Ookles couldn’t even deliver a demo at Stirr that didn’t suck. It sure as hell doesn’t look like it can deliver on par with the rest of these players.

Yes, Johnson has our attention, but all we’ll get is one more big puff of hot air as he and Ookles fall flat on their faces. At least we’ll all be watching when that happens.

How bout stating disclosures before you pump sites you are involved with. You no doubt write with agendas in mind. You are a pumper. too bad.

Hey Joe, I am not associated with any of these sites, directly or indirectly. What is my agenda?

those claims on that sound file are ridiculous - http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/kris_tate/37534

Case in point:

http://www.bubbleshare.com/album/24340

I guess it’s easy to post a comment with something like “why did you forget X?”. But, well… why not Riya?

You know, Mike. Flickr may be lagging behind in number of photos and users, but it has been #1 in web traffic for quite some time:

Alexadex for Photo Sharing sites

What does this mean? It means that traffic isn’t about quantity, it’s about quality.

It would be interesting to do a post talking about the ’stickiness’ factor. We’re certainly not there yet. What do people return again and again to Flickr for? I think they have, bar none, did the most beautiful job of community building.

Kudos to Stewart and Caterina.

Tara, I’m with you part of the way. Flickr is the site I use, and I pay for pro, so you know that I love it. But its about the same size as webshots - http://www.alexaholic.com/flickr.com+webshots.com.

And according to Yahoo’s own stats, Yahoo Photos is much bigger thank Flickr.

The reason? I think the stickiness factor on these established photosites means it will take a while for people to move, and that gives Yahoo Photos and Webshots some time to play catchup on features. So Flickr needs to stay focused on staying the best feature-wise, and right now they aren’t.

Photoboy - yeah, I noticed that. Earlier this evening it was showing images, then it crashed, and so I changed my ookles links to their blog instead.

Ookles hasn’t launched yet of course, so this kind of thing is to be expected. But Scott’s been out there starting to talk about the site, so they do deserve some trash talking for even the landing page being down.

Anyone notice the new photo search features on Yahoo mail? What happens when Google does this … oh wait, I think you can already do this.

Do people care if Flickr is down for an hour a day? probably not. Maybe you are right, and flickr should move their focus to new features at the expense of reliability. OTOH, are they going to have to do a Typepad to their paying users?

As a user, what is the cost of promiscuous data moving? Right now, it’s mostly the loss of attention data and it’s attendant benefits. When that is solved, maybe we can have a thousand photo sharing websites bloom and I wouldn’t care who has my pictures right now.

Well, Jonathan Grubb was correct - it was Yahoo! Search, not Photos that bought Flickr. But I disagree with Grubb in the sense that tagging, although not mainstream, is something that is only going to gain more momentum.

If Y! Photos is so great, why does everybody leave the group after a year or so? Why is the Director being quietly pushed out? Why is a Y! Photos engineer leaving for Google? I’m sure the new Photos will slip. The new Photos is *definitely* not coming out in the Spring…

Yes, Yahoo Photos, Webshots and others dwarf Flickr in terms of users and uploaded photos - but what has more mindshare? Uploading high resolution photos with no means of generating profits is not success (Y! Photos can’t profit from prints - they use a 3rd party and don’t benefit from scale like Ofoto, SnapFish, etc.) I wouldn’t be surprised if the premium Flickr was more profitable than Photos.

I have only tried Flickr and Bubbleshare and I like using both of them. The nice thing I have experienced with Flickr is that there are connections that are built easily, similar to my being in Livejournal.

Aside from that, there are already nifty things that people have done to integrate it in other things like 30boxes, WordPress, etc.

it isn’t very web 2.0

Mr. Arrington: I’ve been reading this blog for longer than I care to admit, and I don’t know of any post where you’ve said exactly what this means, to you.

Care to explain what YOU mean by “web 2.0″ as an adjective?

I’m curious because the term is, as you know, tossed around plenty, and if TechCrunch is indeed tracking web 2.0, whatever it is, you maybe have some useful definition.

Your about page calls it AJAX, RSS and two-way communication… but that doesn’t seem to me to group or define the websites and services you profile here.

Not trying to make a harsh dig at you or this website, just honestly curious to hear from the horse’s mouth what the hell TechCrunch actually about.

Personally, I think Fotki is head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to having the real “meat and potatoes” a photo site should have. Twelve upload options (FTP included) ability to sell, ability to re-download the originally sized photo (or mass #’s of them via FTP), and unlimited storage all for $50 per year. They have a free version as well that’s trimmed down some, but to me, this is the perfect off-site backup.

I did a writeup on it a short while back at
http://journals.fotki.com/airj.....btdgkrrwr/

Honestly, this whole arena is way too crowded. Therefore, the winner may be all about who can maintain their brand value (more than anythng else. One thing that you seem to miss is that I’m sure Yahoo will eventually use Flickr or it’s technology to meld ointo Yahoo photos and that’s a pretty big leap. The reason flickr hasn’t moved forward as much recently is (I figure) that they’re integrationg their service into Yahoo.

I’ve got more than 2000 pics on Flickr and amost 80 contacts there. Oh, I almost forgor: there is entire family who alrealy has my address on bookmarks. Is it worth change? In my opinion, this is a point to justify the high fidelity to Flickr service.

is there anything like flickr or youtube for mp3 and other audio files? I mean place to upload your files if you are a garage band and you want to create an album with your music and share? i thing youtube is to much for this kind of project.

But Flickr has a very active developer community (unline others) which has been developing several third party tools
http://www.quickonlinetips.com.....ollection/

Why I like Bubbleshare:

- can tell stories (photos + audio)

- built on Ruby on Rails

- is based in Toronto !

I don’t think they need to do tagging just for the heck of it. Simple is beautiful.

“I don’t think they need to do tagging just for the heck of it. Simple is beautiful.”

I highly doubt Flickr is doing tagging just for the heck of it. It is a highly useful feature.

Also, picking a photo management site just because it is written in RoR is a bit silly and pretentious. Then again your name IS Geek 2.0….

Kingsley asks (and then answers) in the comments:

‘Do people care if Flickr is down for an hour a day? probably not. ‘

I disagree completely. I’m a big Flickr user and probably hit the site at least 10 times a day. I think the community aspect that they have managed to build means that the commmunity *do* care when their site is down. Do I want more features - yes. Is tagging important? Absolutely. That’s why I would not even consider bubbleshare right now.

Take another look at Smugmug.

They offer both RSS and Atom feeds for all photos or individual galleries, and features like the new Lightbox are looking very Web 2.0 to me.

Flickr is a masterpiece in social photo sharing. They deserve all the success and mindshare they have earned.

Bubbleshare is a masterpiece in the simple album model. Kudos to those guys.

BUT, with these and the thousand other related services, I still have not seen what I want. Sometimes I feel like I am the only one that wants it. This is what I want:

A format that focuses on TIME. A format that asks the question: “What is the net result of uploading your memories over 5, 10, 50 years?” A format that treats my memories as a collected whole. Not a blog format with archives where the deeper the past, the deeper it’s buried, but something else. And here are the features I want to see in this format –

- All media types, photo, video, audio, are thumbed together by day. A “home base” for all my memories.

- Calendar based, but also with a fluid timeline that gives me a stacked view of my entire life. I can FEEL my kids growing and changing.

- Sharing only if I want it, I can protect certain days or whole account, and this service will respect all the other services for what they do best individually: Send to flickr (best community sharing for photos) Send to youtube (best community sharing for vid) etc etc. It should be open that way and in a sense agnostic.

- Smart sets along the lines of zoomr. For example, I can start an empty set before I leave for a trip with the tag “Italy”, and ( if I am using my mobile to capture memories) when I return from the trip - all my photos and video are automatically thumbed by day, but they are also automatically in media set called “Italy”.

- I want to be able to record directly to my account like bubbleshare’s audio captions - but also record audio (not attached to photo) and video from my local mike and cam. This would turn this calendar based format into a powerful pod/vod casting tool.

- Combine the above with mobile - constantly collecting my memories into a meaningful timebased format in the background, and you have a winner.

- Last thing, no stupid fricking names. My memories are too important to be tied-for-life to a name like “zoomr” (or anything that ends with “_r”) or “smugmug” or “bubbleshare”.

That’s all I ask. Will somebody please build this for me? $20/month is not too high a price for a service like this.

Flickr also offers the best API of any of these photo sharing sites.

Hey Mike,

This is a really great discussion. How about this topic (Flickr Gunners) for your next TalkCrunch? (which I love by the way…)

[disclosure: I was a founder of Webshots]

I am amused that no one is talking about revenue!

Remember Shutterfly and Ofoto (er, Kodak Easy Share Gallery) — these are enormous volume services that generate a lot of revenue (50M+) albeit with very slim profits.

Webshots (now CNET) is the only company that has managed to turn photo sharing into a media model. It is also now the oldest brand in this space (more than 10 years).

Photobucket is not mentioned and they are also a monster who are focusing on just hosting media so you can display your photos elsewhere and are generating real revenue.

Flickr is fantastic as a trendsetter and a community. Pound for pound it is certainly the greatest PR machine in net history.

No one will “win” this space because photos are becoming a ubiquitous media type with far too many use cases. There will be several large storage companies and then several really vibrant communities that focus on imaging, but photos will continue to traverse online locales as they become commodities.

I have a smugmug account, and it has RSS and tagging. Did you actually test the service before writing about it?

Flickr’s API is in full force as noted by Raju. It is also a big seller for web design/developers as it allows branded galleries/site-elements for client web sites and on the backend allows said client to use Flickr’s interface to easily control the content. As mentioned by Miss Rouge, with site traffic comes increased appeal to partners as listed at http://flickr.com/do/more/, so it is not so much consumers going pro and paying minimal fees that will lead to success, but the income gained in partnerships and, eventually professional utility that will make it a success. In order for it to move this direction reliability/scalability is key. Just my musings.. Cheers.

Great article Mike, thanks. To the commenters or naysayers: My money and my time right now are into Flickr Pro. What it boils down to is choosing the right service for yourself. Which service provides your desired features and for what cost? Everyone can make a case for which service is best but does it matter? The great thing about 2.0/books/music is that you can choose what you love and not have to defend it.

I agree, this sounds like a great TalkCrunch episode. A guest mashup of Flickr/Zooomr/Bubbleshare founders?

I too love Flickr; Ookles is aiming its features in a different direction. As Scott Johnson points out in his Fuzzyblog.com, Ookles was never intended as a Flickr killer. Disclosure: I worked with Scott on both Feedster and Ookles (don’t anymore, though) and I wish him success. And speaking of disclosure, who the heck is the anonymous Scott-Johnson-hating PhotoBoy?

I don’t understand Zooomr. I hate it. It’s super slow and it seems to me that there’s really no other incentive to use it as an alternative to Flickr other than it uses geo-tagging, which really doesn’t excite me that much.

Flickr doesn’t have any new features because they don’t have to start throwing them out there. Flickr is awesome because it works so well. It’s simple and effective. More photo-sharing features are just going to complicate things.

The new big thing out there? It’s You Tube. When this whole Web 2.0 thing becomes “so 2006…”, we’re going to see like 4 survivors: del.icio.us, flickr, youtube, and digg. And since Yahoo has already purchased two of those, they seem to be on top right now.

Re: Luke (#13 above)

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the premium Flickr was more profitable than Photos.”
You might not be surprised, but you would be wrong. The number of pageviews generated by yahoo photos is staggering, and there are ads on every page.

“If Y! Photos is so great, why does everybody leave the group after a year or so?”
I didn’t say it was great, just big and profitable (though I do think it’s good). People leave yahoo all the time, and they can usually be replaced. Everyone I know on the photos team seems pretty happy.

Finally, a fun piece of trivia: Yahoo’s largest photo site isn’t Flickr *or* Y! Photos. Yahoo Mail handles far more photos than any photo site, hence the recent photo integration features.

As the CEO at SmugMug, I feel compelled to comment.

SmugMug has had RSS, Atom, and even Google Earth feeds since before any of these other companies were even announced. Ditto for tagging. And do any of them have a public API? We do.

How about completely democratic, friction free, no login required ranking of popular photos? Look what’s bubbling to the top already.

I could go on and on about our AJAX’d interface for much of the UI, robust search engine, Google Maps integration, etc…

But maybe I just don’t get this ‘Web 2.0′ term. Maybe it’s that we’re a bootstrapped, self-funded, profitable-for-three years company, so we don’t qualify for the name. Does it only apply to those companies without business models?

75% of our customers are refugees from other sites. Flickr is easily our largest “switcher” demographic, followed by most of the other big boys: Kodak, Shutterfly, Yahoo Photos, and Snapfish. We must be doing something right - even if it isn’t ‘Web 2.0′.

Don

It is nice that you feature a lot of these companies but I hope you do the same due diligence when some of these go bust.

Sam, I promise that I will.

Why did you remove your comments on smugmug?

@37 Flickr had plenty of great geotagging mashups.
—-

It seems to me that new entrants , if they create a killer product, need a feature that allows users to export their pics from other accounts. RSS feeders are easy to switch because importing OPML takes seconds. DPhoto download sizes and limits make it a bit harder but surely not impossible.

Personally I have too much invested in Flickr to consider moving (lightly).

Also, I am wary of investing time in a new player until I have confidence it will last. Again due to he effort of organizing photo collections/social networks/addons to my web site / etc.

Barriers of entry /exit are just a litttle bit higher (although not that high) than some other services I think.

As others have said, the great flickr API means there are so many fantastic mashups/plugins available.

Regards

Thanks for the write up Mike.

There’s some really great feedback/thoughts on this message thread. Its fantastic to see how passionate people are about their photo service.

I’ve got a crazy day today, so I won’t be able to read though all the comments here right away, but I do want to participate in this dialog while is happening.

What I wanted to bring up is point around the issue of BubbleShare not having taggging and photosearch. You’re right, we don’t have it, but it is on our radar. With the limited development resources that we had, we wanted to focus our efforts on new things that we thought would appeal to our target audience (mainstream users/non-alpha geeks) first (i.e. BubbleCaptions, voice recording, etc.).

Tagging has always been on the back of our minds, and its something I’d personally like to see as well. We’ll likely support it sometime soon, but right now, frankly, we’re just trying to build something everyday regular folks that are sharing photos for the first time would really appreciate.

One note that was pointed out that I was very please to read following the tagging comment was “(Bubbleshare) isn’t about discovery, it’s about sharing photos and albums you’ve uploaded/created with others.” That’s exactly it. Our primary focus has been helping people share photos and the stories that go with them as quickly and easily as possible. However, I hope that we’ll be able to provide more discovery elements over time in a simple non-intrusive way as well.

We welcome and listen to all feedback sent to us. I hope you’ll all give BubbleShare a spin and let us know what you think.

I’ve said this on record (well, on my blog really: simplyalbert.blogspot.com) before, and I’m happy to see that there’s great innovation happening in our space. IMHO, I think Zooomr is rockin and has brought about some really cool ideas. I didn’t get a chance to see Scott’s new gig/demo at Stirr.net (i think thats where he was going to demo?), but I can’t wait to see more neat stuff happening in the community. The market is giagantic, and there’s a ton of opportunities for multiple players. The constant innovation and rivalry is great for our users (that includes me and really drives us to push ourselves. Kris (Zooomr) and I speak regularly, and I would welcome anyone from the online photo service community to contact me to see if there are ways we can work together as an industry to HELP each other set standards around our emerging space. One thing that I think Tara has already started doing is pushing for open standards around tagging. Data mobility is another one that’s going to be controversial, undefined, and important.

Anyways, I’ll get off my soapbox now and gotta run off to my next meeting.

Mike: I know me and Kris would be happy to do a skype/talkcrunch with you and whomever you’d like to bring to the table.

Jonathan Grubb, not sure who you get your fin ops info from, but both Flickr and YPhotos lose money. The difference is Flickr is almost breaking even and revenue is growing faster than expenses, while YPhotos loses more and more each year.

What, no Smugmug? A very large service with a substantial API, web2.0 AJAXy goodness, RSS & ATOM feeds, a google maps-based mapping feature, delicious-like keywording, and new features coming out all the time like the recent - kick booty - popular photos feature (www.smugmug.com/browse) and you didn’t even think to include them?

And you call yourself a blogger

I think I have come into this late…why is there no Smugmug review? (yet comments about a review?) Anyway, I have had an account with them for two years and they are fantastic and SOSOSO customer-service friendly. The few times I have had a question, I get a response, in, like, minutes. No kidding.

Flickr is cool and all…but it’s fun to just play around with. It’s not somewhere I want to store my past. Flickr is a distraction in my day, a pleasant one, just as reading a gossipy magazine is a distraction. Smugmug is a little more serious in my life, just as is keeping an eye on my Schwab portfolio.

Heath

The smugmug comments are obviously just people that work for Smugmug.

I am sure it has great customer service, but Smugmug is basically just album based photo sharing with lots of features being added. It is not innovative.

What do you get with the album based model? You get your memories clumped into an ever growing pile of albums. It really is not the future when it comes to accumulating and sharing personal memories.

That doesn’t mean your business will not continue to grow, but I do believe people will start to understand over time that this is not the right format.

IMHO, What is the ideal, “serious” format for collecting memories? Something along the lines of Nokia’s lifeblog, though lifeblog is desktop software. A true web based app along the lines of lifeblog’s commitment to meaningful accumulation (fluid timelines etc) with “albums” (sets) as a secondary way to organize, combined with smart 2.0 tagging and openess. That is what what I want to see.

Flickr doesn’t do it for me when it comes to accumulation, but Heather (comment 46) — Saying that smugmug is “serious” compared to Flickr (a service that changed the world in a way) sounded just plain silly.

Mr Arrington - I am glad you pulled Smugmug from this review. It doesn’t belong.

(bubbleshare is also just the album based format, but it so on-point and beautifully done that I believe it does belong in this review, but again - disparate albums accumulating over time kinda blows)

bubbleshare rocks, no problems noted with Firefox under Linux

What’s with this zooomr? It won’t even load now …

http://fuzzyblog.com/archives/.....us-update/

Wow. Would you trust your photos to this chump? He even thinks ( in this post http://fuzzyblog.com/archives/.....aw-shucks/ ) that TechCrunch is “lauding him”.

Heads up, Johnson: I’ll translate Mr. Arrington’s paragraph on Ookles for you. He said “PUT UP OR SHUT UP.”

He didn’t exactly shower you or Ookles with praise. He said he expects big things after all the big talk.

So far, looks like we can expect big crashes and big outages based on the Ookles posts on FuzzyBlog.com.

At least those are big things after all the big talk, right?

What does it say about Web 2.0 when a 17 year old is the coolest guy at the party?

comment 47: The smugmug comments are obviously just people that work for Smugmug.

hmm, I don’t work for smugmug…

I’m also glad that the reference was taken down, but for different reasons. It seemed like the author hadn’t tested the system, by claiming the absence of things like RSS. It’s been around a while, too — unlike these newer apps.

Smugmug was disqualified from the review for using the Comic Sans font. Puhhhleeeessse change that font guys. It’s so web -1.0

“My eyes, they burn!”

I’m no Smugmug employee. I’ll tell you what is obvious though. Trevor (#47) hasn’t spent a minute actually using Smugmug. Albums are there but unlike other photo services like pbase or exposure manager you cannot have unlimited heirarchy. In fact I think one of the most powerful aspects of Smugmug is the exact kind of keywording system that Trevor wants in a photo service.

Combine that with the unlimited uploads and the massive amounts of bandwidth granted to customers (which has grown several times in the past year that I’ve been a Smugmug customer) and you’ve got a photo sharing service that is easily as good as any reviewed in this article.

“They missed the video boat entirely, and YouTube now has a big lead in that category.”

You lost all credibility after this statement. Why the hell would Flickr ever wanna do video?