Sometimes you come across something and don’t know exactly what it is. What if you could snap a photo on your iPhone, upload it to a site where people can submit answers and vote on the best ones, and send out a link to everyone you know on Twitter to get them to weigh in? That basically describes idthis, a simple site developed by Billy Chasen, who previously created chartbeat (which I covered here) and firef.ly for betaworks.
With idthis, which is both a Website and an iPhone app (iTunes link), the concept is pretty simple, but I can see it going in different directions. One is a simple utility. You see an old BMW convertible on the street and want to know what year it is. Send a photo to idthis. It could also be a way to play visual games. Take a closeup of an object or make it slightly blurry and see who can guess what it is first. (Obscene photos will be taken down and can be flagged by the community).
The instructions on the site state:
Just snap a photo of something you’d like identified (like a breed of dog, a type of car, that weird gelatinous blob sitting on your plate, or even that celebrity sitting next to you that you can’t remember their name, etc…) and then send it to be identified.
Anyone can submit an answer. Once an answer gets five votes, the picture becomes officially identified (you can change the number of votes required to identify a picture when you submit it). Here’s one I put up. See if you guys can guess what it is.
Why not just post it on twitpic and ask your twitter followers to ID it? Wouldn’t that be easier?
Great minds think alike!
http://www.tech...comment-2962675
The idthis iphone app allows for posting to twitter. And it makes uploading the photo really easy right when you take it.
No voting, no categories, not easy to search it afterwards. But yeah, you could do that.
Love the concept and its seems to have been executed well. Like you, I can see this being used for games.
Interesting model, but how to monetize this kind of “game” ?
pay (micropayments, maybe by expensive SMS) for each photo uploaded
My knee-jerk reaction was “what’s wrong with Twitter + Twitpic etc?”, which would have the added benefit of sourcing identifications from those you know and trust.
But on second thought, this gets around some of the problem of needing to have lots of followers. It’s easy for @stephenfry to tweet to get loads of people to help him, but for the average person who uses Twitter on a solely personal level and doesn’t have (or want/need) a large number of followers, it’s difficult to get such help. So a community that doesn’t rely on a “following” mechanism is quite cool.
“Mahalo Answers for pictures” sums it up well…
Lego man rolling a joint. Puff Puff Pass. Now that would be interesting lego pot! Lego grow OP. Be the first on your block to have a Lego Grow P…
It’s cool. Will check it out soon.
They really should consider some sort of tineye.com integration, these services could work well together.
Honestly I think using the site as a game would turn people off from it more then anything. The basic idea alone is enough to give it some interest but people using it as a game may keep people that want to be helpful away from it.
Having the instant response of “why not use twitpic?” is so sad to me.
This is cool. It will be interesting to see how far this goes.
http://www.picanswers.com does this for ages …
This seems silly, somebody like Google should have done this, at least you could get answers faster. Upload your photo and it would find the exact match of it, and probably the source URL along with tons of other data.
MEH.
Is it just me or does the site not work? I clicked on lots of categories and got a lot of “photo not found”, and generally nothing happening when I tried to click through the photos.
Brilliant! I am addicted already.
nice name. eat this.
I laughed myself SORE at some of the answers and some of the pics.
Wonderful comedy value, which might not be what the originators intended.
Our new WineFinder app is a first start at this problem:
http://youtube....WJyE&fmt=22
2nd try at posting. Is comments working? I submitted comment but didnt see anything. Trying ione more time.
Hey I love idthis.org. I check it everyday and seems like a lot of user participation. Plus great user interface. Anyways, GREAT JOB Billy.
I had the same idea few years ago and have something up but not near the level of idthis yet. Check it out at http://www.photoidentify.com