Resonant Signals

1. A new orientation, not around the author: virtually every photo site is first prioritized around who took the photo (like a blog). But for almost everyone who is just a casual photo taker this orientation is secondary at best.
My kid Kaden just had his sixth birthday and there were probably 5 people taking photos with various devices. Most of those photos I will never see, or they will get randomly emailed and then lost. I wish someone had an elegant and natural solution that actually mapped to how people use photos now.
I just want to see the photos from my kids birthday all in one place, in an easy way to share with other friends and come back to a year from now. Other stuff on my list:

2. Seamless cross-client posting and reading (mobile, mobile, mobile)

3. Public and private clearly delineated

4. Dropbox-style access/syncing of photos

5. Simple group email interface for upload since so much is still conducted that way (make it as easy as Tripit, I want to be able to get a photo from my Dad via email, forward to this service to keep it there but attribute to him)What’s on your list? And if you’ve already got an elegant solution I’d love to hear about it.

from brinking. by Nabeel Hyatt: What does the next Flickr look like?

Nabeel’s five main points are a condensed set of the most important feedback we’ve heard thorough our customer discovery process.

When we all first made the transition from celluloid to digital photos, we still lived in a desktop-centric computing world. We stored our photos on a hard drive, and ran into a chore of keeping them organized. We would cherry pick the best and share with friends on email, and with the emergence of Web 2.0 companies like Flickr, online with a focused community.

Those days are gone, and now we live in the age of the cloud, social, and smartphone cameras - yet the products available have not yet adapted to the resulting subtle behavioral changes, and may not ever.

Until recently, common practice was for people to email out their photos after a special occasion, or perhaps bulk upload them to PhotoBucket and send a link. Not anymore – now a bunch show up on Facebook (sooner or later), and tagging is a chore so that doesn’t always happen, and then some people are posting them in realtime to Twitter (with or without a hashtag to hold them together) using any number of services like Instagram or Twitpic… Now we have a kind of photo data fragmentation, and it’s getting worse.

Guess who gets left out? The people at the party who aren’t “photo takers” but would love to see the photos - which it turns out is a lot of people.

So, to Nabeel’s point, there needs to be a way that everyone’s photos come together – and we’re working on it, as are a lot of other people with great products just hitting the market – so that what was a shared experience in real life can be a shared experience online, without anyone being left out.

To his other points – in today’s world of murky online privacy, something as personal as photos need clear boundaries and transparency to who and how access is provided. Mobile is quickly becoming our new primary means of interacting with all this content and its connections, but we expect it to be persistent whether we access it from a tablet, smartphone, computer, or in our living room.

It’s a complicated, pervasive problem that needs an elegant solution, and we at Grinnit hear you Nabeel – and the voices of countless others that are clamoring for an answer.

Source: bijan