Hi everyone,
I've been building a less bad way to share photos and videos out to friends and family: https://vzg.me
The motivation is personal for me since...
1. I'm not comfortable using Facebook properties
2. Group SMS/email gets out of control with more than a few recipients
3. I don't want to convince my friends and family to download a new app or figure out shared albums
So I created a system that lets my network subscribe to individual people in my family and get updates via email, SMS, or RSS at the frequency of their choosing (immediate, daily, or weekly). Subscribers just opt in like a newsletter; they don't have to download or sign up for anything.
Here's an example of a public feed
https://vzg.me/t/abe-lincoln
And its corresponding RSS
https://vzg.me/api/t/abe-lincoln/rss
A few features I think are cool:
1. If your subscribers opt for SMS, they can push photos and comments to your feed by just texting them to the vzg phone number. Basically grandma texts a photo of Timmy and it automatically gets sent out to all of his subscribers (after your approval).
2. You can link up your Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts to have anything you publish there get added to your vzg feed and notified out to subscribers
3. You can manage multiple feeds with your account and have different sets of subscribers for each. I set up separate ones for my kids to have a nice visual timeline for each of them and hopefully someday pass along ownership of their feeds.
I hope some of you find it useful.
If you want to promise never to do this again and to tell your friends that it will get them banned on HN if they do, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll consider unbanning you.