There won’t be tagging, but CNet’s photosharing site Webshots is adding a number of features reminiscent of Flickr and getting a whole new look. The relaunch will occur some time in late August, but an alpha site is up here. The site currently looks straight out of the 90’s, it will be interesting to see how established users react to the redesign.
The Webshots team told Premium users in an email today that at relaunch Webshots users will be able to comment on each other’s photos. Premium users will have their accounts increased from 5,000 images total, with the limit being bumped up 500 images each month in the future future. Photo quality will be improved, information about the type of camera used for each photo will be included and advertising space will be decreased. Users will also be able to see aggregate stats and comments on their personal Webshots pages.
We last wrote about Webshots when they launched AllYouCanUpload, a bare bones service that has no limits or other frictions on photo uploading. A month prior, the company initiated its College Live section - a social networking feature for college students.
Webshots was purchased by CNet from Twofold Photos, Inc. in 2004 for approximately $70 million dollars. Webshots has approximately 19 million registered users posting almost a million images a day in online photo albums. A total of 400 million photos have been uploaded to date (compare to Flickr, a much younger service, with about 200 million photos). For comparison, Yahoo! Photos is reported to have 30 million users, Photobucket reports having 19 million users and Flickr approximately 2.5 million. It’s clear who’s the trendsetter here, though, and that’s liable to continue with innovations like Flickr’s rumored drag and drop geotagging in the works.
Interesting. I dont know how well the design change will stick with their current uses. But I guess if they ramp up usability and features, theyll keep their customers happy.
Finally they’ve done something with all the concepts thhey commissioned a while back.
Big improvement over than old design. Much cleaner and less cluttered.
Well, they do have tags, but they don’t have a tag cloud to access them. Instead, they use tags users define upon uploading images to inform their search capability.
They used to call this “keywords for search”. Now they call it “keywords/tags”. To see this, simply go to the image upload feature.
Marshall - thanks for the write up - and thanks to those who like the new design.
The alpha was intended for review by a few of our users, before we release it more broadly next week for comments.
so it’s not yet ready for daytime, much less primetime (ie: TechCrunch). There are a number of improvements that will go out in code pushes planned once per week for the next several weeks, including a code push by end of day Friday.
A couple of the things that are in this redesign:
1) For sharing: many many clean up UI features, including visible and not so visible things like a flash based rendering alogrithm for each photo.
2) For viewing: 10 Channels, hundreds of sub-categories and thousands + tags, with a combination of algorithm and editorial (human beings) editing and programming - you’ll be able to see what’s good, what’s recent, what and who’s popular and active Channels (like Travel, Sports or News) or anyone of hundreds of categories (Lebanon or kayaking) now, and soon, for each tag.
3) we reduced the real estate devoted to ads by about 40% (no banners and sky scrapers anymore). early reception is that the new ads are better for users and marketers.
and a couple of other things. but then I’d be running on in your comments.