Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on November 2, 2008 – 1:01 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
This is something new: yesterday I received an email from Frans Ekman, co-founder of PiX ‘n’ PaLs. He sent me a blog post about his company, which I could either copy/ paste or modify. That approach makes the blogger’s life easier.
Anyhow, I’ve chosen a different approach. Mainly because I have some critical remarks on PiX ‘n’ PaLS. The idea is pretty good, as I can imagine my family and friends using it:
The core idea is to document your life together with your friends in a collaborative way. Your life, or “The Story of Your Life”, consists of events that you have participated in. An event can be for example a wedding, a party, a vacation or any important happening in your life. Any user can create a new event and invite the people who participated, so that everyone can post their photos and memories to the same place.
You can also publish your “life story” on any blog or social network. Good idea. Nice alternative for the outdated phenomenon known as a photo album. Yet I don’t feel like subscribing.., again.
I don’t want to go through all the hassle of inviting friends and family, building another profile and transferring all the photos I already have on Flickr and Facebook to PiX ‘n’ PaLs.
Connect different social networks
Instead, I’d love to integrate the idea of PiX ‘n’ PaLs in existing friends and family networks like Facebook or sites like MyHeritage. Maybe in the form of a Facebook app or some sort of aggregator which also slurps up my existing contacts and users.
The idea behind the Finnish bootstrapping project of Frans Ekman and Jarl Törnroos is worth another look. Building a whole new social network based on photo sharing is not the way to go. People are used to the superb UI and experience of networks like LinkedIn and (until recently) Facebook and there’s no way you can compete with that - unless you’re a extremely talented designer. Instead, I’d gladly accept the challenge of finding ways to connect existing social networks to make life documentation possible.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on October 15, 2008 – 3:34 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Facebook engineer Doug Beaver published a company blog post today about the fact that users of the wildly popular social networting site have now uploaded over 10 billion photos to the site. And since they apparently actually store four image sizes for each uploaded photo, that’s over 40 billion files.
Huge numbers indeed, if you consider the fact that it’s only one aspect of Facebook, as it’s not a photo sharing site per se. Caroline McCarthy from CNET’s The Social writes:
To compare, the News Corp.-owned Photobucket, which has a real-time ticker of photos uploaded, stood at slightly less than 6.2 billion photos on Wednesday morning. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, hit 2 billion photos just less than a year ago.
On a sidenote, Webshots isn’t talked about in this comparison, and probably for good reason: CNET sold the photo-sharing site to American Greetings for $45 million, having spent about $70 million on acquiring three years ago.
Some more interesting stats released by Beaver:
- 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day
- We have just over one petabyte of photo storage
- We serve over 15 billion photo images per day
- Photo traffic now peaks at over 300,000 images served per second
No wonder they had to borrow an extra $100 million earlier this year to keep up with the staggering growth.
Written on September 11, 2008 – 3:50 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Have you noticed the small attention grabber on the bottom of your Flickr homepage? No? Well, it’s the first sign of Flickr’s upcoming home improvement. The Yahoo-owned photo site wanted to create a new homepage that “surfaces much more of the action going on around you on Flickr”, social technologist Matthew Rothenberg wrote on the corporate blog.
They’ve done that by showing more pictures from your contacts, introducing the latest pics from your groups, and pushing the blog plus your personal stats to the front. But while Flickr has added more content the page, it actually looks cleaner. Once again it’s a fine example of almost perfect and original 2.0 design, like our guest editor Sjors Timmer earlier noted.
For now, users can have a sneak peak via the “Psssssst! Want a sneak peak at your new homepage?” button. With the feedback of the thousands of member photographers, the Flickr designers will then finalize the redesign. There are already 509 replies in the dedicated forum thread, so I guess they won’t be done soon.
If I had to come up with a piece of advice, I’d suggest to remove the side bar, as it’s of no use to me. But I guess that will make Flickr go bankrupt, so never mind.
By the way, even if you’re not interested you should click the button, as you don’t want to miss out on the Flickr balloons and a MIDI version of Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night which appear during the transition. It’s all about user experience folks.
Written on May 18, 2008 – 2:40 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When something happens in my life that I find noteworthy enough to share with family, friends, business relations and “weak ties”, I post it to Twitter. Sometimes words are not enough and I post a photo using Mobypicture. So my sharing needs are full-filled. Yet the majority of people lack this fulfillment, mostly because they don’t use Twitter. For those folks, Ian Kilpatrick has built BeenUp2. (Update: Layton Wedgeworth is also one of the site’s founding fathers.)
On BeenUp2, users can send photos of life’s special moments to their profile by using a phone, e-mail or an old-fashioned uploader. There’s also an iPhone app for all you hipsters out there. As soon as the pic is live, the “chit-chat” can begin as other people may post comments on your photo. Sounds familiar right? Twitter for visually-minded people?
There are some differences though. For example, when you’re an active Twitter user, your messages and photos just disappear in a dull older/ newer post archives. BeenUp2 however, creates a diary for those nostalgic moments. There’s also a geotag feature which makes it possible to browse around the globe. But to be honest with you, Flickr already offers these services. And when it comes down to the archives, there’s probably already a Twitter app for it (if not, I guess now there’ll be one pretty soon).
If somebody came up to me and asked where he could share special moments, I would tell him to adopt today’s standards and sign up for Twitter, which he should connect to Flickr by using a service like Mobypicture. Even though BeenUp2 is really easy to use, it’s just one service too many. The web is already cluttered enough. Like Lani from KillerStartups noted:
Will users grow tired of the same pic/video sharing/ social networking offers currently flooding the market?
bootstrapping, facebook, finland, life documentation, linkedin, photo sharing, PiX 'n' PaLS, social networks
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
