Facebook has acquired Divvyshot (YC W09) | Hacker News Reader

Facebook has acquired Divvyshot (YC W09)

divvyshot.com

196 pointskevintwohy108 comments

Hi everyone,

Thank you for all the congratulations. We're thrilled to be joining the Facebook team. Frankly it's still taking time for everything to sit in.

I'll admit that it's bittersweet. When you spend 18 months obsessing over your company it's hard to see it go. It ultimately came down to the decision that we could touch more people's lives at Facebook...and that's what we've been in this for all along.

Since this post is going to get a lot of eyeballs I want to take this chance to solicit any suggestions/feedback/complaints HNers have for Facebook Photos. I can't comment on exactly what we'll be doing at Facebook, but I can promise whatever you tell me will get in front of the "right people." :)

If you want you can email me directly: sam@divvyshot.com

----

Since their legal department might read this: I'm not yet a Facebook employee and I'm not speaking on behalf of Facebook, anything you tell me is going to be placed in the public domain, you waive all rights to ownership over any IP that Facebook ends up implementing, etc.

</shameless>

First off, congratulations!

Now, suggestions:

1) ability to resize tag boxes to some degree

2) ability to drag tags around, instead of having to remove and re-click to place them

3) ability to change an existing tag. Example: when my mom joined facebook, I had to go back and delete all of the tags to her name (unlinked) and then add in new tags to her name (linked to her profile). It would have been easier to have an "update tag" button that let me link that tag to her profile (preferably for the whole album, but one-by-one would be better than nothing.)

4) I know facebook stores multiple sizes of photos. It would be neat to have more direct control over that -- say, to pick our own thumbnails, or to allow certain photos to be displayed in higher resolutions.

Sorry, I accidentally voted that down (the arrows are not very iPhone friendly), but yes, all of the above!

The biggest issue with facebook photos is the resolution. Most people have 7MP+ cameras now, but facebook resizes them to ~600x450. While I can understand facebook being reluctant to store large pictures, it has become the primary way for many people to share their photos, and it's a shame that so much gets thrown away.

agreed, that's pretty much my only frustration with facebook photos. the resolution is horrible. i can understand not storing the full resolution, but 600x450 or so is just WAY too small.

Yes, meaningful access to the original high-resolution images. By "meaningful" I mean stuff like downloading everything in a zip archive ($10 says fb doesn't do this) to working with iPhoto, Picassa, Flickr, etc. I would even be willing to. pay a couple bucks to download high-res images in a zip file

I promise you if fb doesn't provide decent access to the high-resolution images, DivvyShot will be reinvented by a different founder under a different name and offered up as a paid service. Yep, its that valuable, and Flickr has proven people are willing to pay for this stuff.

We have a service called The Wedding Lens that lets you do this: http://www.theweddinglens.com

Group uploading, full-size resolution uploads and (bulk) downloads.

My partner and I just had a ten year anniversary in Thailand, and we're in the process of sharing our entire groups' photos via Divvyshot. If you had a less wedding-oriented skin/store-front on that website, we'd love to use your service..

Unfortunately our service is only focused on weddings. We originally started with a broader site but then decided to focus on the more lucrative wedding market where people are more willing to pay for services. We have had quite a number of people use the TheWeddingLens for things like birthdays and parties since it still gets the job done (high res photos and bulk downloads). Our long term intent is to expand to the broader market after we attain a decent level of success with weddings.

If you're interested in trying it out I can give you a discount coupon code, just email me at justin [at] theweddinglens.com

My wife and I used WeddingLens for our wedding last year, and we got ~1000 photos within about a week (our wedding had about 60 guests). Well worth the price.

Leo, glad it worked well for you. I've added your testimonial to the site: http://www.theweddinglens.com/testimonials

I have a feeling that will be something tackled down the line with a 'premium' paid account. Divvyshot seems to have this as a future offering as well.

Divvyshot has always stored full-res photos.

hmm, I've never found it to be an issue, and I'm not sure facebook's dominant demographic cares either.

Congrats again, Sam!

One thing that I'd love to see your guys' hands on is the notion of 'ownership' of FB photos -- this is something that was definitely in the DNA of Divvyshot, and it would be really interesting to see FB explore some models of shared/group ownership of content.

I'd like to sync certain directories on my harddrive with FB photos so I don't have to go through the current Java applet-based upload photos process.

Maybe facebook should acquire dropbox...

Please no...

I want to keep using Dropbox.

Fear not. Dropbox has revenues.

One can integrate a photo sharing site with Dropbox without acquiring Dropbox. I did.

They need to fix the performance problems. I've had problems viewing pictures on several occasions. It feels sluggish at times. This is understandable though, seeing as they are the largest photo storage site on the internet.

My grandmother has boxes and boxes of old photos that are unorganized and as it stands will probably be lost forever soon enough.

I think it would be cool if some company would partner with kodak or wallgreens or whoever is running all those 1hr photo developing places that are somehow still in business. They should be outfitted with specialized photo scanners and staffed with professionals who can help scan a lot of photos quickly. Then these photos could be archived online and partially sorted with that facial-recognition software. Maybe dates and annotations could be pulled off of handwriting on the back of photos if it is clear enough. Some kind of family-tree arrangement would be nice, too.

Anyways, I honestly don't expect Facebook or anyone else to implement this. It is too costly and difficult and laborious. I sure as hell wouldn't want to do it. But there's my suggestion.

View counters would be nice.

Larger views would also be nice.

And most important, color correction has to be fixed. It's been improved, but whatever they're doing on the backend for compression is muting and killing all color in my photos when I upload them :/

The Java applet is really bad, pleeeease find another way for users to upload their photos.

Here are some major pain points (and some suggestions):

- The reliability of Facebook Photos is pretty suspect - the AJAX picture loader will get hung up randomly, increased reliability here will make the system a lot more polished.

- The Java upload tool really, really sucks. I would even take a Flash uploader over it, and I really despise Flash. Letting the users interact directly with their file systems may not also be a great idea - can you slurp directly from a memory card or camera connected via USB? This may convince more people to use Facebook as their only stop for photo storage.

- Photo API could use some work - right now the Lightroom Facebook plugin can't seem to delete photos. This means that when I make modifications to a photo and re-publish it just creates new photos on top of the old ones. The Flickr API allows overwrites, which means that the files can be seamlessly replaced, preserving comments and other data.

- iPhoto's facial recognition stuff is really really really cool, it'd be great if Facebook shamelessly stole it :)

Face recognition technology has been around for years. A partner and I even implemented a rudimentary tool for it in a few weeks in an AI course. I always wondered why Facebook couldn't take advantage of this and save the world thousands, if not millions of cumulative hours tagging photos.

Two reasons come to mind,

Even a 5% error rate is unacceptable. People may take offense to machine tag errors.

Second, facebook probably likes the time commitment people make to tagging photos and adding friends in order to tag them to the picture. It increases communication and also adds cases where people get facebook invites so they can get tagged.

The solution to the 5% error is to do the tagging automatically, but make the uploading friend confirm each photo to ensure that it was tagged properly.

I don't consider tagging itself to be inherently social. Being in a social setting with someone is what was social. Putting a picture of someone on Facebook is social. You can still comment on an auto-tagged picture just the same as a manually-tagged one. The only difference is that you save some time for those people who contribute the most (the friends who take dozens of pictures at every event and then spend a couple hours uploading/tagging them the next day). By decreasing the necessary effort of photo-sharing, I would expect to see more uploading and tagging.

A side benefit is that it could eventually make discovery easier. How many pictures do you have at a bar or somewhere else with a bunch of people you don't know in the background? How many times have you hung out someone somewhere, have a picture of them, but didn't get or can't remember their name? Automatic recognition gives you a better chance of meeting some of these people again.

For those saying this is a privacy issue, the uploader doesn't have to see the auto-tag of a non-friend. Instead, the person who has been auto-tagged could be notified and have the option of allowing/disallowing the tag to occur.

I'm not an AI guy, but isn't having people tag their photos is creating a gold mine of data for when they do automate the process?

I read facebook looked at doing this, but their users were already manually tagging all their photos (and cool with that) so the additional hardware/implementation resources were errrr spent elsewhere.

Tagging friends in a photo is a meaningful social action, just like commenting or liking a status update. Automating this would give users one less way to interact with their friends on the site.

there are a lot of situations where you don't want to tag a photo of a friend, the way tags are implemented on facebook.

i generally wouldn't tag a friend in a picture where they look bad, and there are all kinds of social situations where a friend wouldn't want to be tagged in a particular photo -- because one girl would see them with another girl, for example.

I thought of something additional:

Group photo album ownership.

Example: I would love to be able to make a "family photos" album that is shared between me, my wife, and my son. I don't see any reason to have to duplicate their albums, and think it's silly that people have to add all three of us (or look in three places) to see all of our family pictures. If one of us could make an album and add the other two as co-owners, it would be a lot easier for us to put up family pics.

fun widget for viewing a random photo a day from one friend. i have tons of friends, each with tons of photos....i want to engage with them (these aren't folks i speak to normally), but it's overwhelming.

One-way tagging.

People occasionally upload party pictures and tag you in them. It is good that people watching the photos can see who are in them, and go to their profiles. The problem is that it also shows up under "Photos of X" where potential employers and girlfriends parents can see them. So you you have to go and untag yourself from any photos where you look stupid.

Let me remove pictures from "Photos of X" while still staying tagged in them.

How's about not claiming to take ownership of my IP for the mere service of hosting and labelling my pics?

Why the heck did they do that? I mean, congratulations to them, but they just released an amazing rewrite of their product that kicked Facebook Photo's ass. I wonder why they didn't go through with it. Sad...

"...we’ve received an offer we can’t refuse."

Translation: $

Plus, Facebook is an awesome product with millions of users. Now they can help Facebook Photos kick its own ass. Sounds like a win-win for everyone. :)

And I believe that. I would have done it as well. That said, there's something wrong with a startup system that's little more than an elaborate job application process. No problem for that kind of consumer space site but at the end of the day the message is clear: Never trust a startup with something important.

"Never trust a startup with something important."

Well, startups aren't the only types of companies that get bought. Acquisitions are part of the markets and across all types of companies, big or small, young or old.

The only difference is that the tech startup scene is so very loud and vocal about all this. In other markets, it's maybe a side notice in a rarely-read corporate newsletter. Nobody cares except for the individuals directly involved.

Ultimately, the bulk of these M&As happen not because a product is to be destroyed but in order to take it to another, subjectively "higher" level. It's the same here. Whether that happens, as always, remains to be seen, but both parties were willing to try.

Many companies get bought for their products or assets. Some get bought for their customers. Only very few get bought exclusively to hire people. I do follow other industries as well and this is definately unusual.

I know what you mean, but I'm not sure how "important" photo sharing really is. I think we're kidding ourselves when we think we're going to "make the world a better place" in this industry. Other industries do much more to "make the world a better place" than ours does but they don't talk about it near as much as we do.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. Not to crap on anyone's parade, but Sam Odio's comment above, "It ultimately came down to the decision that we could touch more people's lives at Facebook," rings extremely hollow to me. I can think of about 1000 better ways to touch peoples' lives, if that is really your aim, and none of them involve web apps or startups. Again, I am absolutely not trying to detract here. These guys had a smart idea, worked their asses off, and were justly rewarded. But can't we just admit already that we are capitalists? This ubiquitous tendency in the startup crowd to hide the profit motive behind a wall of lofty ideals is just silly.

I don't think you truly understand just how much of an effect Facebook has on people's lives.

I'm afraid it is Facebook users who don't really grasp that yet, but that's a different story altogether.

He was not bullshitting. It's scary how much power Facebook is starting to have in recruiting and acquisitions because of their large and highly engaged user base. Hackers want an audience.

They have a very concentrated form of koolaid over there. I've been surprised by the effect it's had on some of the most skeptical people I know.

It's not in the same order of magnitude (and maybe off-topic), but from the leaked documents of Twitter, Google was directing much of the Twitter APIs implementation, from their tone. And twitter was in the boom stage (2009, sorry can't find a source, techcrunch iirc).

I don't have any experience in acquisitions by large companies, but from the twitter story (above) I made an idea of the tension going on. It's like you're a soldier and their the commandant during a war, most of the time you just can't say no.

edit: I meant, if you say no, you have to be prepared for the consequences.

I wouldn't call someone who is working on the "poke a friend" or "throw a sheep" features a "hacker". While the audience is large, facebook isn't changing their lives for the better. The user base may think so, though, just like with the TV.

Why can't we have both? Especially in an industry where we actually create products, and thus wealth, rather than extracting or shuffling it around.

Sure, there are many other possibly "better" ways to touch peoples' lives, but I'd much rather do something I love doing that also helps people than hate what I do. We can't be completely selfless.

I agree that we should admit we are capitalists. But I'm a little concerned that this kind of parachuting off the fighter jet exit for web startups makes it more difficult for other capitalists like myself to convince business users to get on board.

When someone's house is on fire and they can only save one thing, they save their photos. Photo sharing is way up there on the list of things that make people happy.

I see this as a problem for startups to get traction in the future if there continue to be these early product shut-down exits. What wants to go use a marginally better product when the is always the chance it will disappear into one of the bigger options at any time.

Not being in a position to judge this specific instance, I'd think in general you are better off showing some power, saying no to a deal, maybe entering into a partnership instead that keeps the focus on your product.

Early acquisition seems like a natural extension of the "minimum viable product" strategy.

Hopefully facebook will let them open source, just as Google did for EtherPad and Remail. It always feels regretful when a service gets bought up and shut down but I hope open sourcing becomes a common mitigating factor.

The Divvyshot team has talked about this and it's definitely something that we want to do. Ultimately it depends on Facebook's legal department.

For how much?

cash or stock?

Who made the first move?

What phase of the moon was it when you guys agreed on the terms? And was Jupiter visible?

I'm curious as to how that would matter too much.

None of this matters, the only relevant question is whether it's interesting.

It matters for the s ake of increasing the information available about the market for startups. Granted, startups span a huge space, but there's a real dearth of pricing information overall.

http://finance.wharton.upenn.edu/~allenf/download/Vita/roleo...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=efficient%20market

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=role%20of%20informa...

Contrary to the sentiment of the other replies, I feel this is an interesting question. For those nearing the parapet of potential acquisition it would be interesting to know how affirmative one's actions should be.

Facebook, via email.

How many days did it take from initial email to final acquisition?

Maybe this could be a hint: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121349

Don't know but to me it seems unlikely. The links is when they just launched. I am assuming Facebook could have known them only after they launched.

They launched 49 days ago?

From TechCrunch: "The amount of the acquisition is not being disclosed, but it was likely small. Buying Divvyshot is a talent acquisition for Facebook."

Congrats to the team! Also, thank you for featuring the reddit logo on your homepage. ;)

I think we can now conclusively prove that having a reddit logo on your homepage leads to a successful exit.

This is a real shame, because I just started using Divvyshot (first event: birth of my daughter on March 8) and I really, really liked it.

It filled a great niche. A year ago, a bunch of friends and family and I went on vacation, and we all talked about trying to set up some kind of photo sharing spot where we could see each other's photos, but it never happened. Divvyshot, though, fit that bill.

Facebook doesn't do that for me, so I've downloaded the photos and will be deleting this event. I realize that getting bought out is a positive thing for the founders, but it can be a negative thing for your users, and it certainly feels that way to me. Bit of a letdown.

All that aside: great product, and best of luck to you guys in the future.

I'm curious... what is it, specifically, that you want from your friends-and-family photo sharing that Facebook doesn't offer? I can't figure it out from your description.

dropbox seems to be perfect for that kind of sharing

Related Valley drama:

"I was the one who came forward about the Macbook Air" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160643

Starring Divvyshot founder Sam Odio, Former TechCrunch Intern Daniel Brusilovsky, and Jason Calacanis.

Looks like Sam made out OK.

Wow, somehow I missed all that drama when it happened (other than hearing about the macbook bribe). Thanks for the links.

What was Divvyshot, exactly?

Photo sharing site. The website is still up so go take a look at the tour: http://divvyshot.com/#to-details

It's a sort of photo manager that links together photos based on where they were taken from rather than by who took them. It seems especially aimed to manage photos from groups of people.

UVa startups are 2 for 2. Way to go, sodio!

ps. I've forwarded this to the whole comm school.

As a Hokie let me add my congrats =)

and now there's a good chance you can walk into a random café and see someone using your product.. :)

Congratulations! And for the record, photo sharing can do good in the world. Just think of people collaborating on a disaster with photos, helping to know the extent of the disaster and the help that is needed. Of course, they would need to take photos intermittently so they might actually help, but I think photo sharing is definitely something that can improve the world around us!

Wow, congratulations.

If you ever doubted your business, you can feel affirmed now. Being bought out by the largest social networking site with a sizable portion of their site dedicated to photos... well, you obviously did it right.

Get out there and do something else right, now :D

Excited to be working in close proximity with Sam and Paul again! Congrats guys.

Hot damn, congrats Sam, Paul & Michael!

Congrats Sam, Paul, and Michael!

Congratulations! This is a great app.

... Which is now going to be closed down.

I have to echo the sentiments of another poster in this thread - what is the point if your startup is just an elaborate job application process? Now a really cool app will be shut down, and a couple of guys will land a job at Facebook. Seems like a net loss to me.

Ultimately the founders are maximizing their net gain and this offer may seem best to them, at this point of time.

That's pretty expedient. The Wayback Machine hasn't even taken a snapshot of you yet. :)

Omg, yet another YC startup has been killed^H^H^H^H^Hacquired ? Oh well, hope the team has been offered something little bit more material, beside "the resources and freedom to build cool stuff". :-)

If you're going to go to the trouble of doing the witty ^H thing, you should at least delete the correct number of characters.

Also, it's 2010, you have ^W at your disposal, which, gasp, kills a whole word!

You haven't heard of the new startup fad of being "Kacquired" ?

I was tempted to make this crack as well :)

Whats witty about typing caret H ?!

I learned about this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace

by putting caret H in a Google search.

Nice man!! I've been following your progress for a while, congrats congrats congrats! Very curious to know how you made out...

That is intense! Way to go Sam!!

Congrats for divvyshot!

For how much? Doesn't mean much without that info.

This is great news. Congrats to Sam and the team.

Congratulations!

Congrats guys!

Big congrats!

Congrats Sam!

Awesome!

Umm what is Divvyshot?

baller life!

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