Because of the abundance of photo hosting sites available on the web, it can be hard to track down every photo from an event you’ve attended. Oftentimes they’re scattered across multiple user accounts, under generic album titles like “Party”, making them hard to find and virtually useless for future reference.
LifeSnapz, a photo sharing site that launched at TechCrunch50’s DemoPit, is looking to give users a simple way to manage photos from multiple sources at a given event. To use the site, users first invite their friends to join their groups, where they can post their photo albums under discrete Events (for example, they could create multiple photo albums under the heading “School Graduation).
Collaborative photo albums are nothing new – many popular photo services allow multiple users to upload to the same album. But CEO Brian Hand says that LifeSnapz takes a different approach, by allowing users to group photos through time and space (namely, they are arranged by date and location data, when available). This information is used to compile an interactive timeline, which serves as a fun and intuitive way to browse through past photos (especially when compared to the thumbnail views offered by most photo services).
Each event also includes a profile page, which allows users to write further details and comment on the event as a whole. This makes the site appealing not just as a hosting service for current events, but as a place for old friends and acquaintances to reconnect over photos from years past (in an example I saw, graduates from the class of ‘84 used the site to share photos from their school days in preparation for an upcoming reunion).
LifeSnapz has some good ideas, but it may have a hard time differentiating itself at this point – while the timeline is impressive, most of these features can be found elsewhere. The site feels a bit too complicated to appeal to the “technology-averse” crowd that is looking for a very basic photo service, but it doesn’t yet include enough features to draw away users of more established services like Flickr and Photobucket.
It reads like Life is a nap. Best of luck.
OurStory.com has done group timelines with photos and stories for the last couple of years. Nothing new here.
its true…nothing new
Thanks for the comment. The difference is that LifeSnapz is event-based, not timeline-based like OurStory and other sites. Events can be shared with groups, and timelines are dynamically generated based on tags, making the experience more interesting and robust. See my broader comments below.
any company with a Z at the end of its company name is doomed to failure.
Lifesnapz rules!
I love it.
Can’t ping it…???
EngineYard was down for 45 minutes last night, unrelated to us.
If they are providing your core service and they stop users from accessing your service it is very related to you.
Dynamic timelines are slick.
I’m not sure this video comment is really valuable, to be honest. {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/C5OpZqTIdv_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”I’m not sure this video comment is really valuable, to be honest. ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/iWINMupuVf”}}}
great question. my guess is they have raffles daily.
Andrew needs to “know for the future”……wouldnt we all……… your asking for TC’s secret sauce. The TC Gods dont kiss on the first date so dont expect an answer.
ReportLocator.com
Is G on the lookout for this too ?.
Yahoo Taglines (http://research...o.com/taglines/) is way way much better, much prettier too.
Thanks for the feedback. A few comments.
First, we are not a photo sharing site per se. LifeSnapz is based on events (what happened, where it happened, when and who was there) and at the core it allows people to record history. While photos are part of an event, there are other things as well – descriptions, videos, etc.
Second, events can be viewed in a variety of ways – via timelines, maps and lists. A significant differentiator is that all of these are instantly customizable by clicking tags for specific people, places or types of events. For instance, you can create timelines by clicking on tags for your kids, parents, friends or events (party, wedding, birthday, Christmas, reunion, etc.).
Third, like many sites based on user generated content, content is created by few and viewed by many. One person chronicles an event, and many view and comment on it. If someone else was at an event, it becomes part of their set of events without them having to do much, and it can be dynamically viewed from their perspective.
Lastly, our site just went live and we still have a lot of things to improve, not the least of which is simplifying the UI and providing new users demos of the site’s benefits. These will be live shortly. One of the challenges we face as a greenfield site is showing a new user what’s possible before they have contributed any of their own content and shared it with others.
Thanks again for the feedback and keep it coming.
This sounds and looks just like Dipity (www.dipity.com) except limited to photos, where as with Dipity can you can use video, photos, articles and more.
@Sig Naah:
As Brian said above our atomic unit is an Event, not a photo. An event may be comprised of simply a title and a date, and may be further enhanced with a description, location, tags, participants, photos, and videos.
The idea of having shared events that users can belong too is old. Even the history or story concept was used by PiX ‘n’ PaLs (www.pixnpals.com) over a year ago. Several photosharing websites have group galleries and similar, but to the best of my knowledge, these additional features are not used that much in the more popular websites. So I wonder, do these features add more value at all? Or are they too complicated for normal users to understand?
I can see the value in trying to make your social on-line life better integrated with your off-line life. I’m just not sure if it adds that much more than what facebook already does, except for the timeline which is nice but no match for FB’s killer networking functionality.
http://www.techcrunch.com, админ. Кто писал про последнее китайское предупреждение ? Извини. Я надеюсь мы найдем компромисс ? 1. Поставь на блог-комментирование хорошую каптчу. 2. Пошли урлы своих блогов сюда chezanah@gmail.com и ты избавишься от меня. Ещё раз приношу извинения. издержки производства…
Nice post, I think it’s worth sharing here about a photography website, http://www.aperture.in that offers amateur and professional photographers to create unlimited number of photo albums and a plenty of features to manage their photo albums. This time, the site does not seem to have many photo albums/ photos yet, I liked the site.