“Sil­ly ideas” some­times have the poten­tial to go viral if they hap­pen to be addic­tive­ly pleas­ing — and a new­ly launched social app from the crew that brought you CoTweet (the Twit­ter blast sched­uler) could well be head­ing that way. Social media man­agers and com­mu­ni­ty man­agers inter­est­ed in what’s hot in the social media world may like to meet Ever­lapse, an iOS app that lets you turn your pho­tos into a dig­i­tal flip­book while let­ting your friends add theirs to your evolv­ing cre­ation, too.

What users end up with is a fast-motion slideshow — not quite a video but vast­ly more ani­mat­ed and com­pelling than a plod­ding series of stills. It effec­tive­ly con­verts your pho­tos into a sto­ry­board, whether you’ve “Ever­lapsed” the snaps you took of your night out last Fri­day or, like one of the Ever­lapse team, you’ve decid­ed to com­pile a day-by-day sequence of your small child’s chang­ing face as she grows up. Ever­lapse fus­es the stop-motion tech­nique of Vine with the visu­al shar­ing of Snapchat, and social media man­agers may well agree that it has the poten­tial to become as explo­sive­ly pop­u­lar as both.

From doo­dle to app

The stu­dio behind Ever­lapse is See­saw, and its CEO Aaron Got­walt says that users are going to come up with unpre­dictable new ways of play­ing with the app. It began humbly as a kind of tech­ni­cal doo­dle-ses­sion to blow off steam at See­saw. Got­walt makes no bones about it, stat­ing, “It start­ed out as a sil­ly exper­i­ment. If it goes well we’ll keep build­ing on it.”

And thanks to a mil­lion-dol­lar-plus cash injec­tion last Novem­ber cour­tesy of Freestyle Cap­i­tal and oth­er par­tic­i­pants, See­saw has the resources to do just that. Because See­saw is already in the Beta­Works accel­er­a­tor, it can draw on the latter’s 5,000 testers to give Ever­lapse a thor­ough going over.

Going viral?

 The app is built on Twitter’s social graph and login and auto­mat­i­cal­ly gives new users a fol­low­ing based on peo­ple they’ve already fol­lowed on Twit­ter if the lat­ter have also joined Ever­lapse. Their Ever­lapse flip­books (or “clips”) will then appear on the user’s Ever­lapse home feed, plus all the clips the user has either made or modified.

Social media man­agers read­ing this could well be look­ing at the next big viral phenomenon.