Profile: BuzzNet

Company: BuzzNet

Founded: March 2003

Location:

Buzznet, Inc.
2404 Wilshire Blvd. #11b
Los Angeles, CA 90057
(213) 252-8999 phone
(213) 252-8955 fax

What is it?

BuzzNet is a photo-sharing community. It’s hard to talk about BuzzNet without comparing and contrasting it to Flickr. It shares most or all of Flickr’s strengths, and has a few additional features as well. It’s these additional features that make it better, in my opinion, both for casual and/or “mobile” users as well as serious photographers looking for a way to share their work. I’ll explain why below.

First, the basics. You can check out a quick tour here that shows how it all works. Sign up for a free BuzzNet account and you can upload photos directly to their website, or email photos with a unique email address that contains a keyword you choose. This allows for easy mobile photoblogging – just snap a picture with your phone and have it up on your photoblog in seconds.

Pictures can be tagged (they call it “buzzwords”) by you and anyone else (Flickr only allows tagging by you and your friends). Users can search/browse by these tags, and they are indexed at Technorati as well and thumbnails are shown for technorati searches for those tags. See, for instance, a technorati tag search on “Seattle” and check out the BuzzNet and Flickr photos on the right.

Every user has a unique URL for their pictures, comments and profile information. You can see the Techcrunch photoblog at techcrunch.buzznet.com. For infinitely cooler photoblogs, check out some of the featured ones on the home page. For example, a guy named Adam Richman, who recorded an album in his parents’ basement in Pennsylvania, is photoblogging while on tour. Link

Uploading pictures is easy, and here’s the part that I like better than Flickr: Instead of limiting the amount of upload capacity (20 megs per month at Flickr), BuzzNet only limits the number of total photos you can upload per month (just increased from 60 to 120 on the free account). Why is this important? Here’s why – With Flickr I have to take time to resize photos so that I don’t immediately use up my monthly allotment with just ten 2 mb pictures. At BuzzNet, I just send in the big file and they resize for me. And a little known fact (told to me by Marc Brown, the co-founder and President), is that the original, full size image is stored for me by BuzzNet – a killer archive tool for serious photographers and it will allow them to offer high-quality printing services in the future (just click a button and they can create a bound album and send it to you).

BuzzNet seems to have more “buzz” around photos than Flickr as well. Marc tells me that, of those photos with comments, there are an average of five comments, higher than Flickr. Since BuzzNet has deeper profiling of users than Flickr, it seems obvious that more social networking will occur.

Additional Features:

– easy posting
– unique URL for every user
– RSS feed for every user page
– commenting on pictures (with user settings)
– easy tagging
– generous free account features – 120 photos per month
– easy to invite friends to join
– get three friends to join and they’lll upgrade your account to a premium subscription for a full year
– Buddy list
– Trackbacks (who links to you)
– Bookmarks (your favorite photos on Buzznet)
– Favorite communities and Buzzwords/tags
– Private messaging – like web-based email
– Custom design templates
– Share Photos: e-mail photo to a friend
– Statistics: page views, and other stats

Additional Screen Shots:

Management:

Marc Brown – Co-founder, President
Anthony Batt – Co-founder
Steve Haldane – Director of Technology
Rich Lee – Art Director

Relevant Links:

about
Press, media
Corporate Site
Faq
On Technorati adding BuzzNet pics
Technorati Tag: Buzznet
Bitsplitter on buzznet v. flickr
Om Malik on buzznet
Furl Search on Buzznet

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