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July 7, 2006

BubbleShare Live brings screen sharing to photos

Marshall Kirkpatrick

26 comments »

Toronto based photo sharing site BubbleShare launched a demo today of a new service that may help differentiate themselves in the incredibly crowded photo sharing space. Called BubbleShare Live, the service allows multiple people to view and control a slide show and pointer on a shared web page. While other photo sharing applications operate asynchronously (I upload at one time, you view whenever you like) BubbleShare Live offers a way for multiple people to interact with photos at the same time.

The 8 person team behind BubbleShare was founded in late 2004, has been live for 10 months and is headed by CEO Albert Lai. No funding has been announced to date.

We have written about BubbleShare here before and the core features of the system are strong. You can start using the service fast - no account is needed to share photos, add audio captions and cartoon speech bubbles. Account holders can access a wide variety of other photo management and bookmarking features.

What’s most exciting to me though is the new service BubbleShare Live. Without installing any software users can effectively share browser windows to look at photos together. Anyone on the page can control the slide show and the pointer to highlight details in the images, or some users can be sent to a URL that only views page activity. It’s just in demo form right now, but you can go and try it out.

If you’re going to look at it by yourself, you can open a second browser window to the same URL your click-through to the demo lands on and see how well it works.

BubbleShare Live is built with a flash application at the server level, with only HTML facing users. It’s pretty smooth and a great idea. The company says they plan on adding chat and more user info in the near term future. If it scales well, it could be a powerful tool. I can imagine throwing screen shots into the system and using it to point out parts of multiple web pages with someone over the phone - for free!

There are obviously countless photo sharing services online. I think BubbleShare stood out with some interesting features even before the introduction of this Live component. Now it’s something I’m excited to use.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Friday, July 7th, 2006 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Web2.0Fan.net

    July 7th, 2006 at 4:20 pm

  2. Changing Way » Blog Archive » BubbleShare

    July 7th, 2006 at 8:22 pm

  3. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » BubbleShare Live、写真のスクリーン共有を実現

    July 8th, 2006 at 12:33 am

  4. Rehan’s blog » Is Toronto the Web 2.0 capital of the North?

    July 10th, 2006 at 12:12 pm

  5. Social Intelligence » Blog Archive » BubbleShare - share photos with friends - Custom Social Networking Research and Analysis

    July 12th, 2006 at 1:19 pm

  6. Techcrunch » Blog Archive » AOL Pictures goes social and it’s not pretty

    September 27th, 2006 at 4:05 pm

Comments

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  1. Joel

    July 7th, 2006 at 3:06 pm

    Check out the BuzzShout ShoutBlog. They have a cool review of PictureCloud that allows you to easily upload photos and make 360 degree panorama.

  2. Aidan Henry

    July 7th, 2006 at 3:09 pm

    I think BubbleShare has a great user interface - very clean and easy-to-use. For the average user, I think it is a great solution. Although, I’m not yet convinced it is the optimal solution for the power user. Obviously, competitors such as Flickr, SmugMug, and Kodak’s EasyShare provide robust functionality and advanced features which may be more suitable to the expert user.

    Nonetheless, I am very impressed with what I have seen thusfar.

    Hail Canadian web 2.0…

    Aidan Henry

  3. Albert Lai

    July 7th, 2006 at 3:12 pm

    Thanks for the comment Aidan, you may be right — we’re not quite optimizing our user interface for the power user, but rather for the masses and novices. Thanks for cheering on a fellow Canadian. =)

  4. paolo

    July 7th, 2006 at 3:13 pm

    but it’s not easy to set an online meeting about a slideshow… people have different times an works and problems: I think it’s better to publish pics and send mail

  5. Chris Sukornyk

    July 7th, 2006 at 3:23 pm

    Hi Paolo,

    We agree that most people would rather just send an Album for people to browse and their convenience. But BubbleShare Live might find a niche for all sorts of things unexpected. Perhaps families separated by distance might come together once a month and bore one another with slideshows :) Or perhaps this is a cheap net-meeting type service. You can easily export your Powerpoints as JPG’s and using BubbleShare Live give a web presentation for free. We really don’t know how it will be used yet, but that’s the fun part!

  6. striatic

    July 7th, 2006 at 3:24 pm

    ..and to think that flickr used to have a “flickr live”. i would say that bubbleshare was building a similar service, in reverse, if only the whole endeavour didn’t feel so fresh and different.

    that said, perhaps too early to show off something “So-Pre-Alpha-It’s-Funny”, even on techcrunch.

  7. Richard Hong

    July 7th, 2006 at 3:41 pm

    I just gave a it try, it’s awesome! Now I can share photos with my family using this one and Skype.

  8. Albert Lai

    July 7th, 2006 at 3:43 pm

    The “So-Pre-Alpha-It’s-Funny” was a dig/joke at ourselves… we were made fun of before about using the alpha/beta tag, so we’re just trying to have a little fun. =)

    Its funny, I never thought of us as doing the reverse of Flickr Live — which I thought was supercool. I think we’re trying to do something a bit different — more lightweight, private group, real-time sharing vs. IRC style sharing (i.e. flickr live).

  9. Search Engine WEB

    July 7th, 2006 at 3:44 pm

    This is an interesting Service, it will come in useful for journalists or Blogers in different locations working on the same story.

    Also it will be nice to collaborate with others around the world with Shared Interests..

    Just started an Album about the current Miss Universe Contest 2006 - Delegates are ariving here in Los Angeles Today

    ttp://bubbleshare.com/album/45251.16f8183c00d/

  10. Varun Mathur

    July 7th, 2006 at 4:42 pm

    What’s with us Canadians and photo sharing sites (flickr-vancouver ; bubbleshare-toronto) :)

  11. striatic

    July 7th, 2006 at 4:45 pm

    “I think we’re trying to do something a bit different — more lightweight, private group, real-time sharing”

    indeed.

    i really like the whole originality that bubbleshare brings to the table, especially the remorseless flickr-clones out there like zooomr and 23hq.

    this slideshow sharing is especially important since most of the major IM clients don’t ‘get’ how do a proper photosharing UI, electing to stuff photos into the chat window where they are tiny and disappear in seconds.

    YIM has an excellent interface however, and bubbleshare live sort of reminds me of it.

    which is great, because i use GAIM, not YIM. i can see people with multi-headed, non-standard IM clients being drawn to a service like bubbleshare live. i’m not sure that it is really your ‘masses and novices’ market, but you could develop plugins for these clients. that’d be swell.

  12. Albert Lai

    July 7th, 2006 at 5:13 pm

    straiatic,

    thanks for the feedback.

    I too use trillian, and I guess one of the nice things about BS Live is that I can now finally do live photo chats with other GAIM/Trillian users. We don’t really know whose ultimately going to pick up on the tool, but we just thought it would be a cool to have a fun live service like this for people to play with and based on your feedback, we’d push the envelope where we can. The idea behind BS Live is that you can instantly turn any photo album into a Live session.

    One thing we really wanted to push was also around lowering the barriers to adoption, but eliminating the registration as with the primary service. We wanted to build something where our users can just jump in, play, and tell their stories.

    Speaking of “play” one of our newer features is the ablity to instantly create a jig saw puzzle of your photos to send to your friends… check that out the next time your back on the service.

    Enjoy!

  13. striatic

    July 7th, 2006 at 10:50 pm

    hm .. that’s an interesting untapped arena.

    things that standard IM clients can do, but the non-standard ones can’t. the web-service as the neutral ground to supplement the client.

    browser based video chat, image sharing, file transfer. account-less group sessions that can be triggered by dropping a link into chat or IM. Take those three, package them together .. file transfer is so flakey out of gaim.

    hm.

  14. striatic

    July 7th, 2006 at 10:56 pm

    meebo could do that very well, with the meebo user seeing these things integrated into the thin client and the non-meebo users having things launch in a browser window while they continue to chat in their multi-headed or standard client.

    that’d be slick.

  15. Skeptic

    July 7th, 2006 at 11:21 pm

    Nice site, great user interface, neat-o features. I mean all of that sincerely. Now, how do you make money so you are still in business in a year or so?

    If I am a ‘regular user’ why would I invest the time/energy to upload tons of photos to your site when all my friends are on Ofoto, Yahoo, and (maybe) Flickr?

    More of my thoughts on this one here: http://www.dead20.com/2006/07/.....are-burst/

  16. Albert Lai

    July 7th, 2006 at 11:41 pm

    Skeptic,

    we will be making money off ads, prints, and soon, premium services/subscriptions, as well as a couple of more surprises to come.

    If you’re happy with Ofoto and Yahoo, that’s great. If you want to do something more with your photos w/ voice and captions, etc. make it more fun… we welcome you to play with BubbleShare.

  17. Pro SEO

    July 8th, 2006 at 12:40 am

    Regardless if the same thing has been done by someone else these types of things fail or succeed on the grounds of will it be marketed right.

  18. SorenG

    July 8th, 2006 at 6:16 am

    Why do you make a post listing the TechCrunch sponsors (the one after this) then give no way for people to respond? As if your users cannot see who the sponsors are — their ads are huge; I see them everyday. You really do not have to fill the entire screen with them. I may be in the minority, but if I go to the homepage, I do not like to see posts as ads. To me, the ads are more than visible on the right. Is their reason why you make posts thanking your advertisers? Why not just give them a call or send them an email if you want to thank them. That would be my preference.

  19. Scott Schiller

    July 8th, 2006 at 8:03 am

    Looks like a good use of Flash’s ExternalInterface / XMLSockets, the response between two instances of IE on my system was very snappy. Well done.

    (Fellow Canadian myself, also work on a large Photos site.. perhaps there is a pattern here indeed!)

  20. Albert Lai

    July 9th, 2006 at 7:07 pm

    Scott,
    Thanks for the kind comments. Its rather strange how many of us Canadians are in the digital photo arena. It must be in the water. =)

    We’ve tested the system performance up to about a dozen viewers (its was built really as a one to one/few users), but we’re intrested in finding out how much it’ll move up to. So if anyone has any experiences with tinkering with it with more than a dozen users, please let us know. =)

    We have much respect for your work at Yahoo Photos/Beta, very cool stuff.

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