Archive for the ‘photo’ tag
Looking like a princess
Why social beats search?
The title is a copy of a recent post by Fred Wilson, but the post is not 
. The part that caught my attention in the post was the statement “it’s a lot harder to spam yourself into a social graph”.
My personal view is that first of all, it is somewhat unfair to compare search with social since they solve vastly different problems. To me “Search equals Intent” whereas “Social equals Discovery“. When you really want to find something, the first thing you do is google for it. Yes, you may ask a few friends about it, but in most cases the expert on your question may not be in your network at all. You may post your question on twitter or facebook, but you certainly won’t wait on these channels for an answer.
The two things that social brings into the picture is “serendipity and trust“. If you are a part of a social network, you hear all kinds of things whether you want to hear them or not and in some cases, you do stumble upon some really neat stuff. Thats serendipity and since you heard about it from someone in your network, you know how much to trust the information based on the trust you have on the source of the information. To a large extent, this is a completely different way of getting information than what search has to offer, but certainly not good enough to kill search by itself.
That is why, at lifeblob, we are building a new channel for discovery of photos through your social graph, not trying to compete with google image search.
Whats your take on search vs social?
Photo management is an open problem
Today, I came across this post by Prof Ramesh Jain and I couldn’t agree more.
A quick peek at the most popular photo management solutions today will tell you that it is still all about uploading your photos, organizing into albums and creating a slideshow. Flickr, to some extent lets you discover related stuff through tags, but thats pretty much it.
To me, a photo management solution is about discovery, photos connecting with each other and navigating through the mesh of related photos. Add to this the time context around a photo and it has all the ingredients of a heady cocktail that could have you hooked for hours.
Imagine taking a shot of “The Statue of Liberty” and instantly finding other people who also shot it around the same time. Or imagine going on a trek with your friends and getting a view of what your friends did while you were at the trek. Imagine attending a pink floyd concert and discovering shots taken by fans at several other previous concerts of pink floyd.
The possibilities are endless and there is a huge problem to be solved here. We are trying to crack some of these problems at http://www.lifeblob.com by making it really easy for you to add and organize your photos in a time based manner. We have also built a system that tracks connections of each photo and highlights connections that are more important to you than others.
We are in the process of turning on some discovery options like the examples that I gave above and hopefully you will be able to take a test ride of this before the end of this month.
If you also think that photo management is an unsolved problem, I would love to hear from you!
