Snapjoy (YC S11) unveils Flickraft, one-click migration for Flickr users
flickraft.com
flickraft.com
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.
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.
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.
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?
s/Flickr/del\.icio\.us/g
s/SnapJoy/pinboard/g
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."
btw to all the photo app creators out there: no API - no go.
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.
All of the core Flickr people have left, and some (like Aaron Straup Cope) are starting to build their own: http://straup.github.com/parallel-flickr/ http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2011/10/14/pixelspace/#para...
opinion != fact
existing alternatives != original sinking
I'm not a fan of Yahoo either, but all I hear is that is sinking because somebody got fired, or it's sinking because someone on a blog wrote that he doesn't like it no more.
So what there's pararell or whatever other apps to backup or sync? I've started making sth similar for django http://zalew.net/2012/01/11/django-flickr/ and what that has to do with Flickr failing?
BTW remember 'dying blog platforms' by Posterous?
Flickr is a huge site and they're not going to suddenly stop working one day. If they do decide to shut down, they're going to give users plenty of notice and probably offer easy ways to export photos and metadata. Until that happens, my photos are staying on Flickr and I'll continue to view my friends' photos on Flickr.
Until they start doing stuff that will effect how I use the service I wont be switching, I'd love to see some facts about users 'abandoning ship'.
Edit: Just tried signing up to SnapJoy and added my Flickr account, thats still pending and I cant seem to get any photos uploaded and showing on my homepage.
I'm happy to see projects like parallel-flickr pop up. I even started my own version: https://github.com/aaronpk/Flickr-Archiver
There are few things I trust more than Flickr right now, but I want to be ready in case they sink in the near future.
As stated in the post, I honestly believe that Flickr-the-site, in the long run, will be fine. Do these layoffs hurt? Of course! But Flickr has had bigger bumps in the past and has pushed through them all. The engineers there are an incredible crew of guys and Markus's post at the first of the year on blog.flickr.net shows that they've got some exciting stuff on the way.
I also have been (in a small way) helping Aaron with parallel-flickr and I think he as much as anyone would say that he's not building a replacement Flickr but more of being a good archivist and leaving nothing important up to chance, even if the odds are 1-in-some-big-number of Something Bad happening.
Obviously, I don't know the whims of major corporations like Yahoo, but Flickr-the-site, which is its content and its devotion to preserve that content, hasn't wavered in how it treats your data.
The site is also broken. I can't click on the logo to find out more about Snapjoy. Pass.
(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.)
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.
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.
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).
Image de-duplication.
Snapjoy has the only image de-duplicating algorithm that I've seen that really works.
Snapjoy doesnt :)
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.
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've hit the 100GB limit on Dropbox, and I'd like to be able to view albums on the web.
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!
My original choice of colour scheme was (deliberately) very close to what Flickr was using at the time, and Stewart Butterfield (who ran the show back then) asked me to change the colours a bit.
I don't recall Stewart having a problem with me dropping a vowel in the domain name, even though at the time this was a novel domain hack on the part of Flickr.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040406000559/http://reviewr.com...
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).