Abstract: An improved social media or messaging platform can be provided, retaining in large measure both the immediacy and engagement of video conferencing, while not sacrificing benefits more characteristic of email and similar messaging platforms, such as asynchronous scheduling, bandwidth efficiency, and various administrative record-keeping benefits. Audio data and associated gesture data (for example, panning and zooming) is recorded by users in associating with image data, and shared with other users in a conversational thread, permitting a video-like experience without associated bandwidth overhead.