Can the Bieber-backed selfie app Shots succeed?

Don’t look now, but your teenage daughter may be taking Shots. I’m not talking about Jack Daniel’s; I mean Shots, a mobile social network built entirely around selfies. The site is best known for the identity of one of its angel investors, a 20-year-old named Bieber. Regardless of what you think of Mr. Bieber, the selfie-centric social network his name is attached to is a solid project that can encourage network building and sharing among young people.

There are two days that Shots CEO John Shahidi says he will never forget. The first happened in December of 2011, when Shahidi was still running the mobile gaming company RockLive. He woke up to find one of his company’s top mobile games, Heads Up, had crashed inexplicably. After quickly scanning Twitter to see what the game’s users were saying, he found the problem. Justin Bieber had played the game and posted his top score on Twitter. The publicity had caused thousands of people to download and play the game. “It just crashed our servers,” Shahidi told Mashable. It was the first time Shahidi witnessed the power of Bieber’s social media influence first-hand.