It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Translated into this Twitter world we now live in, that’s like, thousands of characters. Thousands easily beats 140, so the people constantly complaining about Twitter’s brevity need to check out DailyBooth.
What is it? It’s a Twitter-like quick message service, only the main form of communication is pictures. You can send pictures of anything you want, though most users tend to send images of themselves, photo booth-style, and attach messages to them. The result is a crazy amount of interaction in the community. And interestingly enough, unlike Twitter, it seems to be a hotbed for teenage activity.
While there have been no shortage of startups that have launched picture services for Twitter, the Y Combinator-backed DailyBooth is a little different in that it tries to stand on its own by emphasizing its own social stream (though there is Twitter tie-in as well). In that regard it’s more like Radar than TwitPic or some of the other standard Twitter photo services. But Radar places an emphasis on cameraphone pictures, as I said, DailyBooth seems to be populated more by photos of people taking pictures of themselves, sitting at their computers. Though you can upload pictures from a mobile device as well.
And DailyBooth’s growth has been pretty amazing. As you can see in the chart below, since its launch in January, DailyBooth has grown to over 3 million unique visitors a month. And they have a growth rate now of about 35% a month, which means they should easily hit 4 million uniques this month, founder Jon Wheatley tells us.
One reason for this growth has to be the active community. I uploaded one picture last night around 2 AM, just my standard profile icon, and it almost immediately got 8 comments even though no one was explicitly following me. This morning, my inbox was bombarded by notifications from DailyBooth, new pictures notifications, new follower notifications, recent activity on my pictures, etc. Sure, that was a little annoying (you can change the email alerts in your settings), but also nice to see such a new community with that kind of activity.
Y Combinator’s Paul Graham says that at one point they had considered a name change for DailyBooth, but then realized just how engaged the community already was with the service (the picture at the top is just one example), and that a name change may have caused a revolt.
The service recently added a bunch of new features including the ability to send DailyBooth images to many of the major social networks. And you can automatically set your latest DailyBooth picture to be your MySpace or Facebook profile picture.
I often find myself clicking on pictures posted to Twitter even if I don’t really know the person. And one of the main features I’ve liked of FriendFeed and now newer services like Brizzly is that they put pictures sent to Twitter inline, so you don’t have to click anywhere to see them. DailyBooth takes that one step farther and makes it all about the pictures. And it does so in a simpler and more social atmosphere than a site like Flickr. The results seem to speak for themselves in their growth.
http://tumblr.com
I’ll just leave this right here.
tumblr … really? what?
Tumblr sucks so badly it is really hard to tell within 140 characters lol
Wait what? This looks like they just slapped a new front end on 4chan. How is this news?
Actually holy crap, I just uploaded a picture and literally by the time I’d been redirected I had a comment. wow.
DailyBooth is a fantastic little website, and I’ve been using it for a while now.
The community is the thing that brings me back, time and time again.
My first picture got over 20 comments without me even publicising it, and everybody is so friendly.
The new design and features are snazzy too.
“What is it? It’s a Twitter-like quick message service, only the main form of communication is picture.”
I started this in 2001:
http://mobog.com
yea, but yours sucks.
true.
Philip, you have won me over. add another fan to your user totals.
but you failed.
pretty much. though it was just a weekend project many years ago and still has its devotees.
but yeah
Speaking of weekend projects, how’s Kaplan Index coming along?
devotees as far as the same people who keep post those eiffel tower pics?
come on pud, when are you bringing back fc?
What’s left of FC is at http://f2bbs.com
Good for you, dude. And Alta Vista had search, and MySpace had a social network. Did you also have an active and engaged community of people that loved your site?
Mobog is “The greatest photo sharing community in the world” — it says it right there on the site.
Hahha….I can’t argue with that ;)
No iJustine? No sign up for me. It’s clear to see that DailyBooth scores 10s in design, community, and functionality. And did I mention they have iJustine??? That’s game over man!
He had a really active, nationally famous community until he pulled the plug after everybody there made fun of him for getting fired at Adbrite.com.
F’dCompany.com; perhaps you’ve heard of it.
A company’s success isn’t measured in who came out first.
And we all know.. A picture is worth a thousand words :P
Also very similar to fotolog which became very popular and was started in 2002
http://en.wikip...rg/wiki/Fotolog
pud, you’re a hero for f**kedcompany in my book. I wasted so much time laughing my ass off on that site, as the dot com bubble burst.
I was lucky i wasn’t sitting on the bubble when it burst. I had the mop and bucket to clean up the mess. It’s a shame I was wasting so much time on your site, or I’d have made some serious money!
But yeah, Moblog? lol gimme back f’d company.
try http://woofertime.com for some fun. A 1400 character MINIMUM.
yep. yours suck so badly my browser crashedd!!!
lolllllllll
They really did a good job with the new design and it’s pretty cool service. The only criticism is the lack of a desktop app and mobile support *hint meaing iphone*.
It’d also be awesome if this could update Gravatar and twitter as well.
Nice work though guys
It can update twitter, so booth away!
Ya it can update twitter after I give you my twitter username and password. No thanks.
Like the site. So simple.
Yeah, but…
when you page through someone’s photo stream, the forward and back button are labeled “More” and “Less”.
Not too intuitive. Maybe English isn’t their native language, or it’s a failed attempt at humor. I don’t think it’s a good idea to mix humor attempts in with UI features.
Maybe it’s just me.
Where did you come up with 3M uniques?
Compete says they have 75K uniques: http://siteanal...dailybooth.com/
Is the claim that 2.925M are international, or are the numbers just false?
Interesting. That’s some major discrepancy. I have not checked yet, but maybe they used skewed Alexa data after someone had a script running for a week or so to get the hits up. :)
Yay, it’s brilliant to see DB get some decent, well-deserved exposure, glad to have been there from the start :D
This is the best website I’ve ever seen in my life.
TechCrunch Effect. The site has slowed to a crawl.
The site is like twitter, its always going down or needing to fix servers…
I love DailyBooth!
dailybooth ftw!
I see it didn’t take you long to find meekakitty. She’s hilarious. Check out her Youtube videos too.
yes! dailybooth is wat im lookin for! bc like it say a picture is worth more than 140 words! and being a photographer this is better for me, ill still tweet but i think ill like doin this more!
& it’s awesome to have some positive review!
DailyBooth is so much fun. The community on there is amazing. You’ll literally spend hours “talking” to your followers back and forth via picture comments. SIGN UP! DailyBooth FTW!!
Cool, now I have an excuse to use that webcam that’s built into my new laptop. You know, the one I never use.
Very nice, another service that pushes the boundaries of innovation. Just what we need.
Glad to see DB doing so well, it’s got a great community behind it. I’m thrilled to be a part of it.
I don’t get it.
Of all the various networking sites I’ve looked around, DailyBooth has been the most fun and most friendly.
compete says they have 75,000 users. how does that correspond to the 3.2M mentioned in the article?
Dailybooth is the best thing to happen to social networking. Hands down.
Concept is weird, but seems to actually work.
The community on daily booth is seriously awesome! I have no idea why i first joined since I’ve always hated taking pictures of myself but very quickly it was something that no longer bothered me thanks to daily booth i have grown so much in confidence
“Twitter-like”. I stopped reading there.
Where are you getting 3mm uniques?
Any reply? If you are going to recycle 3M uniques – show any third party proof.
Compete says 70K uniques.
Or put another way, essentially 0.
That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.
MG write “Not safe to look at work” or something. Crappy crap photos. Lot of photos are not safe to look at work.
Really? Compete? GTFO… That site is never fucking accurate.
Nice Daily Booth astroturfing here in this thread. This is yet another value-less viral smash that will be dead in 6 months. Founders, exit while you can…
What “viral smash” do you know that has carried on successfully for 6 months already? Dailybooth existed before you stuck your skeptical nose in and it’s only escalating further.
In geekspeak the title could have been – “A .gif is worth a thousand .txts” :)
Very nice site, but the UI sucks, and the CSS needs tidying up, almost all the font sizes are the same which makes it very crowded on the eyes.
iPhone support is needed aswell.
Well done, John. As an active member of Sitepoint Marketplace/Flippa I’ve followed your “entrepreneurial career” with interest. Lots of nice ideas and a few nice sales over the years, but it would appear that a site and idea has finally taken off.
I remember looking at DailyBooth a long time ago (a year?) and didn’t get it, didn’t see it being big.
If I own another Cat I might join to upload pics :/
Great idea!
Dailybooth is NOT a “Twitter-like messaging service”… it’s an opportunity to document your life through daily photos, and receive feedback on what you’ve been doing.
DB will be the next big thing in the Valley!