Yup. From 2003 to 2007, I spent an enormous amount of brainpower thinking about different ways to share photos. In the near term, I failed at it.
Here's what I learned:
1. your everyday photo taker won't pay for using a photo sharing site
2. little revenue means assets are measured in the number of users
3. viral adoption is needed to get to a large number of users
4. certain features limit viral adoption
5. people hardly ever upload private photos
6. private photos are only shared with a handful of people
7. photos suck up bandwidth and hard drive space like none other
8. there are lots of other photo sharing competitors
Based on all this and about a 100 other observation points (like nobody was going to acquire the current offering) I considered doing a simple offering called FotoFluff. The idea was to create a 'fluff', a collection of photos, and then assign three URLs to it. One to view, one to allow adding, and one to allow edit/delete. You'd only need the URL to do stuff to it, so you could IM it around, or post it in public if you dared. Propegation and commenting was left to the linking sites. Viewing privacy was only as good as the users kept the URL to themselves. Display of the photos was all on one page, with an API to do more if you wanted. Like Imgur, without logins. Delete stuff that never got viewed, or was older than X many days.
I just don't think I'd try this again. I'd say it's a damn tough nut to crack.
Here's what I learned:
1. your everyday photo taker won't pay for using a photo sharing site
2. little revenue means assets are measured in the number of users
3. viral adoption is needed to get to a large number of users
4. certain features limit viral adoption
5. people hardly ever upload private photos
6. private photos are only shared with a handful of people
7. photos suck up bandwidth and hard drive space like none other
8. there are lots of other photo sharing competitors
Based on all this and about a 100 other observation points (like nobody was going to acquire the current offering) I considered doing a simple offering called FotoFluff. The idea was to create a 'fluff', a collection of photos, and then assign three URLs to it. One to view, one to allow adding, and one to allow edit/delete. You'd only need the URL to do stuff to it, so you could IM it around, or post it in public if you dared. Propegation and commenting was left to the linking sites. Viewing privacy was only as good as the users kept the URL to themselves. Display of the photos was all on one page, with an API to do more if you wanted. Like Imgur, without logins. Delete stuff that never got viewed, or was older than X many days.
I just don't think I'd try this again. I'd say it's a damn tough nut to crack.