

Facebook kills startups with new collaborative photo album feature  - nopinsight
http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/26/facebook-kills-100-startups-with-new-collaborative-photo-album-feature/

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karterk
Link bait-y title.

 _> But we’re deadpooling all of ‘em, effective immediately._

I really don't like the tone of many parts of this article.

 _> Facebook is just too big to fail when it comes to normal people and
photos._

The same could have been said about places.

~~~
jmduke
_> Facebook is just too big to fail when it comes to normal people and
photos._

Which is why they didn't have to worry about some silly mobile app with
ridiculous 'filters' that only teenagers use when they want to feel artsy.

~~~
neotek
I had much the same feeling about silly mobile apps with ridiculous filters
prior to actually using Instagram, but the truth is that (when used
appropriately) those filters do actually improve the aesthetic quality of
phone photography.

It's easy for some people to go overboard or act like they're a deeply
intellectual thinker just because they've taken a brooding selfie in black and
white, but misuse shouldn't be conflated with uselessness.

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chasing
"Apps and services like Cluster, Albumatic, Keepsy, Swirl, Flock, Kicksend,
Kaptur, and dozens of others are destined for the dustbin of Internet
history."

I suspect most of these were headed there anyway, no offense to anyone working
on them.

~~~
weland
As someone who isn't doing web programming, this "app culture" is grinding my
gears.

I respect a fellow coder's work. I'm sure a lot of hard work went into all
those applications listed there (of which, frankly, I haven't heard, because
if I want to share something with my friends I upload it on my server and be
done with it), but people ought to be more aware of their own smallness. You
don't base your enterprise on making (and hosting, and maintaining!) the nth
fucking website that essentially offers something that should simply be a
feature of a social network. Especially if it's something like a _shared
album_. Who the hell invests money into a business whose end product is
basically one week's work away for the company which already provides services
to 99.99% percent of the people need that product?

 _Wishing_ for a niche to be there doesn't magically make it poof into
existence.

~~~
vm
Instagram began as a photosharing app when Facebook already dominated
photosharing.

~~~
weland
However, it's not vanilla photosharing that was Instagram's
killer/distinguishing feature.

------
nness
If you build your house on a river-bank, you can hardly be surprised when a
flood washes it away.

I guess that's the risk with any entrepreneurial work, that someone will get
to market faster or build on an existing user base (in this case, a completely
unmatchable user base). Surely though, if a whole business idea can be trumped
by a new feature on someone else's site, that'd warrant some stronger
scrutiny.

~~~
dpcan
Well, unless you built a beautiful house on a river-bank to sell to a sucker
for a huge profit before the flood hit.

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ojbyrne
Probably most people don't notice or care, but Facebook introduces so many
artifacts into jpegs, there's got to be room for a startup that actually
doesn't compress the crap out of images.

~~~
stef25
The average Facebooker doesn't know what that is and doesn't care. Just like
so many people listen to music on iPhone or laptop speakers, quality seems to
no longer matter.

~~~
coldtea
Music on an iPhone with headphones is probably better than what 90% of the
people in the eighties/nineties ever heard.

CD systems' speakers (when not Hi-Fi) have worse sound than middle of the road
headphones, and cassette had like 8 bit definition (and noise, wow, flutter
and other nice stuff to degrade the sound).

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junto
I see a market for photo app customer that don't have Facebook accounts and
don't trust Facebook.

This article is both hyperbolic and patronizing.

If the article stated, "don't bother building another OS, Microsoft have that
market sewn up", I think we would all equally call bullshit.

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jmathai
I'm one of those entrepreneurs whose startup is destined for the Internet
trash bin (or whatever that was).

Yes, Facebook is a behemoth in the photo space. But there are many facets to
people's photo libraries than mere sharing and collaboration. I've actually
been happy to see fellow photo start ups tackling some of hose more
interesting problems.

No doubt this solves a pain point for many. But I don't know if I see it as
crushing many startups. The thing with Facebook is that people will come up
with ways to work around the limitations of the platform. It's got that much
momentum.

Photos are a big space and I'm happy to see other companies tackling more than
just the social sharing problems that in my opinion have largely been solved
already.

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infocollector
Just in case you didn't trust your photos/albums/comments with Facebook (or
Google), you could try a privacy respecting, user-owned, self-hosted solution
(self-hosting coming soon):

Demo:

[https://rrc.imp.blib.us/link/album/private?albumid=117bc3](https://rrc.imp.blib.us/link/album/private?albumid=117bc3)
Password: 1234

If you wanted your own: [https://register.blib.us](https://register.blib.us)

~~~
stef25
Chrome screams out an https error on the first link.

~~~
infocollector
Are you talking about the certificate problem or a DNS error. If its a
certificate problem, its because each user in our system generates their own
self-signed certificates. If it was an actual error - Some windows/DNS servers
query "AAAA" records currently which gets our DNS server code in trouble -
hopefully we can fix this soon.

------
DjangoReinhardt
I have just one question for everyone: Would you guys use something like
[HashPix][1] instead, if it were made available as an alternative?

If not, I'll stop working on/maintaining it and devote my time to other
pursuits - preferably ones that might bring in some money eventually.

PS: It is currently running on a Heroku instance because I can't afford to
'launch' it yet. :(

[1]: [http://hashpix.herokuapp.com](http://hashpix.herokuapp.com)

~~~
coldtea
Another question is: does hashpix have the license to do what I does? When
people post a picture of twitter, that doesn't necessarily mean the give the
license/rights for someone to include it in his album in another service.

~~~
DjangoReinhardt
Very interesting question. :)

To be completely honest, I haven't really thought about that. I haven't really
_really_ looked into that either.

However, I am basing this attempt on the belief that, if Twitter, TwitPic and
Instagram can 'show' me your photos when I search for a particular hashtag, it
automatically implies that each of them have acquired the redistribution
rights.

At no point in the process am I claiming that I own these photos; in fact, all
the photos link back to their original places. I'm merely collating symbolic
links to them. In a sense, I'm (sort of) indexing them just the way a search
engine would.

Am I making sense or am I being escapist with my answers here? Do let me know.
I'd like to believe I am not breaking any laws or infringing any copyrights
but IANAL, so I'm not really sure. :)

Thanks for the insightful question. You made me realize something that I had
completely missed in my enthusiasm to code. :)

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disbelief
Sorry I've been out of the Facebook app game for a while, but isn't there a
Facebook API for photos? Couldn't anyone do what Facebook is doing here,
leveraging the Facebook userbase and their unrivalled quantities of photos? Of
course users would still have to discover the app as opposed to it being part
of the stock FB experience, but this doesn't necessarily sound like the death
knell for every startup who wants to build a social/collaborative photo album
service.

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stefanve
As someone who doesn't have a Facebook account I hope that "Facebook does it"
isn't going to be a reason to stop or start. That being said lucky Facebook
rarely does something interesting or original :-)

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shurcooL
How many years ago was it that Facebook bought out Divvyshot?

~~~
pcardune
It was April 2010.

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hkmurakami
correct me if I am wrong but... hasn't Google+ have this for a while? (ofc G+
isn't used nearly as much as FB for photo sharing, but just sayin')

~~~
bsimpson
They call it Party Mode, and they demoed it at the 2012 I/O.

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acjohnson55
Just like when Facebook killed all individual photo sharing startups like
Instagram?

