365.io was created specifically for Project 365, which is a year-long photography project in which you upload a picture a day for 365 days so that after a year you have some sort of photo documentary of your life over that year.
The main difference between this and a Flickr stream is the focus. Flickr is meant for photography in general, and while you could use it for Project 365, it's less organized and focused. For example, your P 365 entries would be mixed in with your regular flickr uploads.
Wouldn't there be anything in Flickr's ToS that would prevent third party developers from hosting their app's photos there? I like the suggestion though.
Yes. From Flickr: "The direct link to a photo file is no longer shown on the page. Per the Flickr Community Guidelines "pages on other websites that display content hosted on flickr.com must provide a link from each photo or video back to its page on Flickr." Linking directly to the photo file doesn't do this."
I think a desktop and/or mobile software for P 360 would make more sense than an online solution. It could simply integrate with people's Flickr accounts and get out of the way.
> You need to prove the value of your product before you can start charging users $11
Disagree about this. It's obvious what the offering is, so let the user decide if it's worth $11 to them. The expectation of value is set by defining the price point.
This is from a 20 line shell script that takes a picture at some random time within a minute after I unlock the screensaver. They are then uploaded manually using kflickr because, honestly, some of them come out really crappy (out of focus/blurry) and I unlock my computer like a 100 times a day.
Clever! Can you share the script? I have something similar, but my computer takes a picture every 20 minutes or so and uploads them to my server ( http://lishin.org/pavelcam.jpg ), overwriting the previous one.
(To answer the inevitable question, yeah, it's caught me naked a few times.)
Maybe I slightly exaggerated on the size. It's a 14 line shell script and a 57 line perl script. Anyway, it's small. Requires xscreensaver and mplayer and a working USB camera.
Well, it's also not clear what being "more organized and focused" gives you too. It doesn't seem worth 11 bucks. I think you need an obvious distinction to be able to get people to pay up. On the other hand, I love the design.
Great design! And I love the idea even if I'm not a big photo guy myself.
11$ seems a fair price if I'm hooked to your product but I need to try it before. Maybe you can offer a free plan, or give a trial period (10days for example).
Also I think that you should put your "View a sample collection" way higher in your homepage.
Good luck! I really love what you did, your design and your logo are awesome :)
Great idea. I would sign up immediately if I owned a digital camera, although I am not sure about the $11. You should show visitors some of the members' pages.
The price should be free or lower if you upload daily, and automatically charge your CC for the higher yearly fee if you miss uploading.
i think the thumbnails should link to a dedicated page for each picture, rather than a lightbox version, like flickr does. that way users can have a url per-picture but still have some context around it (like who took it, show the user's other pictures, promote the 365.io site, etc.) rather than just the raw jpeg url on s3. i'd say add the ability to leave comments and favorites and all that, but it sounds like you're just duplicating flickr at that point.
you could probably accomplish the same thing by using flickr's api. let users upload photos to flickr (with a certain tag that your site would look for) or through your site, but collect and present all of them with your own layout and sharing mechanisms. flickr can host all of the photos and let users keep copies of their own photos in their own photostream. you could pull in comments made on flickr and show them in the same stream with comments left on your own site.
there should still be incentive to use your site to view the photos, though, like having a voting mechanism and some kind of 'picture of the day' that would get displayed on the homepage.
Flickr's terms won't allow that type of use of their api. Also, flickr has a 200 photo limit on free accounts that makes project 365 impossible unless you upgrade, and even less so if you use flickr for something else.
"Also, flickr has a 200 photo limit on free accounts that makes project 365 impossible unless you upgrade, and even less so if you use flickr for something else."
"When you have a free Flickr account, you can upload 2 videos and 300MB worth of photos each calendar month....Your upload limits are reset to zero at midnight in Pacific Time Zone (Flickr headquarters time) on the first of each calendar month."
I can't see me paying for the service, but I think it's a great idea, especially for anyone who is trying to learn photography. I think I might make that my New Year's resolution.
True, but as I stated earlier, the main difference between this and a Flickr stream is the focus. Flickr is meant for photography in general, and while you could use it for Project 365, it's less organized and focused. For example, your P 365 entries would be mixed in with your regular flickr uploads.
Also, flickr's upload limit on the free plan wouldn't allow you if you have a high megapixel camera.
I've just completed a Flickr 365 project, so I have a bit of feedback. First, you can't do this for free as you can only show publicly the last 200 photos without a pro account. With a pro account, you simply create a set for your 365 project to separate it from the rest of your photos: works great. Plus you get awesome views like a calendar that shows the photo a day in a small thumbnail, and all kinds of sorting options (though old-> or new-> are all you really need.) Flickr's partnerships with photo printing companies can also be really convenient and probably makes Flickr some extra money too.
The only reason that I personally was able to complete my 365 was because I had options for uploading my photos direct to my set from my phone (I tried various paid apps until I found one I was mostly happy with.) If I had to sync my photos with my computer first then it never would have gotten done. Obviously on the one hand it would have been great to have 365 high quality photos from my DSLR, but the convenience of the iPhone was the only way I could keep up some days. In other words, an app or a simple way to e-mail photos to the program would be a must for me. And I probably spent $50 specifically for my 365 between Flickr Pro membership and various apps I tried, so I don't see the $11 as off-putting in itself at all.
If you're curious about my 365, I took a photo a day of my Toy Story Toys: http://www.flickr.com/dafalcon/ - the set is on the right side. And I just started 365 days of my newborn baby girl ... Give me good reason to switch from Flickr and I just might!
Thanks for the feedback. Here's a few tidbits regarding your remarks:
We're planning on allowing users to purchase a book of their photos at the end of the project.
We're also working on adding email-to-365, which would allow you to upload via your phone and other devices since e-mail is pretty widespread. We're also working in webcam integration so you can take a picture from the website itself.
One thing we allow is backlogging. Right now it's basic, but we're planning to implement a verification feature so that pictures that don't match the dates get flagged. They'd still be in the project, but they'd be marked as late. We were thinking about doing this by reading the images EXIF data.
Not $11 superior. If it offered some funky filters Instagram style you could perhaps capitalize on the Polaroid/Lomography type of audience. Or build a Flash driven picture uploaded that would use the web cam.
The way it stands is you're offering a pretty page for photos at $11 that doesn't target any real customer niche and does what a Tumblr blog paired with a Flickr account would do for free in a more flexible way.
We're working on webcam capture, actually. Regarding using flickr/tumblr, it can be done, but it's a decentralized, unfocused, and unorganized way of doing so.
I like what you said here. Contrary to what people seem to think...these "be all, end all" services and sites aren't suited to very particular and niche markets.
It's funny because there are so many people on HN and Reddit, for example, who don't capitalize on creating small niche services because there's already a Flickr, or already a Youtube and whathaveyou.
So I think you've done a good job here.
I think you could probably market $10 better. Remove the struck out $20 and just prominently and proudly display the $10.
As a risky marketing move, how about refunding all users who paid $20 the difference? What a great way to get them talking about you on Twitter, Facebook, etc. when you deposit their account with $10. It's a nice surprise.
Interesting but your page raise too much questions:
- What will my page look like?
- Is there a quota or something?
- What are the possible interaction with the community?
- What is the difference with flickr?
etc ...
re: interaction with the community. It's currently limited to sharing via a public URL, but we've discussed a follow model (like Twitter, except you'd have to opt-in) where you'd be able to view a stream of all photos from the people you're following. Since it's limited to one photo a day per user, the stream should be pretty easy to keep up with. Beyond that, there are lots of things we could do with favoriting, commenting, etc., but we'd like to keep it really focused and simple for now.
I think what could add value to this, if the focus was on taking a picture of yourself - from your laptop's webcam or something. Then you could do some basic facial recognition to align the pictures, centering the face, and slideshow that.
One problem that I experienced is that when I viewed the sample gallery and then clicked on an image to view it larger, I couldn't figure out how to get back to the gallery again. I tried pressing the back button but it returned me to the landing page, rather than to the gallery as I expected.
Some co-workers of mine have been doing 365 projects for 2010. On their server, each photo has a comments section where they give each other feedback and suggestions. That community aspect has really encouraged them to keep going. They talk about how hard it is to find something that makes for an interesting photo every day, but it's made them pay attention to their surroundings, and the feedback is making them better photographers.
One guy was pretty intimidated by the project at first. He started by trying it for a week, and now he's done 320 days or so.
They had their own server, but it recently died. The photo are copied elsewhere, but the comments are possibly gone forever. I'm certain that any of them would pay $20 for someone else to take care of the servers.
That's a good anecdote, thanks. We definitely think some more social interaction (primarily following/friending and commenting) is the next logical step for the service.
Flickr's upload limit and 200 photos (on the free plan) limit wouldn't allow you to complete the 365 project, specially if you use flickr for other photos outside the project as well.
I can understand the Flickr argument, but what (other than a lovely design) makes this better than http://365project.org/ or http://www.fotolog.com/ - at least $11 better (for now, then $20 better)?
Well, I guess we think people are willing to pay for lovely design (and by "design", I'm referring to the way it works, in addition to the way it looks).
You could also ask, "What (other than a lovely design) makes a Macbook/BMW/Dyson/Armani better than a Dell/Lincoln/Hoover/Old Navy?"
I get what you're saying but all of your examples are really bad examples.
Macbook vs Dell - Technology (specialised CPUs, Dual graphics chipsets in Macs to give better battery life and hard-wired flash chips in Macbook Air)
BMW vs Lincoln - Forgive me, I'm not well versed in American cars, but BMWs have cutting edge technology as well as some serious add-ons and tech (one of the first to introduce GPS, in-seat heating, various energy/mileage saving technologies such as brake-recharging). I don't know enough about Lincoln to say what they've introduced.
Dyson vs Hoover. Massive differences in technology, better suction on a Dyson, bagless, easier to clean.
It's interesting in the first three comparisons the premium option has a large amount of patents and internally developed technologies don't have (exception: Lincoln, I don't know enough about them to comment).
Armani vs Old Navy. Material quality, stitching quality, the way the garments are (traditionally) made although the gap is closing (if you'll pardon the unintentional pun).
Ultimately though there's a big difference in focus. Old Navy makes clothes for day to day wear in a variety of circumstances. Armani make clothes to be seen in at events. Apple are highly consumer and creative focused, Dell are more business oriented (but also attacking the consumer market). Dyson targets people who don't want to clean/change bags every now and again. BMW targets moderately wealthy men who want something decent they can drive as though they own the road with, I don't know who Lincoln target but it appears to be a higher end luxury car brand of Ford.
So what's the difference? I can't see it. I'm not saying there isn't one, I'm saying I'm interested in hearing what it is because it's not immediately clear (or at least sufficiently clear to make me want to hand over the cash if I know about fotolog).
Anything Nikon or Canon in the mid-$200 range would do wonders for you. Depends on what you want to spend of course. Have seen great results from Panasonic Lumix range also. I might suggest avoiding cameras with only touch screens - you'll go crazy about missing your shot if you need to set up and your fingers are gloved and it's cold out.
How about charging a fee X but reducing it by Y for each consecutive month a person uploads a daily photo, to the point where, if anyone actually uploads 365 photos they get the use the service for free?
Charge $12, but refund $1 for each completed month.
I have no tolerance for products that have ads and I pay for them. Nowadays, a lot of times paying means simple ¨removing¨ ads. This is a product that I can achieve in some ways for free. Why should I both pay for it and experience ads.
I don't like the idea of ads, but some kind of reward system might become critical to 356's success.
I started sth very similar to this this with a couple of friends one year ago and every single one of us lost interest/motivation/time in the first half of the year :(
On the homepage there should be a much higher-priority link to see a sample gallery.
When I clicked on a photo, I didn't know how to get back to the timeline/365 view. I went for the back button, but it wasn't active. It was hard to figure out that it was actually a light box. An animation when the lightbox activates would help, as would making the lightbox "less fullscreen."
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadThe main difference between this and a Flickr stream is the focus. Flickr is meant for photography in general, and while you could use it for Project 365, it's less organized and focused. For example, your P 365 entries would be mixed in with your regular flickr uploads.
You need to prove the value of your product before you can start charging users $11. Your frontpage gives no indication of the value added.
Regardless, thanks for the feedback.
> You need to prove the value of your product before you can start charging users $11
Disagree about this. It's obvious what the offering is, so let the user decide if it's worth $11 to them. The expectation of value is set by defining the price point.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thwarted/sets/72157623777255069...
This is from a 20 line shell script that takes a picture at some random time within a minute after I unlock the screensaver. They are then uploaded manually using kflickr because, honestly, some of them come out really crappy (out of focus/blurry) and I unlock my computer like a 100 times a day.
(To answer the inevitable question, yeah, it's caught me naked a few times.)
Maybe I slightly exaggerated on the size. It's a 14 line shell script and a 57 line perl script. Anyway, it's small. Requires xscreensaver and mplayer and a working USB camera.
11$ seems a fair price if I'm hooked to your product but I need to try it before. Maybe you can offer a free plan, or give a trial period (10days for example).
Also I think that you should put your "View a sample collection" way higher in your homepage.
Good luck! I really love what you did, your design and your logo are awesome :)
The price should be free or lower if you upload daily, and automatically charge your CC for the higher yearly fee if you miss uploading.
I have a feeling this site will take off.
There's a sample collection you can check out at http://365.io/u/2fe9781736.
you could probably accomplish the same thing by using flickr's api. let users upload photos to flickr (with a certain tag that your site would look for) or through your site, but collect and present all of them with your own layout and sharing mechanisms. flickr can host all of the photos and let users keep copies of their own photos in their own photostream. you could pull in comments made on flickr and show them in the same stream with comments left on your own site.
there should still be incentive to use your site to view the photos, though, like having a voting mechanism and some kind of 'picture of the day' that would get displayed on the homepage.
Flickr's terms won't allow that type of use of their api. Also, flickr has a 200 photo limit on free accounts that makes project 365 impossible unless you upgrade, and even less so if you use flickr for something else.
Incorrect.
From http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/
"When you have a free Flickr account, you can upload 2 videos and 300MB worth of photos each calendar month....Your upload limits are reset to zero at midnight in Pacific Time Zone (Flickr headquarters time) on the first of each calendar month."
Also, flickr's upload limit on the free plan wouldn't allow you if you have a high megapixel camera.
The only reason that I personally was able to complete my 365 was because I had options for uploading my photos direct to my set from my phone (I tried various paid apps until I found one I was mostly happy with.) If I had to sync my photos with my computer first then it never would have gotten done. Obviously on the one hand it would have been great to have 365 high quality photos from my DSLR, but the convenience of the iPhone was the only way I could keep up some days. In other words, an app or a simple way to e-mail photos to the program would be a must for me. And I probably spent $50 specifically for my 365 between Flickr Pro membership and various apps I tried, so I don't see the $11 as off-putting in itself at all.
If you're curious about my 365, I took a photo a day of my Toy Story Toys: http://www.flickr.com/dafalcon/ - the set is on the right side. And I just started 365 days of my newborn baby girl ... Give me good reason to switch from Flickr and I just might!
We're planning on allowing users to purchase a book of their photos at the end of the project.
We're also working on adding email-to-365, which would allow you to upload via your phone and other devices since e-mail is pretty widespread. We're also working in webcam integration so you can take a picture from the website itself.
One thing we allow is backlogging. Right now it's basic, but we're planning to implement a verification feature so that pictures that don't match the dates get flagged. They'd still be in the project, but they'd be marked as late. We were thinking about doing this by reading the images EXIF data.
The way it stands is you're offering a pretty page for photos at $11 that doesn't target any real customer niche and does what a Tumblr blog paired with a Flickr account would do for free in a more flexible way.
It's funny because there are so many people on HN and Reddit, for example, who don't capitalize on creating small niche services because there's already a Flickr, or already a Youtube and whathaveyou.
So I think you've done a good job here.
I think you could probably market $10 better. Remove the struck out $20 and just prominently and proudly display the $10.
As a risky marketing move, how about refunding all users who paid $20 the difference? What a great way to get them talking about you on Twitter, Facebook, etc. when you deposit their account with $10. It's a nice surprise.
Just an idea. Good luck.
There is a soft per-image file size limit, but it should allow room for most cameras including the higher megapixel ones.
What we did instead is put up a "Start Project" button instead of auto-starting it on sign-up so users can choose when to start.
One guy was pretty intimidated by the project at first. He started by trying it for a week, and now he's done 320 days or so.
They had their own server, but it recently died. The photo are copied elsewhere, but the comments are possibly gone forever. I'm certain that any of them would pay $20 for someone else to take care of the servers.
You could also ask, "What (other than a lovely design) makes a Macbook/BMW/Dyson/Armani better than a Dell/Lincoln/Hoover/Old Navy?"
Macbook vs Dell - Technology (specialised CPUs, Dual graphics chipsets in Macs to give better battery life and hard-wired flash chips in Macbook Air)
BMW vs Lincoln - Forgive me, I'm not well versed in American cars, but BMWs have cutting edge technology as well as some serious add-ons and tech (one of the first to introduce GPS, in-seat heating, various energy/mileage saving technologies such as brake-recharging). I don't know enough about Lincoln to say what they've introduced.
Dyson vs Hoover. Massive differences in technology, better suction on a Dyson, bagless, easier to clean.
It's interesting in the first three comparisons the premium option has a large amount of patents and internally developed technologies don't have (exception: Lincoln, I don't know enough about them to comment).
Armani vs Old Navy. Material quality, stitching quality, the way the garments are (traditionally) made although the gap is closing (if you'll pardon the unintentional pun).
Ultimately though there's a big difference in focus. Old Navy makes clothes for day to day wear in a variety of circumstances. Armani make clothes to be seen in at events. Apple are highly consumer and creative focused, Dell are more business oriented (but also attacking the consumer market). Dyson targets people who don't want to clean/change bags every now and again. BMW targets moderately wealthy men who want something decent they can drive as though they own the road with, I don't know who Lincoln target but it appears to be a higher end luxury car brand of Ford.
Say like, you can use it for free for the first month, then if you like to continue with it, pay $11.
Charge $12, but refund $1 for each completed month.
The refunds keep the users coming back, and the ads support your business.
I started sth very similar to this this with a couple of friends one year ago and every single one of us lost interest/motivation/time in the first half of the year :(
On the homepage there should be a much higher-priority link to see a sample gallery.
When I clicked on a photo, I didn't know how to get back to the timeline/365 view. I went for the back button, but it wasn't active. It was hard to figure out that it was actually a light box. An animation when the lightbox activates would help, as would making the lightbox "less fullscreen."