Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#21

Post by undertoad » Wed, Jan 28, 2009, 2:46 PM UTC

whacked_new wrote: post #19

catone wrote: post #14

My buddy Allen Stern (of CenterNetworks) said something recently in a podcast that I liked and is relevant here. Paraphrasing, he said something like, "In New York City there are a thousand pizza places and new ones opening up all the time. Many of them are successful and some of the new ones will be, too." Or, in other words, there is always room for new startups that do the same thing. Just do it better or differen…

It's very misleading to compare pizza places to web businesses. Every new pizza shop adds tangible value to the system. It has a physical presence and sells a physical good that fulfills a basic need. A web shop, without marketing, adds basically zero value to the system. It's not like you can "walk by" and discover that it provides something. And I don't think any pizza shop bootstrapped its business by offering piz…

It might make sense--a pizza shop owner who couldn't afford to rent in a highly-trafficked area may have similar problems bringing customers to his storefront (stores don't usually pop up and have instant success).

Plus, a brick-and-mortar store owner has higher fixed costs.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#22

Post by fallentimes » Wed, Jan 28, 2009, 2:46 PM UTC

whacked_new wrote: post #19

catone wrote: post #14

My buddy Allen Stern (of CenterNetworks) said something recently in a podcast that I liked and is relevant here. Paraphrasing, he said something like, "In New York City there are a thousand pizza places and new ones opening up all the time. Many of them are successful and some of the new ones will be, too." Or, in other words, there is always room for new startups that do the same thing. Just do it better or differen…

It's very misleading to compare pizza places to web businesses. Every new pizza shop adds tangible value to the system. It has a physical presence and sells a physical good that fulfills a basic need. A web shop, without marketing, adds basically zero value to the system. It's not like you can "walk by" and discover that it provides something. And I don't think any pizza shop bootstrapped its business by offering piz…

It's not like you can "walk by" and discover that it provides something.

Sure you can, organic traffic.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#23

Post by ojbyrne » Wed, Jan 28, 2009, 2:46 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #13

ojbyrne wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just allowing bigger files would be a start. I have a Canon 5D M2, and I keep ending up trying to upload > 10 mb jpegs to flickr, which has a 10 meg limit. Perhaps expensive though.

What do you think the user tolerance for paying to host large images would be? Obviously bandwidth and storage cost money, and if a site is to allow 4x larger photos (driving 4x larger costs), the site needs to make 4x more money somehow. Page views and ads and referral arrangements to photo printers aren't going to automatically scale with photo sizes for a free site.

Probably low, since there's already at least one low priced service (zooomr) that has no individual filesize limit. Prices of hard disks have been dropping precipitously, so I think there's an expectation out there that the same cost for online services should happen (gmail's steadily increasing quota also reinforces that). I realize those expectations are probably unrealistic.

In terms of bandwidth, a flickr-like display that shows a smaller size by default mitigates that. It's the convenience of uploading a full-size file and getting it resized to multiple sizes (and the full size is there for those who want to see it).

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#24

Post by alabut » Wed, Jan 28, 2009, 3:00 PM UTC

tdavis wrote: post #5

Sam seems to think so and apparently YC agreed with him (well, maybe): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=453303

That's the first thing I thought of too when I saw this post. Have you watched the screencast of the dropbox-like functionality? Pretty slick.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#25

Post by sstrudeau » Wed, Jan 28, 2009, 3:09 PM UTC

What I'd like (and what I'd build if I had more spare time & mental capacity) is a photo-hosting service driven by a Flickr-like API, but designed to be an intelligent "asset store" for photos so large sites or communities can use this service as their photo storage & hosting back-end. The service itself wouldn't need much of a UI and users of sites/systems that depend on the service wouldn't necessarily know their photos are there.

I imagine this working something like S3 except that it knows about images, so it can process/resize them (and provide APIs to control such things) and also include a bundled CDN service (CloudFront). The pieces are all there but an API that made it really easy to put images in, process them and get them out again would save a lot of time.

(I manage a high traffic blog network and am spec'ing out some image-heavy niche web apps/sites. I'm eventually going to have to build something like this for internal use -- wish I could just buy in now).

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#26

Post by dpapathanasiou » Wed, Jan 28, 2009, 3:13 PM UTC

It seems hard to believe now, but when Google started, some people wondered "why another search engine?", since Yaho and Altavista had that market "locked up".

So yes, there is room for another photo sharing service.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#27

Post by jz » Wed, Jan 28, 2009, 3:15 PM UTC

alabut wrote: post #24

tdavis wrote: post #5

Sam seems to think so and apparently YC agreed with him (well, maybe): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=453303

That's the first thing I thought of too when I saw this post. Have you watched the screencast of the dropbox-like functionality? Pretty slick.

About half way through when he pulled down pictures from the site. In the back of my mind I was thinking "ok cool, but can you push your pictures to your friend?", and then it happened. Good stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#28

Post by froo » Wed, Jan 28, 2009, 3:26 PM UTC

matthias wrote: post #17

flickr etc = images + community... so go create images + technology. that photo stuff we hear about from time to time, like face recognition or stitching together photos or turning them into videos or building 3d models of landmarks from tons of user photos... are any of those on photo sharing site yet?

Totally agree, look at animoto, they took an idea (slideshows) that had a clear market leader (slideshare) and its basically slideshows on crack.

They've even outdone themselves with the iphone app for example.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#29

Post by froo » Wed, Jan 28, 2009, 3:27 PM UTC

Avshalom wrote: post #18

ojbyrne wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just allowing bigger files would be a start. I have a Canon 5D M2, and I keep ending up trying to upload > 10 mb jpegs to flickr, which has a 10 meg limit. Perhaps expensive though.

How about a service that allows you to upload raw formats like .DNG, and do basic non destructive editing on them, nothing fancy just crop, heal, contrast, color, that sort of thing. to serve as both an online backup service, easy way to share images when you don't have time to really fiddle with them, or they're just not good enough to bother. as well as yes just sharing you're best.

How about an app that kind of automatically airbrushes pics that you upload to it so that you can then upload them to other sites?

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#30

Post by anamax » Wed, Jan 28, 2009, 3:32 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #13

ojbyrne wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just allowing bigger files would be a start. I have a Canon 5D M2, and I keep ending up trying to upload > 10 mb jpegs to flickr, which has a 10 meg limit. Perhaps expensive though.

What do you think the user tolerance for paying to host large images would be? Obviously bandwidth and storage cost money, and if a site is to allow 4x larger photos (driving 4x larger costs), the site needs to make 4x more money somehow. Page views and ads and referral arrangements to photo printers aren't going to automatically scale with photo sizes for a free site.

> if a site is to allow 4x larger photos (driving 4x larger costs), the site needs to make 4x more money somehow

Not so fast. Bandwidth and storage needs scale roughly with resolution, but other costs scale more slowly or even not at all. Note that even storage (and to a lesser extend bandwidth) has a per-action cost that does not depend (much) on resolution. And, storage costs include meta data, which doesn't scale with resolution.

I've been working through a cost model for a (different kind of) image service and there are are surprises.

For a first approximation, work through how you might build such a site on Google App Engine and/or Amazon Web Services and build a parameterized cost model using their fee schedules for different things. Fiddle with the values for the parameters.