That all sounds really interesting and I'd love to read more on that. Do you have a book or an article that would be a good start on reading up on this?
There are also other things you could monetize that would make it easier for people to open their wallets.
Customization is probably a good thing, i.e. the subdomain and own-domain thing.
Physical stuff is always good, so I'd love to pay for an automatically created photobook/photobook-ready-PDF (I hate to do them in the crummy software supplied by the printer). Or, go one step further even and allow direct upload to Lulu. Basically a Make-your-own-coffee-table-book.
In any case, you might want to think about specifically targeting power users from the start, instead of going for the freemium market.
Thanks for the idea. Yes we have it on the road-map with our poster app http://47posters.com . Our problem now is that we have more products that we want to integrate, but now we have to focus on one. And also we have to make clear who to target. More users here suggested to target more focused audience with premium account (backpackers etc).
Looks pretty great so far, and I really like the pages you're creating.
Just a handful of things:
1. I don't like logging in with my Google Account. I can see that you're using my Google pictures so you're going to need that. I don't like it anyway.
2. I completely don't understand the graph at the left hand side of your pages. Perhaps it's number of photos (but then that info appears twice, right?). Or is it text written? Or is it distance covered? Or is it coolness of the segment? Some information would be nice.
3. Or even better, how about customizing that area? I know you're quite early in development, but I'd expect to see some interaction there.
4. The location was a little off when I loaded my non-geotagged pictures. It placed them somewhere in Slovakia for some reason. After placing one of my segments into Africa, the overall location marker moved to Germany.
5. These little info boxes are cool. Can I do them myself, please?
6. The time line is interesting, but I'd like to customize that a bit better. In my case, there's lots of empty space at the top and the bottom because I arrived on Saturday and left on Tuesday, causing empty weeks there.
Ok, that was a bit of stuff. Don't take is as criticism, I really like the concept, but I'd also like to see it developed a bit more.
1) Login with Google is just a way to make it simpler for us for an MVP (and as you note we need the photos as we don't have a direct photo upload in this product just yet).
2) The graph is a reflection of intensity of the story (basically the more photos you take, the more interesting stuff is going on around you) and it gives you a time context for how things went.
We will definitely add an explanation in the interface.
3) What kind of customization do you mean? Structural (move things around) or cosmetic (colors, etc).
Basically the graph is firstly a navigation tool. You click on the event names to move to that moment in all the views of the app (album photo grid/large photo view/album edit mode).
4) The map widget starts centered in Slovakia (center of Europe) for non-geotagged photos. This does not mean that the location was assigned to the album, it is just how the widget renders. (Does it look like we automatically assign the position? Any idea on how the map widget could look to avoid this confusion?)
For geotagged we are of course working on using this information (it is no there yet).
5) It is all about the context (graph - time context, info boxes - POI in the area or related concepts).
6) The problem with empty space in the timeline is that once you start 'stretching' and 'compressing' it, the time axis will stop being homogeneous which sort of ruins the effect of 'at-a-glance' time awareness.
If there was a big block of down-time on the holiday, why do you want to mask it by covering the gap in the graph? The representation loses faithfulness that way. But maybe a faithful representation is not that desired here, hmm :-D
2) I see, but that still means that the data is shown twice, doesn't it? Once in the little bar-graphy-thingy to the right and once in the name placement.
3) Both structural and cosmetic would be nice. I know that at the moment the graph is for navigation only, but why not make it another tool to tell an aspect of my story? Don't worry about it at the moment, that's something for the roadmap.
4) Wow, yeah, that is confusing. Why don't you start out with an empty map widget (without the location marker) or just a link that says "add a location" or something of that sort.
5) Yes, it is, and that's why it's important to let the user enter them. That you add them automatically is nice, but not always perfect, as you can see on one of your demos, http://mystorify.com/a/BjYb08qE. The first and the last fields are obviously not what you'd want there. Also, again the question, why not allow it as a tool to complement my story?
6) Exactly. =) Start out with a good automatic timeline, but let me edit it anyway. What if I have highly inhomogenous events? Perhaps, I don't know, two vacations to the same place. That would probably show up as a month or even a year display, but a gapped timeline would be better in that case.
You're probably right that Amazon holds your data for as long as that, however, there's another way to look at 11 nines: If you upload one hundred billion (10^11) files on Glacier, you expect to lose one of them per year, and not more. That's probably realistically achievable.
Compare this with S3, where you will lose 1 in one billion files per year. Shocking!
Note that Glacier+Arq also allows you something entirely different from CrashPlan and incremental backups: Data archives. I.e. you can store data there cheaply that you don't have to keep available on your hard drive. Very useful for storing data that's too large to have on your drives all the time, like the pictures and videos mentioned in other comments in this thread.
