

Divvyshot [YC W09]: Photo-sharing for groups - vlad
http://divvyshot.com/

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cperciva
Here's my 10 second review: I have no clue why I should want to use this
instead of flickr.

I'm sure there's some reason -- but whatever it is, you might want to point it
out more clearly on the front page, because otherwise those 10 seconds are
probably all you're going to get from most people.

~~~
alabut
Honestly, I think it's a design issue. Interaction design, not visual design
(the site's very pretty) because the answer to your question is right there on
the home page, it's just nowhere near prominent enough to grab your attention
in the 10 seconds you mentioned.

 _"No account needed!

It couldn't be easier! You can share photos with friends and family right
now!"_

You can tell it's important because it's repeated again directly below, with a
minor change in wording:

 _" Share your photos NOW - No account needed!_ "

That's actually huge, I'm guessing it's even the main feature that sold YC on
accepting them (to me, "photo sharing made stupid simple" = "no account
needed") especially considering that trend in recent YC startups like
posterous.

Actually, posterous is a great example, go look at their home page, the super
prominent crossed out "make an account" line at the top of the page gets
across the point really nicely.

~~~
axod
I don't think picking a username and password is _that_ big a hurdle for most
people.

~~~
akirk
I hate if I have to enter a username when I just want to quickly try what
something is about.

I always try to build my apps so that you can use most of the functionality
without an account. I think that should be the standard way to do it and not
other way round.

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Sam_Odio
Hey guys, it's Sam (divvyshot's creator).

The site's a piece of crap right now, but hopefully things will be better over
the coming weeks. Release early and frequently, right? If you find any huge
bugs email me: so / at / divvyshot / dot / com

Features we've built and haven't yet launched include:

\- A Desktop client (PC & Mac)

\- Twitter, Flickr, & Facebook synchronization

\- Facebook application

\- An iPhone app (you can see real time what's happening at the event you're
attending and push photos to the event from your phone)

\- Snipshot photo editing

~~~
jklubnik
Allow email addresses to contain a plus. It's something a lot of gmail users
like to do.

~~~
Sam_Odio
Fixed, thanks for the heads up.

~~~
d0mine
`+` doesn't work in emails.

TOS is scary.

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arnorhs
About the frontpage question: "You and your friends went to a party. where do
you put the photos? Right here!" \--- ehh wrong, personally I'd put my photos
on facebook. I have an account there, my friends do as well, so I don't get
it... sorry :S

~~~
pg
If a group of you wants to put all the photos you took at some event in one
place, where do you put them?

~~~
jupiter
Facebook. You can tag your friends and they will be notified. That's a huge
advantage, because not only the tagged person comes to see but also her nosy
friends.

~~~
pg
Sorry, I was unclear. By "one place" I meant one page, not one domain name.

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savrajsingh
Divvyshot centers on events -- not albums by individual photographers. You can
quickly post a few pics and get folks uploading their photos to the same event
with almost no effort. Check out the immediate photo upload -- just drag and
drop into your browser! And you can click to download a zipfile of all photos
in an event, at full resolution. Think of it as a new spin on photo sharing,
similar to how Posterous is a new spin on blogging.

~~~
neilk
It's drag and drop from the finder to the "Mini Divvy" app. Then it does some
sort of synchronization to everywhere that's registered interest in that
"event".

Not sure what the use cases are, and whether it justifies a whole other app,
but it's an interesting spin on sharing. You don't just get notified of
something, you just get the file.

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uuilly
Your branding is at odds w/ your mission statement. High res photos speaks to
pro-sumers. Party pics speaks to grainy iphone shots.

~~~
johndevor
Sure, party pictures are one thing, and facebook handles those quite well. I
don't believe Divvyshot stands to take that market from facebook. That said,
if you've ever travelled overseas, it's likely you've had friends and family
ask for your photos... and facebook just doesn't cut it with that use case
IMHO.

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jonnytran
You are displaying people's email addresses? And you say you don't like spam?!
Shame on you. I'm already weary giving divvyshot my email address, and now
divvyshot is passing it on to every other registered user. And of course I
couldn't tell that it was going to do that ahead of time b/c I had to log in
to see that feature.

(Looks like you can prevent the display of your email address by entering a
display name in your profile, but that is not obvious at all.)

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smanek
You may want to turn off directory browsing ... Playing around for a few
seconds didn't reveal anything particularly bad (although, this was very
interesting: <http://divvyshot.com/static/bandwidth_costs.xls>).

The Java applet also seems to hang firefox for me (Ubuntu 8.10 x64). I don't
have another 64bit linux machine handy, so I can't tell if it's something
particular to my setup though.

~~~
thepanister
According to what I read at the xsl file above, it looks likt it's the
costs/user...

Don't tell me that this website is for scalable photo sharing!

You scale up and down your photos storage, and you pay as you go!

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simonista
The design looks really nice. I already use drop box with friends to
accomplish pretty much the same thing, and it wasn't immediately apparent what
the added value would be to using Divvyshot.

Also, the first time I went to the upload page I got a "unknown certificate.
trust/don't trust" dialog which disrupted the otherwise excellent UX. Mac OS X
10.5.6, Safari 4 if that's relevant.

Overall great work. I think this will be really appealing for people looking
to share photos without any setup.

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apwalker
So I've been beta testing for two weeks and I think Divvyshot is a great
service for a few reasons:

1\. It allows you to share high res photos without downloading a client,
sending an unreasonable number of emails with attachments, or resorting to
other archaic methods like swapping jump drives.

2\. You can invite other people to add photos to the same event which is
awesome when you go on vacation/to a party/etc. and everyone is taking
pictures with different cameras.

3\. Facebook integration = one-stop posting. (Though I wish it would present
separate albums on Facebook as they were created on Divvyshot).

4\. It’s easy.

5\. I never have to right click “save as” again if I want a friend’s picture
off of Facebook.

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nopassrecover
I'm a little confused - really great execution (!!) but I don't see the
business sense. I'm not sure how this differentiates itself from other file
hosting/photo sharing sites. For instance can you have private photos on
Flickr? At the very least there are things like drop box as mentioned. What
about people who tend to share photos through Facebook? Besides which, what is
the monetisation strategy? Freemium? What features will be added?

There must be some sense or it wouldn't have got YC investment - maybe the
idea is to execute this so well that Google buys you you as I don't think they
have a good photo sharing method yet and it would be a great way to expand?

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aak
Sam, congrats on getting techcrunched! Can you share with us your
marketing/outreach efforts and how you got them to write about you in such an
early stage of the product?

Thanks!

~~~
thepanister
I think it's the same as they wrote about likaholix.com , which is by ex-
googlers, and stills at too early stage, too!

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mcxx
Those hot girls on the photos will definitely boost sing-up rate.

~~~
vaksel
to clear up any misunderstandings I'm sure he is talking about the girls on
the beach and not the kids at the birthday party

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aston
A little YC easter egg: If you keep refreshing until you get to the little
girl's birthday photos, you'll notice all of the names are of the YC
principals + baby George.

Nice touch.

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cabalamat
My review:

1\. the drag-and-drop add photos page
<http://divvyshot.com/event/F2z3/photo/add/> doesn't work, at least for me
(Using Linux/KDE/Dolphin/Firefox)

2\. the HTML alternative <http://divvyshot.com/event/F2z3/photo/add/form/>
only allows one photo to be uploaded at a time. I have 7 photos I'd like to
upload, varying in size between 1.7 MB and 3.4 MB. I want to be able to tell
it to upload the lot in one go, not have to go back to the site 7 times and do
it.

3\. there should be a command-line application to upload photos. This would
only be 100 or so lines of Python. It should of course allow multiple photos
to be uploaded at a time (see note 2 above).

4\. I uploaded a photo -- <http://divvyshot.com/event/hv4x/> \-- and can't
give it a name or title. I even created an account but that didn't seem to do
anything useful.

~~~
cabalamat
Also, why the name? A divvy is an idiot --
<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=divvy> \-- I suspect this is
not the image you want to portray

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terpua
Not sure what you have for the Mac client but a suggestion: I can select an
album in iPhoto (or event(s) or multiple selects) and then use either
contextual menu or menubar app to upload photos. No need to drag and drop.

When I open iPhoto, that's usually the time I feel like sharing.

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jonnytran
Arrrrgh! Registration doesn't allow + in email address.

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pyroman
I liked the video that you have after signing up. That should be easier to
find for people that haven't signed up yet.

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ddispaltro
Great work, the site truly looks excellent. I love the ability to keep a group
updated, with pictures, in realtime.

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teuobk
I like the simplicity, but I'm not yet sold on posting event photos here
instead of Facebook. Maybe the ToS would be a deciding factor. Speaking of
which, what are the ToS, especially with regard to content rights?

Bug: the Java upload applet won't load for me.

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zhyder
You call it an alpha... did you want TechCrunch to cover it so soon:
[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/04/y-combinators-
divvyshot...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/04/y-combinators-divvyshot-
launches-dead-simple-group-photo-sharing/)

~~~
thepanister
It's a great way to find early adopters and testers for the product!

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menloparkbum
Java app doesn't seem to work on mac safari.

When I upload from the HTML box, the javascript status thing keeps spinning
and never lets me know that the file has been uploaded.

I am on a relatively bad hotel connection right now.

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pclark
Turn your text into this:

    
    
      You and your friends went to a party.
    
      Where do you put the photos?
    
      Right here!
    

Note the lack of orphan words.

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vaksel
Props on using a quick sign up box.

I would take out the "free" from the Alpha account, might turn away people
who'll think you'll need to pay later.

~~~
thepanister
read this at the bottom of the page: _Hurry! Only 738 free alpha accounts
available! After the first 1,000 accounts, we're going to charge for storage._

~~~
nopassrecover
And beat the free storage competitors?

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freeman01
You guys should try out www.imagevat.com too

~~~
thepanister
I flag this because the website has a sex content!

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dhouston
congrats sam!

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thepanister
Congratulations. Looks very attractive!

If you can find a way to help users "move"/import their stuff from their
current service to yours, then it would be really great. Also if you consider
adding service like printing or something...

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davincicode
I am actually genuinely excited to use this

There bringing something new(er) to photo sharing which is awesome

