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Comment by nettletea | Hacker News Reader

Great that you touched on photo sharing. It's 2014 and it's still difficult to get photos from a camera to your computer to your friends. Publishing a simple web page is still deemed too difficult, discovering and managing contacts, and mass mailing them is hard.

Facebook basically stepped into the niche above. It adds instant messenging, and some automated feed organisation.

To some extent Email, IM and a little web space would suffice as well as some photo resizing tools! OSs, file managers and browsers could really help here, and if these tasks had been far easier to do in the first place Facebook wouldn't have even become what it is. Privacy and authentication for dummies is the other thing that has to be made and integrated into a solution.

With a little work Facebook could be decentralised, and having your Mum as a contact wouldn't make your social network toolset uncool.

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I've been using photobucket (for a couple of years) and Imgur (past month or so) for quick shares. Imgur does offer some editing capabilities. Neither allows you to limit access best that I know, though I could be wrong on that. Most of the need I've got is for hosting images related to blog posts.

And yes, having played a bit in social space, photo is the killer app. Google knows this as well.

It's not just photo. It's as simple as people just wanting to be able to do things intuitively and easily. Hey I took a great photo at the weekend, let me share it with you, here you go, done. Or you must hear this song, or read this etc. Sharing has to be very easy.

I have an Aunt with an iPad full of photos, that she's pretty clueless as to how to backup or share. She's given up trying and just takes her iPad to her friends.

I have another Aunt who can't for the life her, get photos from her camera to her laptop. It's a trial.

So if you have a phone with a camera, that lets you seamlessly share photos, even if it's through imgur, facebook, or whatever, it's probably going to be easier than connecting up cables, trying to traverse file systems etc.

My brother wanted to sell a motorbike, and wanted to send the buyer a couple of photos. He was absolutely dumbfounded by the process because his SLR took big photos that his email provider rejected. He's not that web savvy. In the end I said it might be easier for you to just install Dropbox, and it was. How arse about face is that?

Even copying files onto some people's computers doesn't help that much, if their file management skills don't exist.

OSs (desktop) haven't functionally changed that much in the last decade on the face of it. And even the simple problems haven't been solved, which is laughable when you have an insight into the complexity of some of the work arounds.

Sharing has to be very easy.

Used to be we had email and MIME attachments. Which is to say: you simply attached whatever media you wanted to share to the email.

Mind: that could clog up systems with massive files moving around (though what was once considered massive for servers is now minuscule on handhelds).

With a website you control yourself, and URLs you can distribut to whom you choose, you can still use the email method, but distribute a link. Or RSS. Or a host of other tools. The problem isn't so much the technology as the incentives for people to create sharing platforms based on them, and the inclination for those platforms to be proprietary, silos, and highly monetized.

From the perspective of a nontechnical person looking to share things, you've got the challenge of comprehending technology (that's a longer rant), which is a challenge. But really. "Take picture, share privately to list of friends" isn't particularly difficult conceptually _or_ technically.

I'm well beyond convinced that a huge part of the reason that local filesystem management tools (for Windows, Mac, and Android) are so difficult to grasp is because the vendors prefer it that way. They can sell "enterprise server solutions" or "cloud social services" instead.

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