Last August Noah Kalina posted a video on YouTube (embedded above): it features nothing more than daily photos of himself over 6 years, set to music. The video has been viewed over 6 million times, inspiring many spoofs and similar postings. The amount of work that went into the video is staggering. Taking the photos, organizing them and then editing them into a movie would have taken hundreds of hours in aggregate.
FlickaDay is a new Boston-based startup that makes this whole process much easier. Use the site to take a photo of yourself every day using a connected webcam or camera. Flickaday will organize the photos and will let you publish it as a Flash widget on another website.
FlickaDay uses Flash to hook up to your web cam. Each day you can sign in and snap a photo through your web cam and write your mood. You can only snap one photo a day, which is stored to your account. You can then show off these photos on your FlickaDay widget, which lists your most recent photo and mood. Viewers can also look through archived photos using a calendar or play through the whole set to a song you uploaded. You can adjust the frame rate, but the default is a comfortable 8 frames a second.
The service is dead simple easy to use. They even offer to remind you daily by email to come and take your picture. Emo kids and narcissistic bloggers will love this. Example to the right.
sounds like a nifty student project
nice video, and will add to my site a video a day for tomorrow.
as far as the new startup is concerned, nice service as it may provide, i’m not so keen to it
it will soon be dropped into the deadpool
prove me wrong!
I agree…nice idea, but little to no commercial potenital.
The little gem I love from the FAQ is:
“Data is ours. Deleting accounts deactivates them. However the data remains flickaday’s property”
Nice…my embarassing video will be shown on the internet for ever. So much for running for president.
Please tell me they were not able to get VC money for this company.
Fun idea, but it’s not a business.
This is a pretty sweet idea, and Ian, I have to disagree. I think it is a workable concept for a business. The site has incredible stickiness for users who actually use the service, and Flickaday can charge for “premium” features.
This is very good for Viral Marketing campaigns.
Do you want to buy my startup
http://cgi.ebay...em=180126906061
Their policy on data is ridiculous. Let me get this straight…you delete your account, and they “own” your data, which could consist of hundreds, even thousands of your IP? No thanks guys, go to hell!
What kind of premium features could you see them charging for? Special effects?
@Tan The Man: Special effects could be one (iChat comes to my mind). Another possibility would be search for “similiar faces”. I could see this growing into a dating site once it has enough users. Another alternative (thuogh it doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive) could be to link the comments one writes each day to the features of that day’s photo and try to do some learning to predict not only what ones mood will be on certain day, but also what one would look like. Will I have a bad hair day next thursday morning? To me it seems this is the sort of things a blog company should provide. Livejournal, blogger … they’re all too enamored on their php code but bottom line is, new versions are pretty much the same old stuff and features like flickaday’s are lacking.
I think the idea as some have pointed out is viral. That’s all what’s needed.
Upon checking out their site further, I am not sure it’s a business. It appears to be a personal site, maybe a college project or something?
If that’s the case, I apologize for coming down so hard on them before.
Not sure I like their legal policy:
“Songs are yours. Data is ours. Data backup not garunteed unless you have premium services.
Deleting accounts deactivates them. However the data remains flickaday’s property”
Is this pretty standard for a product like this? What types of rules do Flickr or other sites where you upload your images etc have in regards to intellectual property?
Why would anyone want to give up their privacy for a miserable six million views on You Tube?
having people tune into your site daily is a good thing.
“The amount of work that went into the video is staggering. Taking the photos, organizing them and then editing them into a movie would have taken hundreds of hours in aggregate.”
given about 15-20 seconds to take each photo, the fact that they were (obviously) taken in a chronological order (greatly decreasing/eliminating “organization” time), and the abundance of software that turns digital photo albums into “dvd slideshows” (i.e., videos), I think you are seriously exaggerating the time it took to do this. It was a brilliant idea (though he’s not the first to come up with it, maybe the first to have a viral web video, but certainly not the first for the general idea), but not as intense a process as you seem to think.
I think these guys are pretty late to the game. This whole fad has died down quite a bit since this video was first introduced a few months back.
Better luck next time!
Whoa, that’s cool.
georgespamungus@gmail.com
What we currently need is Yet Another Startup that will counsel other startups on good taste.
Is it just me or do I find this video incredibly depressing… seeing the SAME background year after year after year… seeing the same facial expression YEAR AFTER YEAR AFTER YEAR. Concept is great, but this guys needs to learn how to crack a smile or change environment every once in a while. Time for a shot of eggnog!
Jon
Hey Guys,
I’m one of the co-founders of Flckaday.com. I’m glad to see everyone commenting on our site. Just to clear up a few things. We are a self-funded startup. Our vision is that people will use flickaday.com to chronicle there life in the form of a very simplistic diary or blog; that they can share anywhere online.
To answer a couple questions about the legals on the site. We are currently in public beta so a lot of the current text is used as a placeholder for the longer (soon to come) legal agreements. However, I assure you the legals are pretty standard.
Their business plan
– Collect pictures of everyone / then sell to google for their face recognition program
I’ve been doing a daily photo for almost three years now. I like Flickaday’s idea, however, I’m not sure how archival their offering is. If I were to commit to using their product I would want to know that my daily photos were portable and “high” resolution.
I was running a personal project called me365. Where I used to take a pic of myself everyday. Now I can use this. Probably needs remote MMS upload too.
http://www.thej...65-month-april/
Talk about a niche within a niche! It’s not exactly difficult to put these together in the first place with freely available and easy to use software. Fun, but I can see this niche going out of fashion pretty quickly.
Thejesh remote MMs upload is a great idea, im not too sure many people will go on thier site everyday( im sure id skip a few days here and there)
Im not too sure they’ll work. But lets just hope for the best
http://www.watblog.com