Forward Looking Statements

Microsoft Photosynth

TechCrunch highlights that MSFT live labs is working on a product called photosynth - essentially a new way to group photos and view images based on pattern recognition.

My description doesn't nearly do it justice - it's a very cool UI - sort of virtual reality meets slideshows and albums, with zooming, 3D flying etc.   Here's a tour. 

Live labs architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas likens the potential to Narnia worm holes, where you can use the pattern matching and UI to go from one of your photos of the basilica to more photos of the basilica taken by others.

It looks slick - I am very curious to see how they plan to integrate photos from outside photosynth.  Wonder whether the pattern matching works at scale at all the various places in the world.  They definitely should include geotagging and maps also.

Oh yeah - if you want to see the Basilica, we have a few (44,214) photos from Webshots here 

Webshots redesign

We just posted the first public comp of our new design for Webshots in the Webshots blog to get user feedback, in advance of the upcoming beta in late june/early july.  I'd love to get your thoughts too. 

and yes, that's a video player where the photo should be.  more on that in a minute.

For the last several months we've been working with an advisory group of Webshots users to get their perspective on the needed changes to the front end design and UI.

Additionally, we have been adding talented designers and producers/developers and I now feel we have the necessary user centered design skills to do a complete overhaul of a site that serves 19 million people per month. 

Everyone knows that the current Webshots front end is functional, but it needed major major changes.  our members knew.  you knew.  we knew.  it's all going to change.  for the better (we hope).

The new changes will be risky - because they touch most areas of the site, and they are pretty radical.

- all major user flows and pages are getting changed.  signing up, uploading, sharing, browsing, searching.  signing up to webshots currently takes something like 9 pages/steps and we ask people to download the software to "get started".  ugh.  changing. 
- category pages will be changed and will pave the way for tags (finally) - but we'll be combining tags with cagtegories.
- our members' pages will be changed.  we are adding better ways for them to publish and share.
- most of the ads are being changed.  no more banners.  no more skyscrapers.  no one likes them.  out out out.  In with sponsorships, paid links, and what we call MPUs (square ads).
- the site will better highlight the great content we have in the community, and the breadth of passions from our users, from citizen news to travel, their hobbies, art, and good times.
- the site will show more of our members (that just doesn't read well).  anyway - we'll highlight people as well as photos.

- finally - the site redesign will pave the way for video.  The cameras we all have take both short videos as well as photos, so after you've captured both video and photos of a recent trip, why shouldn't the site allow you to share both, together? 

The photo page design layout here will be the same for photos and videos, and our albums will allow members to go chronicle something with both photos, text and video, and store it all in one container, so someone can see everything to do with your trip, or the next hurricane or whatever, all in one place.  you won't have to upload your photos to one service and your videos to another.

The Webshots logo in the upper left is a placeholder  - we're not changing the name - but the logo/font will be changing.  More later.

String Theory

I wish I could post about string theory :)

We are scoping the suggestions received on allyoucanupload.com.  I'll post the results soon.  But I just learned something about integers and strings.   As someone on the business side of tech I have to say that it's awe-inspiring to see the technical complexity that is required to build simple and scalable things for users.  This is a neat example, because it's not even that complicated.

As I took the snip url idea back to James Park - who runs the product development team, he told me that the way to create unique but short URLs is to use numbers *and* letters.  That way you get lots of permutations within a small url.

Makes sense I said - that's what tinyurl and snipurl do.   How hard is it to do letters and numbers?

Easy said James.

"Perfect", I said...but James was looking up at the ceiling then he turned to me and said, "but a letter is a string.  And a string is a lot slower than an integer at scale - and we need things that work very fast at scale."

Not so easy.  not so perfect.  nothing ever is.  and that's what's so damn fun about this business.

we're looking further into it.  If anyone knows anything relevant - let me know and that might help us get to the answer faster.  cheers. 

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."

Allyoucanupload suggested improvements

Since I wrote about the service here I've recieved a number of suggestions for improvements.

Here they are.  Please comment, add, heckle, whatever.

• On the upload success page - the one with all your codes, links etc. why not make it unique so users can bookmark it?

  • we should - we will - seems obvious.  not sure why it is like it is right now.

• The success page and your main photo url should have a snip or tiny url
• Enable a cookie based “account” for your photos – no registration required.
• Provide an email form so you can send yourself an email with your codes/links.

  • each of these are going to get scoped this week.

• Enable other file formats to be uploaded and shared – flash, video
  
  • this is going to wait a bit - we're doing some other work on video that will be relevant soon - intentional forwarding looking statement :)
• Update: URL uploading
• Update: APIs for allyoucanupload including XML and JSON output (please note that we provide APIs to Webshots.com here)
• Update: small windows app that adds “right click to upload” functionality to all images and possibly provides a minimalist drag and drop to upload feature. It should store urls for the user.
• Update: The homepage is ugly, http://imagesocket.com/ is much nicer.
• Update: If you need to let people upload more than one photo at once, you add a script like Gmail’s attachment script which adds as many upload slots as you need, and you urge the download of the above mentioned drag and drop app.
• Update: Other file types.

Thanks to Narendra, Andrew, Nick Wilder, GD, Walter, Ian Danforth and Mike for the suggestions.

allyoucanupload

"No cuffs, no pleats...just pants"   

We developed an image hosting service called allyoucanupload - please check it out and tell me what you think. 

It's a front end to a brand spanking new storage system that we just built.  We call the back end system "Haystack" and I can post on that later if people are interested.  It's pretty neat.  took a few months of hard core systems and operations engineering.  much thanks go to Matt, Paul, Rodolphe, MKaz,  and Jim.  Haystack will soon serve hundreds of millions of Webshots member photos.  (we have over 375,000,000)

But allyoucanupload is what this post is supposed to be about.  We built it to test haystack and because it wasn't too much extra work, we built it to serve those people who want their pants with neither cuffs nor pleats.  Credit goes to James Park, who joined us last year from start up HeyPix! with two of his friends. James is ably taking over Webshots product development and you'll see more stuff from James in our upcoming relaunch.

allyoucanupload doesn't have a lot of things - no albums, no photo streams, no profile page, no comments, no friends.  It was built to do one thing very well - store and serve images (images right now).

As those of you who take and share digital photos, you may contribute to photo sharing sites like webshots and flick, but we know that you email them, you IM them, and you might post to your blog or myspace, livejournal, metafilter or other site. 

do you really want to upload the same photo multiple times?  we didn't either.

things allyoucanupload.com doesn't have:

• no registration required
• no ads on the pages seen by the uploader
• no limit on the size of the photos you can upload
• no limit on the total amount of images you can upload

please try it out.  in our perf testing it tests muliple times faster than the competition (flickr,photobucket, imageshack).  of course they have tons of usage, but so does webshots.  we'd love to see some real world testing and feedback on the new service.  all comments are welcome.  we've got some ideas for additions but we thought we'd launch with just the basics.

oh yeah - here's a nice picture of some tulip petals by my wife to put some colour on this page.

Gorillaz

This weekend, I was driving my daughter back home and she asked me to replay a song.   "Dare" by the Gorillaz was playing (perhaps too loudly) and it's her fav.   she's not yet 18 months old, so her ask was actually "moah" coming from her car seat.

We recently got the DVD of the Gorillaz live at the Manchester Opera House.

As the entire world knows, it's a great album, but it's even better to watch - with the guest appearances by De La Soul and Shaun Ryder etc. Kids were at the show, singing along and dancing on stage.  very cool.