I was in Mountain View today! Does it have to be tonight? Can you do next week? I will be back in town. - Daniel Brusilovsky
Damn, how about tomorrow? Want to come over for a Half Moon Bay BBQ? :-) - Robert Scoble
ooh, ooh, pick me! pick me! .... wait.... that'd be a long walk. nm :) - Chris Abbey
Do we get to keep the hardware device? :P - David Recordon
@Robert Scoble: We're thinking about heading your way tomorrow, actually. Our 4th of July plans are up the air, but it's a possibility. You have a BBQ planned? What time? - Don MacAskill
Don: call me when you're coming over tomorrow. The BBQ is gonna be going in the evening. +1-425-205-1921 - Robert Scoble
I'll see if we can make it. If we can't this weekend, we should do it again sometime soon. :) - Don MacAskill
Why is it I feel like I miss out on stuff when I live up here in S. MN? - Mike Wills
@Mike Wills - or Jacksonville, Florida... - JA Castillo
I agree. I love the flickr community, but IMHO smugmug is a better setup for me. Much more professional. Different strokes, I guess. I get the feeling that smugmug probably makes a little more $$$ than flickr, too. I would love to see some financial metrics on all the major online photo sharing sites.... - Matthew Freeman
Hey Don, Twip podcast ( www.twipphoto.com) just mentioned SmugMug last week with regards to the shopping cart. Surely this is one way Smugmug is better than Flickr (I'm thinking of Twitter vs FF too much)!!! - Roberto Bonini
Flickr has the largest collection of tagged and organized photos that has ever existed in the world. There is incredible power in this organization that people have yet to even comprehend. I would consider them the most successful photo-sharing site on the web... even if Zooomr is cool too. ;) - Thomas Hawk
Metric: Silicon Valley mindshare. People can't say "share photos" without the words "on flickr." On TC photo-sharing sites are judged by how quickly the reviewer can find those features that mimic flickr's. - Bruce Lewis
@Matthew Freeman: Just be clear, SmugMug doesn't belong in that category, either. Other companies have much larger photo repositories than Flickr (and way larger than us) and have made more money than Flickr (or us). This isn't SmugMug vs Flickr (and it almost never is) - it's about Flickr not being "the most successful" in any sense of the word. - Don MacAskill
@Thomas Hawk: I'm sorry, but the WSJ or New York Times or Fortune magazine - you know, the people who define success in this business - wouldn't use "largest collection of tagged and organized photos" as a measure of success when using the word "most". It's awesome, and useful, but "most"? Come on. - Don MacAskill
@Bruce Lewis: Silicon Valley mindshare is hardly a useful barometer either. Adoption and financial success are the two typically used and well-understood metrics (and they're often at odds with each other, at least initially) - and Flickr doesn't match up to either. - Don MacAskill
Hey, you asked which metric, not which useful metric. :-) - Bruce Lewis
Don, which photosharing site would you say would be the "most successful" in terms of adoption? Which in terms of financial success? My guess is that if all of the photo sharing sites out there were independent and all went public at the same time that Flickr would fetch the highest price in the public markets. - Thomas Hawk
As sad as it is to measure a site this way... my mom knows what flickr is (although she still complains about the missing 'e') - John Worthington
Actually Thomas, I would guess that Facebook has the largest collection of tagged images and would probably fetch the highest price. Entertaining discussion and as a founder of the original (Webshots) I am also a user of Flickr, paying customer for Smugmug, and also post to Facebook ;-) - Narendra
I'm not sure that the quality of the images on Facebook are in the same league as Flickr. Also, seems like Flickr has been around several more years than Facebook and it's reason for existence is photos, where Facebook's primary function is not necessarily photo sharing, more like vanity. So I'd bet that Flickr has more total photos and definitely more quality photos. - Jeff P. Henderson
@Jeff: Facebook limits the maximum length of an image to 604 pixels and they aren't keyword searchable. The biggest problem when discussing this type of thing is we are all way ahead of the curve with these sites. The general population are only still just getting digital cameras and haven't got the notion of sharing them online. We are still in very early days and to declare a winner now would be foolish. - John Worthington
You're probably right about Facebook having the largest collection of tagged images Narendra, but they are not organized nearly as effectively as Flickr. More than just tagging flickr ranks, coordinates geotags, etc. But photo sharing is only a portion of Facebook. Facebook would be better compared to Yahoo which also has a portion of their company (Flickr) serving photos. - Thomas Hawk
The biggest problem with Facebook photos is I have 4,500+ images on there but at best could only expect 100-200 people to ever see. Plus the fact you have to already be a Facebook memeber kills the chances of my parents or relatives ever seeing them. I have slowly being uploading to Flickr but it is by no means perfect. I have a list of at least 10 features I would love to see (first of which is black screen version). I can give someone my flickr address and they can see all my images straight away. - John Worthington
@Thomas Hawk: Flickr has high quality photos, no-one's doubting that. But if that were the metric, Annie Leibowitz' personal site would be "most successful" or something. As far as adoption, there are lots that outstrip it: WebShots, Kodak, Photobucket, ImageShack, Facebook, etc. Financial too: Photobucket sold for $300M, Shutterfly had succesful IPO, Facebook's photo sharing piece is clearly valuable, etc etc. It's just a bad characterization for a great site. - Don MacAskill
So what site has best combination of images, users, quality, community, finacial stability, user-based finacial oppertunity and (general population) brand awareness? - John Worthington
@John I started posting to Facebook for dance-friends, but it was too hard for dancers to signup, so I moved to Picasa. I'm reconsidering & wondering what to post to Flickr and what to Picasa. - Mitchell Tsai
@John Worthington: I question whether we're that far ahead of the curve. That we pigeonhole all photo-centric sites into one category shows how primitive our thinking is. Imagine a discussion about which is a better text-sharing site, craigslist or friendfeed. Discussing which of flickr or smugmug is the better photo-sharing site is almost as nonsensical. It depends what you want to do with your photos. - Bruce Lewis
@Bruce My point was that we are discussing this topic in a closed enviroment. Go to any local supermarket and ask random people where they would put thier photos online. I bet you the default reaction would be "Why would I do that?". The question of who is the most successful (not the best) has not even begun to be decided. My mum (50ish, love ya mum) knows about Flickr cause I showed her my stuff. She then sent the link to my sister and she was "What's Flickr"? Until the general public 'switches on'.... - John Worthington
And anyway, the article said 'most successful' not best. - John Worthington
@John Point taken. You're right that it's too early to tell who will be most successful. - Bruce Lewis
These look intriguing. Are you looking at these more for their online "books" or the actual printed ones? - JA Castillo
@JA Castillo: They're just one of thousands of API developers at SmugMug. They happen to be brand-new (to us), very cool (especially their new two-page layout), and the very first app I know of to use OAuth at SmugMug. I hope we can work more closely with them as time goes on, but for now, there's no official relationship other than we like them and they like us. :) - Don MacAskill
I appreciate the insight. Thank you! - JA Castillo
Timeline seems to be sort of an afterthought. Can you have photos not in a gallery or in multiple galleries? - Mike Cohen
Photos must reside in a gallery, I'm afraid. As for multiple galleries, today, there's keywords, timeline, and most popular to break your photos out into dynamic "galleries", but you cannot have symlinks, if that's what you're talking about. Sounds like a good feature though... stay tuned? ;) - Don MacAskill
Weird, says 8 hours ago, but I only sent it like ~3 hours ago. Twitter timestamp fail? - Don MacAskill
don ... great change ... my wife has been looking forward to the update ... noticing though that the checkboxes don't look right in FF3 when "simplifying" ... might be a css issue since the qty box and +/- don't line up either - Dan Haley via twhirl
posted a message
“Seeing better / faster uptake of SmugVault than I'd expected. It's a slow burn, but faster than I thought. Hope it continues!”
“Very interesting. FriendFeed traffic to my SmugVault blog post is slaughtering the Twitter traffic. I wouldn't have predicted that. Guess I choose correctly? :)”
TechMeme is catching up fast. It's at about 66% of FriendFeed's hits (FF is #1 for this story so far) - but I don't think we've been on TechMeme as long. I don't really care all that much, but intellectually, I'm find it interesting. :) - Don MacAskill
TechMeme is dominant now (2X FriendFeed), but FriendFeed is still far ahead of Twitter and has generated a surprisingly high percentage of the thousands of clicks to that blog entry. Amazing. - Don MacAskill
“Ok, so a few days ago everyone said we should do SmugMug's new product announcement here on FriendFeed. We're ready in ~30 minutes. Are you? Is this gonna fly? Does a tree falling in an empty forest make a sound? :)”
iteresting to see what comes from this Don ... - John Head via twhirl
Looking forward to it. I love the continuous improvement of Smugmug. - Luke Foust
maybe the removal of "fleeing flickr" so I can get some referral love :) That'd be cool, those who haven't run from flickr probably belong there LOL (j/k) - Jason C.
@Mark Trapp: Hahaha! We *hate* announcing features before they're live. Can't believe so many companies do it. Not sure we ever have - and I hope we never do. - Don MacAskill
Looks like it worked. We made a noise. :) Thanks everyone! - Don MacAskill
