Photo sites and social media

Reuters ran an article last week talking about how traditional photo sharing services are having a run for their money because users of social networking services are happy sharing photos over there.

Very true! Infact, this is a repeat of the classic dilemma of reinvent or perish. The basic question to answer is – “Why do people share photos”? Two answers come to mind:

1) To show it to friends and family
2) For archiving, just in case you lose your hard drive full of photos

As all your friends move to social network and you get more connected online, naturally sharing photos on a social service starts making a lot of sense. Why would you want to upload your photos on another site and send links around when you can just upload your photos and the social site takes care of letting your friends know about it.

As a result photo services are left with no other option but to turn more social. However, the good news is that photos are still relatively dumb creatures and there hasn’t been much done to unleash the full power of a network of photos. So there is plenty of room for innovation and a lot of value addition that can be done to turn photo sharing into an activity, more entertaining than it has ever been.

That is what we are trying to do with photo sharing at lifeblob – building a more intelligent tool that understands how photos are connected and helps you navigate through them.

Photo management is an open problem

Today, I came across this post by Prof Ramesh Jain and I couldn’t agree more.

A quick peek at the most popular photo management solutions today will tell you that it is still all about uploading your photos, organizing into albums and creating a slideshow. Flickr, to some extent lets you discover related stuff through tags, but thats pretty much it.

To me, a photo management solution is about discovery, photos connecting with each other and navigating through the mesh of related photos. Add to this the time context around a photo and it has all the ingredients of a heady cocktail that could have you hooked for hours.

Imagine taking a shot of  “The Statue of Liberty” and instantly finding other people who also shot it around the same time. Or imagine going on a trek with your friends and getting a view of what your friends did while you were at the trek. Imagine attending a pink floyd concert and discovering shots taken by fans at several other previous concerts of pink floyd.

The possibilities are endless and there is a huge problem to be solved here. We are trying to crack some of these problems at http://www.lifeblob.com by making it really easy for you to add and organize your photos in a time based manner. We have also built a system that tracks connections of each photo and highlights connections that are more important to you than others.

We are in the process of turning on some discovery options like the examples that I gave above and hopefully you will be able to take a test ride of this before the end of this month.

If you also think that photo management is an unsolved problem, I would love to hear from you!

Lifestreaming is bollocks

I just came across a week old article by Stephen Waddington about how lifestreaming is dumbass and blogging is kickass. Well, I think he missed the point.

I’m no big fan of twitter or friendfeed and have been a significantly late adopter of these services, but what I do see there is a really strong value add in real-time information discovery. The way twitter has been on top of breaking news lately, I don’t see how someone can ignore this channel anymore.

Now coming to thought leadership, twitter not only forces you to speak your mind concisely, it also gets you instant reactions from people listening to you thereby engaging in a discussion – isn’t a discussion the best way to show your thought leadership?

Is twitter or friendfeed the beginning and end of lifestreaming? Certainly not. My personal belief is that lifestreaming is evolving and eventually there will be solutions that satisfy different people in different ways.

Stephen, you think your photo stream is boring as hell – try putting it in a lifeblob timeline and see how engaging it can be with relations around it.  There is a lot of innovation that needs to happen and while all the lifestreaming solutions may not hold relevance for Robert Scoble or Steve Rubel, they would certainly gain prominence as all these services get better at organizing and visualizing this vast resource of information.

Lifestreaming and Transparency

Just saw a great video from Gary Vaynerchuk at Web 2.0 Expo in New York speaking about Building personal brand within the social media landscape.

Check out the video below – I couldn’t agree more:

Thanks to Mark Krynsky for posting it. Find the original post by mark here.

Back to Blogging

I decided to abandon my old blog at blogger and get back to regular blogging.

Its ironical that I see a post from Chris about the importance of real relationships on the same day that I dive back into the world of virtual communication .