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

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

#31

Post by greyman »

whatusername wrote: post #15
pclark wrote: post #2

A lot of users want to share their photos and are blissfully unaware of FaceBook/Flickr. You said it yourself: >But there are always people who are looking for a better solution. Don't dive straight in, work out what users want that flickr/etc doesn't offer - and do that.

blissfully unaware of fb? considering photo tagging (and then showing up in the news feed) is just about the killer app on fb - and its 150mil users growing at 10mil per month -- I'm tipping this is a reasonably small market... (ie - savvy enough to use/explore your site while not knowing about fb/flickr/etc)

>> blissfully unaware of fb?

Yes, indeed. I have a few friends who use fb and after some time they tend to think that "everyone is on the facebook". ;-) But actually not. There are many more people who don't know what fb is, or they don't use it.

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

#32

Post by greyman »

Yes, there is a room. For example, I myself still didn't found an "ultimate" sharing site for myself. I use Google picasaweb, because I like the integration with the Picasa client, but I miss the social features. I can have those on flickr, but on the other site, the free option in flickr is rather limited and there is not a seamless integration with a good client.

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

#33

Post by buro9 »

I'd like a service that in one way made photos second class entities, and in another way treated them as the be all and end all.

I want the hires, the digital negative, to be able to pair a digital negative and a jpg... so that's the first class stuff.

But I want the current attributes of a photo on Flickr to be first class... time and place matter. In fact, a photo is an attribute of a moment in time. And so it should figure out when multiple people upload based on a shared event that the uploads are happening at the same place, and it should then work out from the timestamps when it was, so if anyone adds a geotag all matching files are implicitly tagged unless overridden.

I want to search photos like tineye.com does... provide a photo as a search token. I want to find "similar" photos to the one I have... did someone link to a photo that belongs to a set, how do I get back to that set? How do I widen the search to find other photos from the event?

I want to be able to get the original or negative, regardless of the size, if it's a CC image.

I want to be able to background upload. If the images are local, then they're magically going to be published too.

I'd like an auto image stitcher for lo-fi gigapan-ish images... select the ones to be stitched and go for it.

Lots of things really. There's so much room still.

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

#34

Post by mattjung »

The fact that a lot of your friends are not happy with the existing solutions should be an indicator that there is potential for a new photo sharing site. I think, "photo sharing" includes a lot of different, sometimes very specific use-cases implying different devices that could be explicitly supported. The answer is clearly: yes!

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

#35

Post by catone »

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…

I think you're reading too much into the analogy -- or misreading it.

The analogy isn't, "web business are just like pizza shops!" Rather, the sentiment that I think Allen was communicating is, "in _any_ business, there is always room for competitors and new ways of doing things."

I wish I could remember the link to the podcast so you could hear it in the exact context.

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

#36

Post by r00k »

dpapathanasiou wrote: post #26

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.

...provided yours is better than your existing competitors.

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

#37

Post by okeumeni »

whacked_new wrote: post #20
theklub wrote: post #9

Yeah, it's tough when facebook is becoming the default for everyone uploading their pictures. If facebook expands that aspect of their business it might hard between them and flickr already being huge.

I don't understand the downmods on this comment; theklub makes a perfectly valid point. I would agree that the market for the masses in this area is much too competitive (if you think you can trump Google in search, well, go for it), even with just two players (ignoring SmugMug and the tail). I would agree that niche, if at all, is the way to go. Niche of the upper upper pros, who already pay for Flickr pro but find…

On HN Downmods are not always reasonable; you get downmod mostly because the witch-hunt folks don’t recognize your ID. If you look carefully you will see people getting Upmod for no apparent reason. I guess there’s some sort of club or circle whatever you want to call it. I stop worrying about karma long ago.

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

#38

Post by lbrandy »

okeumeni wrote: post #37
whacked_new wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the downmods on this comment; theklub makes a perfectly valid point. I would agree that the market for the masses in this area is much too competitive (if you think you can trump Google in search, well, go for it), even with just two players (ignoring SmugMug and the tail). I would agree that niche, if at all, is the way to go. Niche of the upper upper pros, who already pay for Flickr pro but find…

On HN Downmods are not always reasonable; you get downmod mostly because the witch-hunt folks don’t recognize your ID. If you look carefully you will see people getting Upmod for no apparent reason. I guess there’s some sort of club or circle whatever you want to call it. I stop worrying about karma long ago.

Instead of alleging a conspiracy, maybe you should just relax. Sometimes good comments get downmodded incorrectly, buried low on the page, and not noticed. Sometimes it fixes itself. Like now. Sometimes it doesn't.

It happens, from time to time. Welcome to the Internet, version 2.

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

#39

Post by Kaizyn »

Yes, but you need to find a way to do picture sharing better. What would differentiate your startup from flickr or photobucket? A tie in to all the networking sites where you upload your photo once and they show up in all of your networks might be a big win, I don't know.

You can always find room in the market for a better mousetrap, provided you have a good idea of how the mousetrap needs to be improved.

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

#40

Post by whatusername »

greyman wrote: post #31
whatusername wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

blissfully unaware of fb? considering photo tagging (and then showing up in the news feed) is just about the killer app on fb - and its 150mil users growing at 10mil per month -- I'm tipping this is a reasonably small market... (ie - savvy enough to use/explore your site while not knowing about fb/flickr/etc)

>> blissfully unaware of fb? Yes, indeed. I have a few friends who use fb and after some time they tend to think that "everyone is on the facebook". ;-) But actually not. There are many more people who don't know what fb is, or they don't use it.

oh absolutely agree that not everyone is on facebook.. (for example - all my younger cousins are only on myspace :P) (Also - I'm coming from Aus - where fb is #2 after google ahead of youtube, myspace, ebay, etc -- so my sample size may be biased..)

My point wasn't that there aren't millions of internet users who aren't on facebook - it's that there aren't millions of internet users who WOULD BE INTERESTED IN SHARING PHOTOS who aren't on a social network of some sort..

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