allyoucanupload was pretty well received

Mike Arrington wrote:

“When I see something like this - a service that strives to do one thing efficiently and without friction, it makes my heart warm. Simple does not equal boring. Simple can be disruptive. I want more services like AllYouCanUpload.”

There’s probably an unwritten rule that says you should write something complementary about a person who writes something nice about your product.

In Mike's case I can do that with a completely straight face. We intended to launch a disruptive product. But we never mentioned that to anyone, including Mike. It took him only a few minutes to figure it out. He’s a smart dude. I wish him every success with TechCrunch.

And for those readers who care how we’ll make money, we’ll serve ads around the photos viewed at allyoucanupload.com. Since our Haystack infrastructure was built for Webshots photo sharing service, our marginal costs of servers, data center and bandwidth are low because of the corporate parent, and our Webshots photo screeners are already making sure porn doesn’t go up on Webshots, the marginal cost of allyoucanupload is very low. And that’s part of the reason why we felt we can deliver a disruptive service over the long term. Investing in allyoucanupload should also pay dividends back to Webshots.

We hope Allyoucanupload is a useful image service for people who blog and post on message boards and social networking sites.

It's is part of a larger effort to make Webshots more useful and relevant to users who also blog or who post content in various places around the web. We have a lot of work to do and improvements to Webshots coming this summer.  Later this week, I’ll post some design treatments for our upcoming Webshots relaunch (July).

As much as I love the favorable comparisons to imageshack and photobucket, our real competitive target is Yahoo!

Both Yahoo! Photos and (as Yahoo! refers to it) Yahoo! Flickr.   

So please forgive me for taking pleasure from this post by a Yahoo! flickr user on the speed of allyoucanupload.com.   Business is as much about small emotional victories won one customer at a time as it is about market share and budgets.

"real problem that i have with Flickr is that it has always seems pretty slow for me. I know looking over Nick Loeve’s holiday snaps always takes me ages, this was superquick."

Comments

[walter]

Hi Martin,

Congratulations on the launch of AllYouCanUpload. The zero-sign-on is brilliant. I Just read your terms-of-service and this caught my eye...
"You further agree that you will not access Webshots by any means except through the interface provided by Webshots and that you will not access Webshots from any territory where its contents are illegal."

Do CNET have any plans to add an API ?

Walter

[martin]

Walter - yes we have details on the Webshots API here:

http://www.webshots.com/html/services.html

It's has only limited functionality. but we're working on it.

We are thinking about releasing an API for allyoucanupload.com. What would be most valuable to you?

[Walter]

Hi Martin,
All I'd need is for the "/uploadcomplete" to return the list of image sizes/urls in XML or JSON format. JSON would be preferable.
If there was an extra optional 'format' parameter which accepted either 'json' or 'xml' as values.

[walter]

Martin,

Take a look at http://pxn8.com/ . I try to follow AllYouCanUpload's principle of doing one thing well. It's a photo editor. I just added the AllYouCanUpload button earlier this morning.

[martingreen]

Thanks Walter - I'll talk with the team about the XML JSON output (although they've likely already read your comments and have an opinion on this) - cheers.

and thanks for the link.

I'm away from the office this week (we just had a baby last Friday) - but I'll try to find some time to play with pxn8.

[walter]

Congrats on the new arrival.
Our son was born last month.
Hope you're getting some sleep.

[Graham Toal]

So dude, what the hell happened? I think a blog post on the reasons for the demise of allyoucanupload would be quite appreciated.

(And where have our images gone? Were they migrated to Webshots somewhere or just deleted?)

I thought it was a great service. Really sorry it died.