My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

Apples and oranges and ranking the photo "sites"

tech
by Antonio on

Pete blogs some interesting HitWise stats released into the blogosphere today by LeeAnn Prescott about how Photobucket is the #1 photo site by traffic, and poor "little" Flickr is only #6.

Comparing Photobucket to Flickr is like comparing one of those cheesy $5.95/month hosting packages you can buy from a zillion different hosting companies to MySpace. In both places you can create a profile and post it, and you can even use all the same funky styles. But no one would ever look at your page on XYZ-Cheaphost and confuse it with MySpace even though they both contain just about the same content.

On the web, there are two things that make up an "application:" a relatively robust set of tools that are provided for the user to "do something" (socializing, photo-sharing, etc.), and the community that grows up around these tools. In the desktop days you just needed the former, but in the web days it seems to me that if you don't have the latter, you're just a piece of infrastructure that can get sucked into some other webapp. In this case, Photobucket seems like a piece of infrastructure that is used by MySpace users to plug a clear hole in functionality.

Not that I have anything against Photobucket– after all they are the clear leader in their infrastructure category. They've managed to turn the crappy business of webhosting into something that seems to make money with just a teeny functionality twist and a new business model. But when Om writes that they won because of "simplicity" or giving the users what they want, I'm left wondering what it is exactly that they've won. MySpace (or CNET for that matter with their new All you can upload) could probably seriously put a dent in their growth curve by simply implementing that little bit of functionality. And if they get too intrusive with their collection of demographic data or their ads, some new entrant may decide that there is just room for the free-and-anonymous version of Photobucket.

It's interesting to think back to when Flickr first launched. I remember thinking: well this is ok, but I'm missing albums and photo effects, and invites, just for starters– there is no way I'm going to use this given how many other places I can go post a photo. But since then they've grown tags, a community, and a whole bunch of new stuff to entice, encourage, and otherwise entertain their loyal users. Will Photobucket have the same opportunity the grow functionality with its community the way Flickr did? Maybe. A look at their frontpage seems to show that they are moving in that direction. The challenge though is any app work they now do they have to undertake with a datacenter full of servers that is being pounded with request for photos on MySpace, and sometimes the weight of this makes you slow. It's why we don't worry too much about places like Kodak gallery coming after us at Tabblo– even with hundreds of engineers, they've got to deal with 3 billion photos and over 10 million users while we deal with... a whole lot less.

In the meantime, this whole Photobucket vs. Flickr discussion seems to me to be a good place to drop the old adage about how comparisons are odious.