Photo sharing innovation has slowed down again. Flickr is still good, but isn’t innovating aggressively, and it’s starting to show its age. Picassa kinda sucks. iPhoto is very nice but doesn’t have a strong online component. Facebook has a great photo app but it’s still Facebook – too closed. I think the space might be opening up again, let’s hope someone has a good go at it.
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Peter Van Dijck 
How are things going peter?
Your thoughts made me chuckle because I completely agree.
Picassa is way behind, but like most google apps it starts rudimentary and is slowly growing on me.
At the very least I’ve been pleased that I’ve weathered the market share wars without any scars.
I have some friends on Picassa, get updates when they post, they have a good slide show viewer. I can track my comments and comment responses and can favorite their photos so I can find them again when and if I need to.
Basically it works for me, I don’t loath it.
Meanwhile I do loath facebook. While generally sucking the only feature it seems to have over other photo services is a completely control freak personality. Can’t favorite stuff unless someone has marked me as a friend… (at least I think that’s the reason)… though I appear to be able to share it on my profile, which is just odd.
Horrible navigation, horrible slide show, clunky interface, can’t view photos large. In short no respect for the value of the photos. Need I go on.
Overall… it’s the walled garden that annoys me the most. I find facebook’s privacy excentricities like needing to verify my username and password with every post, ongoing demands for phone number verification, date of birth and other data, and the rediculously complex privacy settings to be rather useless and actually counter productive to my wants and needs of transparency between what is private and what is openly public.
In short I don’t need a hundred checkboxes for what data should and should not be private to which circle of friends, family and contacts.
It shouldn’t demand from me any more data then verifying my email address. Beyond that it should be my choice.
Instead I have an ultra-simple solution…
if I want stuff to be public I add it to facebook… if not I don’t add it to facebook.
I’m freaking brilliant eh?
I came up with that all on my own… well… that and that’s the way every other site on the web works.
While I haven’t spent a lot of time obsessing over it I think maybe what facebook is doing is preying on people’s insecurities by offering them a whole complex product full of lip service that in fact is destroying expectations of privacy and will hurt them in the long run.
I.E. when a work “friend” takes a photo of them behaving badly from their “protected” facebook feed and sends it to another “friend” at work where it’s free to make the rounds and embarass them professionaly.
Anything on the web is 100% public. There is no “just for friends and family”.
Offering insecure people lip service just creates a self full-filling prophecy.
So… perhaps I overlooked something, but I’m curious what you like about facebook’s photo app? I’ll readily admit that i may have overlooked something?
Peace,
-Mike