 16 in the next six months.

They did not disclose the exact number of users, but said the number of users recently “exploded” in the Philadelphia area after sponsoring PennApps hackathon last weekend.

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