The "media locker" photo storage system on the newly redesigned Multiply.com.
(Credit: Multiply)Multiply, the small social network that acquired MSN Groups when Microsoft shuttered the product late last year, has launched a redesign.
In addition to a new news-feed-based homepage, there are now plug-ins for Google's Picasa and Microsoft's Windows Photo Gallery for easy syncing, a better auto-upload tool, and increased prominence of the "media locker" where members can store high-resolution versions of their photos.
Multiply, which has between 13 million and 14 million members, makes money from premium accounts, photo-printing services, and advertising on free accounts. The company says that right now, those three revenue streams are about even, but that with the updates it expects premium accounts and photo printing to take a bigger share.
Of nearly equal importance to Multiply's redesign is marketing: with its focus on photo storage, the company hopes to appeal to "digital moms" who want to share photos with close friends, maintain a backup of their high-resolution photos and do basic editing online, and turn their pictures into albums and scrapbooks.
The executives' rationale: as Facebook gets bigger and more public, a market is opening up for people who don't see it as a safe or private place to share photos of scenes along the lines of their kids in the bathtub. The revamped Multiply, the Boca Raton, Fla.-based company's execs hope, will have appeal as a sort of hybrid of a social network and a photo storage and printing site like Snapfish or Shutterfly.
The new image-editing tools on MySpace.
(Credit: MySpace)MySpace has brought on board some Web-based image-editing tools from FotoFlexer so that members can fool around with the photos they've uploaded to the site.
It's no Photoshop. But FotoFlexer can perform basic editing tasks (cropping, resizing, flipping, red-eye removal), as well as distortion, color effects, and some decoration and "bling" features (always important).
So far, FotoFlexer on MySpace is available only to U.S. users. The tools will roll out internationally soon, however.
This move makes sense for MySpace. Not only does image editing tie in nicely with its longstanding express-yourself, customize-anything vibe, but it's also a way to keep users on the MySpace domain.
The News Corp.-owned social network has been eclipsed by Facebook in worldwide traffic, but relatively recent ComScore statistics have shown that MySpace users stick around for about twice as long on each visit.
Facebook might not be a photo-sharing site, per se, but there are a heck of a lot of pictures uploaded to it.
On Tuesday night, engineer Doug Beaver wrote a blog post announcing that the total count of photos on the site now stands at about 10 billion. The social network announced informally in August that it has hit 100 million active users worldwide.
To compare, the News Corp.-owned Photobucket, which has a real-time ticker of photos uploaded, stood at slightly less than 6.2 billion photos on Wednesday morning. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, hit 2 billion photos just less than a year ago.
"To celebrate (the photo-hosting milestone), we got a bunch of cupcakes and handed them out to our engineering and operations groups," the post read. "One of our engineers calculated that if we had gotten one cupcake for each of our photos, and lined them up side by side, the line could reach halfway to the moon."
Facebook's popularity may indeed reach the moon, but the news is a bit troubling too. Beaver noted that Facebook stores four sizes of each image, meaning that it has more than 40 billion images stored on its servers. That's a lot of storage space required, and though it's much cheaper than it used to be, hardware simply isn't free.
Facebook reportedly borrowed $100 million in May to cover server costs, and while the company is still pretty much swimming in venture capital, it's not clear that revenues will be up to par with server demands any time soon. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that the company hopes to be profitable in three years.
Discount retailer Target has signed a deal with photo-sharing service Photobucket, adding it to the small collection of online partners for its in-store photo-printing service.
Through the partnership, members of Photobucket can directly order photos for pickup at most Target stores (presumably any Targets that don't have photo-printing stations would be the exception). Typically, the photos will be ready within an hour.
Photobucket, a unit of News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, is the third current partner for the retailer; Target already has partnerships in place with Shutterfly's and Kodak's online photo services.
Last week, Photobucket announced a partnership with start-up Scrapblog to make it easier for members to put their photos into online (and eventually print) scrapbooks.
Photobucket, the massive photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, has partnered with Scrapblog, a start-up that lets members create online scrapbooks.
Through the partnership, whose financial terms were not disclosed, Scrapblog's drag-and-drop application will be available within Photobucket so that users can work their Photobucket albums into scrapbooks and then share or embed them on the Web. Starting in September, printed versions of Scrapblog scrapbooks will be available for purchase.
"Scrapbooks have traditionally been an important part of how people have kept and shared memories offline for many years, and bringing that capability online to Photobucket gives users even more options for enhancing their lives and expressing themselves digitally," Photobucket president Alex Welch said in a release. "We are excited to partner with Scrapblog, and be the first photo and video Web site to integrate a digital-scrapbooking feature directly into the site, making it easy, convenient, and accessible to everyone."
Coral Gables, Fla.-based Scrapblog, founded in 2006, has created scrapbook-related marketing campaigns for brands ranging from Carnival Cruise Lines to the ABC television series Ugly Betty (parent company Disney is an investor). Longworth Venture Partners led Scrapblog's Series A venture round in March 2007.
Photobucket, the photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, is expected to launch a "group albums" feature on Wednesday.
"Group Albums are designed to offer a simple way for colleagues, friends, and families to collaborate on creating photos and video collections where the entire group can contribute, access, and enjoy them," Photobucket President Alex Welch explained in a statement Tuesday. Photobucket released its first developer application program interface (API) last month.
Basically, these are collaborative media-sharing albums much like the "groups" feature in Yahoo's Flickr. Photobucket's release suggests that they could be used to pool photos and videos of weddings, graduations, concerts, and the like. You could also create groups for pictures of dogs on skateboards, superhero-inspired Halloween costumes, or whatever else you might want, but keep in mind that Photobucket likes to keep things squeaky-clean.
Additional features of Photobucket's group albums, which have a 1GB storage limit, include the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of updates, create a slideshow, and if you're the group owner, get e-mail notifications when new photos or video are added.
Group administrators also can create their own easy-to-remember URLs, for example, photobucket.com/cuteboyswithnoshirts.
Later, gator.
Google has announced the shutdown of Hello, a sort of photo-messaging service that became part of the Mountain View family when Google acquired Picasa in 2004.
"All good things come to an end," a placeholder on the Hello.com home page says. "So it is with sadness that we say goodbye to Hello." Guess they weren't so sad that they felt the need to steer clear of goofy plays on words. Hello will fade away on May 15, though Google's photo-sharing service Picasa remains otherwise intact.
"We originally embarked on a mission to make photo sharing easier and more fun with Hello," the message on the site explains. "We plan to keep carrying that torch in new projects to come." That could be interpreted as a hint that Hello's technology may be seen in future Google projects--or not.
As Google Blogoscoped notes, Mountain View now has the domain hello.com. And it's not like Larry, Sergey, and the gang need to sell it for beer money.
Tiny Pictures, a company that operates a mobile media-sharing site called Radar, announced on Monday that it has pulled in $7.2 million in Series B funding. The funding round was led by Valley stalwart Draper Fisher Jurvetson; previous investor Mohr Davidow Ventures also contributed.
Radar's service lets users shoot mobile photos and videos to its site through e-mail and mobile messaging. All photos on Radar are automatically friends-only; members of a user's friends list can instantly see uploaded content and comment on it from their PCs or mobile phones.
It looks as if Radar has some fairly active users; despite having only 750,000 registered members (it's projected to have 1 million by the end of the first quarter), 15 million photos are uploaded each month--a decent number for a site so small. Tiny Pictures also boasts compatibility with most carriers (excluding a few small ones) and more than 225 varieties of handsets.
The company has deep connections: Tiny Pictures had already raised $4 million in a previous funding round and had also pulled in angel investments from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, as well as longtime entrepreneur and investor Joichi Ito. Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am, who sits on Tiny Pictures' advisory board, is helping develop its "Radar Gallery" sponsored content for movie and music tie-ins.
With the new funding, San Francisco-based Tiny Pictures plans to focus on more opportunities with Radar Gallery, as well as international growth. Founder John Poisson is no stranger to the Asian market, having been head of mobile-media research and design for Sony in Tokyo.
Not surprisingly, he says the service is quite big in Japan.
Do we really need another outlet for photo sharing? Shutterfly thinks so.
The photo-printing service, best known for publishing custom calendars, albums, posters, and other photography-infused goods, announced on Wednesday the launch of "Shutterfly Gallery," a social network that is sort of like a Flickr for the scrapbooking set.
Shutterfly Gallery is the first major project launched since the publicly traded company acquired Nexo Systems, a Web site personalization start-up. Nexo's technology has provided the technology for the new social-networking arm of Shutterfly.
Shutterfly Gallery encourages "storytelling" (see, I told you it would appeal to scrapbook lovers) through the creation and sharing of online photo books that can be themed and customized with backgrounds, text, and tags. Members can also rate one another's albums (Ouch! "Scott and Nancy: The First 2 Months" has only two stars!), create profiles, and embed their photo books into Web sites or blogs.
"Our customers are inspiring and enthusiastic storytellers, and have asked for a way to share their stories with other customers and the general public," Jeffrey Housenbold, president and CEO of Shutterfly, said in a statement Wednesday. "Now we are providing them more ways to tell their stories."
Cat lovers, camera-happy vacationers, and proud parents of the world, rejoice!
Apparently, fast-forwarding through commercials just isn't enough. TiVo announced on Monday that users of select photo-sharing services are now able to access their image collections through its set-top boxes.
The digital video recorder manufacturer has partnered with two photo-sharing services--the Google-owned Picasa Web Albums and Fox Interactive Media-owned Photobucket--in order to enable users to surf through their photo albums as well as their friends' and family members', provided that their TiVo boxes are broadband-connected.
A release from the company emphasized the fact that photos are viewable in the highest resolution possible, which on the TiVo Series 3 and TiVo HD devices means full high definition.
In addition, the TiVo interface makes it possible for users to search the overall database of public Picasa or Photobucket images by keyword.
The Photobucket search interface on TiVo
(Credit: Photobucket/TiVo)It's yet another step in TiVo's quest to make its equipment more versatile than the standard DVR--and to make it an appealing choice in a market that remains tepid.
"At TiVo, we're focused on the entire entertainment experience, from movies to music, and in this case--memories," Jim Denney, TiVo's vice president of product marketing, said in the company's statement. "By working with these well-respected and popular photo-sharing partners, TiVo enables families to share their pictures in new, fun ways."
This fall, TiVo announced a deal with RealNetworks' Rhapsody to bring the subscription-based music service to its devices.
