[disclaimer: see my profile for my involvement with Yahoo, I have no connection with this particular incident/Flickr/etc]
This and the TC post annoy me because Snapjoy (or perhaps the tech press) is trying to spin this into some underdog vs evil big company story when it isn't.
For example, when Snapjoy says "We tried our best to stay within Flickr’s API limits, but the overwhelmingly positive response has exceeded our expectations.", what they are really saying is that they didn't implement rate limiting correctly.
And when they say "We’re a bit surprised that the key was disabled almost immediately after we reached the limit.", what they're saying is that Flickr actually did implement said limiting correctly (don't have personal knowledge, assume that's what happened).
I also like the spin from the tech press on this somehow meaning that your photos are locked into Flickr when Snapjoy has neither an API or any other mechanism to get photos out - all I see is a promise of a future feature to sync to Dropbox/S3.
I completely understand the PR game being played here but I wish it needn't be this way. Especially since Snapjoy seems to be a very slick product from a very talented team.
And all this ignoring the issues with the name - I'm not sure how it is ok to use a derivative of your competitor's name to build something designed to take users away from them.
With Flickr, I get unlimited storage for $24/year. I'm probably nearing 100GB of photos there, so in order to store those same photos with Snapjoy, it would cost me $120/year. What's the extra value that I get for an additional $100/year?
And does Snapjoy integrate with iPhoto? I use Flickrfriend for iPhoto now to sync Flickr and iPhoto, but if I don't have a way to sync Snapjoy and iPhoto, it's a non-starter.
The marketing is really funny, but I had the same thought pattern.
I looked on flickr and I have 15,711 pictures. It would cost me $60 a year on Snapjoy. Even if Snapjoy, which is still in beta, is better than good old reliable trusty flickr, that pricing is a non-starter for me.
What I really want to see is someone come up with a one click export to Picassa where I don't have to download all the pix first.
<snarky>Perhaps some peace of mind that with ~5 times the revenue-per-customer Snapjoy might survive and even thrive, where Yahoo's revolving-door CEO office with it's mandatory new-blood costcutting chestbeating puts Flickr's long term outlook in serious doubt?<.snarky>
1) it just attacks flickr without really giving any reason. Flickr is a sinking ship. Great. Why? Why do we have any reason to believe Snapjoy is going to outlast Flickr?
2) Using the image of a sinking cruise ship weeks after a cruise ship wreck killed at least 17 people. I'm not easily offended, and this didn't personally offend me, but it's pretty much the first thing I thought of when I saw a drawing of a sinking cruise ship. Why run the risk?
> Flickr is a sinking ship. Great. Why? Why do we have any reason to believe Snapjoy is going to outlast Flickr?
s/Flickr/del\.icio\.us/g
s/SnapJoy/pinboard/g
For the regex-impaired, swap Flickr with delicious and Snapjoy with pinboard.
When I found out that del.icio.us was falling apart, the discovery of pinboard was a remarkable discovery! The founder posted a link to a migration tool that allowed me painlessly keep thousands of my old bookmarks. Just by itself that was reason enough for me to support them.
I can't speak to the long term viability of pinboard or SnapJoy, but that's true of a lot of web services, frankly. A few years ago you would've seemed crazy for calling Flickr a "sinking ship."
Yeah, I have to agree on both points. I feel like I missed a memo about Flickr going down. AFAIK Flickr isn't even leaking, never-mind sinking... Am I wrong? Have I missed something?
And API is one of the things that makes Flickr great, Snapjoy may have a sweet web interface but that's not enough. I'm guessing from the fact that they have a GitHub account that they'll release an API when the code has settled down a bit more internally, so that's probably just a short-term issue.
The pricing though... the pricing isn't even remotely comparable. You gotta give me a damn good reason to spend that much more money on a competing tool that basically just hosts my images and makes them easily viewable.
It would be nice if I could also rescue some pictures from facebook too. Double brownie points if your software can automatically remove duplicates in the process.
Snapjoy automatically organizes using metadata, which Facebook strips out. That plus recompression make it difficult to detect duplicates from Facebook.
This is great -- I've been looking for a way to get my photos off Flickr before my pro account expires this May. Snapjoy sucked in 2200 photos in just a few minutes.
(The only glitch was when I clicked "Get Started Now" on the flickraft site, it just redirected me to snapjoy.com. I had to manually go into my settings and connect my Flickr account, which triggered the import automagically.)
I agree - Snapjoy is fast, beautiful, and simple. They can win by doing less than the competition. Personally, I can't take the bloat and feature-creep that has turned Flickr into a giant hassle. Just getting your photos into Flickr has been a hurdle from day one, with no official app for iPhoto.
That's not to say there aren't Snapjoy features I want to see: the ability to create/share collections that span multiple dates/moments is at the top of the list.
But as soon as I started using Snapjoy I knew it had massive potential. I especially love the default timeline view, it puts just enough structure around your photos for discoverability, etc.
EDIT: I would love to be able to pay annually and save, though. $15 month is a lot of coin for a non-business app.
On the surface I love this idea. Flickr has been stagnant for years and starting to worry me. I don't mind paying for a photo sharing service but the market sure is saturated. I'll be looking for a little more than a pretty, overpriced UI over Amazon's S3.
Wouldn't it be great if a company came around and offered front ends for S3. One for photo sharing, one for docs. You could switch them out like skins. Your data is in one place and never moves. If a competitor comes along with a better front-end, you could change to them.
That would also be nice, because then you could have one monthly fee for all of you online storage needs. Let's be honest, they're all hosted by Amazon anyway.
Snapfish, DropBox, and several of the other large photo / filing sharing sites are essentially a UI for Amazon's S3 cloud.
I pay for dropbox primarily to store family photos & videos.
In fact the stuff I need to back-up that fits outside that category would fit in a free, or lower priced dropbox plan.
I would switch based on price alone since photos are fairly static, non-changing, and the #1 concern is that they survive a hard disk crash.
I wonder when Amazon just decides to go and own this market by offering a better photo UI, or buys somebody to do it for them.
Amazon has already shown they have no fear of running over profitable customer segments (eg they launched Prime Video while also counting NetFlix as a huge client).
I'd very surprised if Amazon or anyone comes up with a better UX/UI than Dropbox. It has to be one of the best designed, engineered, and executed startups in a long time. Whenever I use it share between my iPhone, iPad, laptop and ubuntu server, I'm amazed on how well it just works. To say it's "just a UI for S3" is a little simplistic.
Snapfish and all other photo sharing sites lack one fundamental thing that any photo enthusiast will identify immediately as one of the biggest problems.
Image de-duplication.
Snapjoy has the only image de-duplicating algorithm that I've seen that really works.
I love the infographic and the one-sentence pitch. It's funny, it's totally clear why I should use it, and I'll never forget it.
People here are saying that they're jumping the gun and Flickr isn't sinking yet. Maybe that's true. But great marketing can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that's what this looks like to me.
We built UnifyPhotos - http://export.goyaka.com a month back, which moved photos from Flickr to Facebook. We moved more than 850k photos.
I can say that the API limiting here is an implementation issue. Instead of querying information about each photo, if you could pass meta information (date_upload,geo,date_taken,icon_server,original_format, url_sq,url_o,url_m,url_b,description) while doing photosets.getPhotos, you don't have to query for each photo.
I guess I'm starting to get jaded... I remember when Flickr was the liferaft of Yahoo Photos and then even before that when Yahoo Photos was the liferaft of Kodak Galleries.
I still don't have a photo storage solution that I'm happy with - but I'm hoping that in 10 years or so Google will have indexed the three or four hard drives in my storage unit and placed them into Picasa X.
Interesting note mentioned there - "I love snapjoy's UI. But they don't allow import from flickr. Also, social circle in Snapjoy is something I have to build. Facebook fits the bill."
Many Flickr users were not happy when they discovered that the ability to migrate their accounts was considered "burn[ing] bandwidth and CPU cycles."
My co-founder, Kris, was quoted with the following:
> Tate from Zooomr says that the exports are a cost of doing business, that Web 2.0 is where “the roach motel stops” and that Zooomr will always make it easy for their customers to take their data elsewhere
Props to Snapjoy for creating an awesome product and giving people freedom. I hope that you guys get your license key back!
I'm actually curious if this is a violation. Does anyone know? The font is definitely different and the F is even capitalized on the boat graphic, though the colors are the same and the name "flickr" is in there. It makes me think of those cereal brands that try to make you think they're the popular brand by dancing as closely as trademark law lets them.
Sorry. I'm not leaving Flickr. It's one of my favorite spots on the Internet. I love the community aspect of the site and the countless quality (and not so quality) Creative Commons contributions.
I have spent more hours than I'd care to admit sifting through photos, admiring people's work, reading comments - all the while listening to trip hop or whatever is on SOMAFM.
It's one of the best parts of website design: finding the perfect image. I'm not going anywhere.
This. 1000 times this. I _so_ often hear geeks saying "It's easy to leave Flickr, just host your photos on S3/Dropbox/your-own-web-hosting! Done!". That misses out on a _lot_ of what keeps people on Flickr. The social/community/discoverability side of it.
I suspect Flickr's successor will either:
1) be a service which provides all that "social/community/discoverability" stuff while letting users choose which of many backends actually do their photo storage (openphoto might be a first contender here),
or 2) one of the existing social networks will steamroller over the entire photo sharing space (Facebook seems to be gaining considerable momentum down this path).
sriramk|14 years ago
This and the TC post annoy me because Snapjoy (or perhaps the tech press) is trying to spin this into some underdog vs evil big company story when it isn't.
For example, when Snapjoy says "We tried our best to stay within Flickr’s API limits, but the overwhelmingly positive response has exceeded our expectations.", what they are really saying is that they didn't implement rate limiting correctly.
And when they say "We’re a bit surprised that the key was disabled almost immediately after we reached the limit.", what they're saying is that Flickr actually did implement said limiting correctly (don't have personal knowledge, assume that's what happened).
I also like the spin from the tech press on this somehow meaning that your photos are locked into Flickr when Snapjoy has neither an API or any other mechanism to get photos out - all I see is a promise of a future feature to sync to Dropbox/S3.
I completely understand the PR game being played here but I wish it needn't be this way. Especially since Snapjoy seems to be a very slick product from a very talented team.
And all this ignoring the issues with the name - I'm not sure how it is ok to use a derivative of your competitor's name to build something designed to take users away from them.
unknown|14 years ago
[deleted]
cfinke|14 years ago
And does Snapjoy integrate with iPhoto? I use Flickrfriend for iPhoto now to sync Flickr and iPhoto, but if I don't have a way to sync Snapjoy and iPhoto, it's a non-starter.
latchkey|14 years ago
I looked on flickr and I have 15,711 pictures. It would cost me $60 a year on Snapjoy. Even if Snapjoy, which is still in beta, is better than good old reliable trusty flickr, that pricing is a non-starter for me.
What I really want to see is someone come up with a one click export to Picassa where I don't have to download all the pix first.
bigiain|14 years ago
subpixel|14 years ago
ssharp|14 years ago
1) it just attacks flickr without really giving any reason. Flickr is a sinking ship. Great. Why? Why do we have any reason to believe Snapjoy is going to outlast Flickr?
2) Using the image of a sinking cruise ship weeks after a cruise ship wreck killed at least 17 people. I'm not easily offended, and this didn't personally offend me, but it's pretty much the first thing I thought of when I saw a drawing of a sinking cruise ship. Why run the risk?
mvanveen|14 years ago
When I found out that del.icio.us was falling apart, the discovery of pinboard was a remarkable discovery! The founder posted a link to a migration tool that allowed me painlessly keep thousands of my old bookmarks. Just by itself that was reason enough for me to support them.
I can't speak to the long term viability of pinboard or SnapJoy, but that's true of a lot of web services, frankly. A few years ago you would've seemed crazy for calling Flickr a "sinking ship."
cannuk|14 years ago
jeffreymcmanus|14 years ago
zalew|14 years ago
btw to all the photo app creators out there: no API - no go.
masukomi|14 years ago
And API is one of the things that makes Flickr great, Snapjoy may have a sweet web interface but that's not enough. I'm guessing from the fact that they have a GitHub account that they'll release an API when the code has settled down a bit more internally, so that's probably just a short-term issue.
The pricing though... the pricing isn't even remotely comparable. You gotta give me a damn good reason to spend that much more money on a competing tool that basically just hosts my images and makes them easily viewable.
zargon|14 years ago
RandallBrown|14 years ago
underwater|14 years ago
The site is also broken. I can't click on the logo to find out more about Snapjoy. Pass.
swalsh|14 years ago
brlewis|14 years ago
masnick|14 years ago
(The only glitch was when I clicked "Get Started Now" on the flickraft site, it just redirected me to snapjoy.com. I had to manually go into my settings and connect my Flickr account, which triggered the import automagically.)
jakequist|14 years ago
subpixel|14 years ago
That's not to say there aren't Snapjoy features I want to see: the ability to create/share collections that span multiple dates/moments is at the top of the list.
But as soon as I started using Snapjoy I knew it had massive potential. I especially love the default timeline view, it puts just enough structure around your photos for discoverability, etc.
EDIT: I would love to be able to pay annually and save, though. $15 month is a lot of coin for a non-business app.
mlapida|14 years ago
Wouldn't it be great if a company came around and offered front ends for S3. One for photo sharing, one for docs. You could switch them out like skins. Your data is in one place and never moves. If a competitor comes along with a better front-end, you could change to them.
That would also be nice, because then you could have one monthly fee for all of you online storage needs. Let's be honest, they're all hosted by Amazon anyway.
subpixel|14 years ago
aresant|14 years ago
I pay for dropbox primarily to store family photos & videos.
In fact the stuff I need to back-up that fits outside that category would fit in a free, or lower priced dropbox plan.
I would switch based on price alone since photos are fairly static, non-changing, and the #1 concern is that they survive a hard disk crash.
I wonder when Amazon just decides to go and own this market by offering a better photo UI, or buys somebody to do it for them.
Amazon has already shown they have no fear of running over profitable customer segments (eg they launched Prime Video while also counting NetFlix as a huge client).
waterside81|14 years ago
justincormack|14 years ago
garry|14 years ago
Image de-duplication.
Snapjoy has the only image de-duplicating algorithm that I've seen that really works.
codenerdz|14 years ago
Snapjoy doesnt :)
snowmaker|14 years ago
People here are saying that they're jumping the gun and Flickr isn't sinking yet. Maybe that's true. But great marketing can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that's what this looks like to me.
alagu|14 years ago
I can say that the API limiting here is an implementation issue. Instead of querying information about each photo, if you could pass meta information (date_upload,geo,date_taken,icon_server,original_format, url_sq,url_o,url_m,url_b,description) while doing photosets.getPhotos, you don't have to query for each photo.
tlrobinson|14 years ago
I've hit the 100GB limit on Dropbox, and I'd like to be able to view albums on the web.
dy|14 years ago
I still don't have a photo storage solution that I'm happy with - but I'm hoping that in 10 years or so Google will have indexed the three or four hard drives in my storage unit and placed them into Picasa X.
stuntmouse|14 years ago
antidaily|14 years ago
jpren|14 years ago
ramanujam|14 years ago
Interesting note mentioned there - "I love snapjoy's UI. But they don't allow import from flickr. Also, social circle in Snapjoy is something I have to build. Facebook fits the bill."
mvanveen|14 years ago
Many Flickr users were not happy when they discovered that the ability to migrate their accounts was considered "burn[ing] bandwidth and CPU cycles."
My co-founder, Kris, was quoted with the following:
> Tate from Zooomr says that the exports are a cost of doing business, that Web 2.0 is where “the roach motel stops” and that Zooomr will always make it easy for their customers to take their data elsewhere
Props to Snapjoy for creating an awesome product and giving people freedom. I hope that you guys get your license key back!
lurker17|14 years ago
antidaily|14 years ago
zalew|14 years ago
AznHisoka|14 years ago
artursapek|14 years ago
zeroboy|14 years ago
I have spent more hours than I'd care to admit sifting through photos, admiring people's work, reading comments - all the while listening to trip hop or whatever is on SOMAFM.
It's one of the best parts of website design: finding the perfect image. I'm not going anywhere.
bigiain|14 years ago
This. 1000 times this. I _so_ often hear geeks saying "It's easy to leave Flickr, just host your photos on S3/Dropbox/your-own-web-hosting! Done!". That misses out on a _lot_ of what keeps people on Flickr. The social/community/discoverability side of it.
I suspect Flickr's successor will either:
1) be a service which provides all that "social/community/discoverability" stuff while letting users choose which of many backends actually do their photo storage (openphoto might be a first contender here),
or 2) one of the existing social networks will steamroller over the entire photo sharing space (Facebook seems to be gaining considerable momentum down this path).
rokhayakebe|14 years ago
MattGrommes|14 years ago
benatkin|14 years ago