flickr

Open photo

30 June 2011

Not that long ago we were talking about 500px, a new Flickr competitor with a great user interface who’s grabbing quite a lot of attention. And because Flickr hate seems to ever grow exponentially one of Yahoo’s ex-engineers, Jaisen Mathai to be more precise, has decided to try luck and build a serious alternative.

But before that Jaisen has to raise some money, like our Diaspora guys… like who? Forget Diaspora, focus on “Open photo“. Using the best raising-money platform in the US (Kickstarter) Jaisen is asking for 25K to start building his multi-synch-open photo platform.

Unfortunately we don’t have many many details, not even a logo, but we feel the Flickr pain deep inside each time we use it, so we thought… we not support this project too?

He’s proposing a service where the user is the only owner of the photos and can export & take them (along with the tags, comments…etc) to any other platform if any day he decides to leave OpenPhoto. The user also gets to choose which file storage service will be hosting their photos (Amazon, S3, Rackspace Cloudfiles, Dropbox….), so you shouldn’t be afraid if the service (flickr to mention one) is shutting down or not.

Like with the most successful services nowadays OpenPhoto won’t just be a nice interface across several platforms for sharing photos but emphasize the advantages of its API for developers to build their own OpenPhoto apps, and on a first stage he’s willing to share the code on Github and build an iOS & Android apps (he’s dreaming wild right?).

Let’s hope the project takes off smoothly, for that he just needs a few £££ from your big pocket, coss even if we’re on crisis… no-one likes Flickr anymore….. Or you can help him with some of your coding expertise via GitHub.

(that smile…. more natural please!)

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500px

9 June 2011

Ahhhhhhhhh good old Flickr, what happened to you? Still the king but for how long? (Because let’s be honest, Picassa is so horribly horrible we don’t even consider it).

But then we discover this Toronto-based service called 500px, and we fall in love, twice the price… but twice the quality, user-friendly experience…. and twice the sexiness of a web product!

Maybe it’s because Flickr is a Yahoo product but the innovative & versatile service has certainly rusted quickly over the last few years… contacts management is a mess, groups is a mess, the home page is horriblis (maybe even worst than that of Picassa), and the way to discover new content… well…. is there such a thing?

We’re pretty sure Yahoo won’t discount Flickr on the short-term but if they keep it like this and new actors like 500px keep appearing, then it may eventually dissappear! Ooops! Another one!

The Canadian service recently grabbed half a million $$$$ from capital investors and their user base has grown from 1000 users in 2009 to over 85K (45K in the last 3 months), with people like us!

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