I've been busy over the last month coding on the new Zoto. I've taken over the development for our photo editing features, and our new blog and forums. Keep in mind that I'm first and foremost a manager - I do a hell of a better job telling coders what to do that I do coding myself, but in a pinch I can do a decent job of getting code written. However, being a bit of a lazy ass, I like to utilize other people's code where possible, and allowed. In that vein, I've chosen PXN8 for our photo editing solution, Serendipity for our new blog, and Vanilla for our new forums. I still have quite a bit of work to do on these features, but should be finished up in a few weeks at the latest. BTW, I now happen to be single-handily responsible for the support of PostgreSQL for Vanilla. That there is geek-cred, baby! 
To my point. I was doing some research on support for RAW formats when I ran across a post by Andy Atkinson regarding the comparison of Flickr and SmugMug, and why he was leaving SmugMug. It's impressive that Don MacAskill (CEO of SmugMug) got to the post as fast as he did - in under 24 hours. He must keep his feed reader maximized on his desktop and connected via XML-RPC to a small shock device embedded in his watch. I'm sure it also helps immensely not having ten SSH windows open to the development servers like I do.
Unlike Don's mostly agreeable attitude, I'm going to say that I strongly disagree with Andy's reasoning for leaving. I'm not saying that Flickr isn't a better solution for Andy, I'm just saying that he doesn't really know why he's leaving. Allow me to counter a few of his points, and then tell you my why I think he left. It is, if you will, a bit of competitive research, which I do practice occasionally.
First point, regarding the fact there are a large number of tools available for connecting to Flickr's API: A large number of tools != better base service. In other words, making the argument that Flickr has a lot of programs using their API does not necessarily imply the service is better. If you want a good analogy of this statement, look at the comparison of Windows to OSX. Windows definitely has the market edge when it comes to the number of programs that run on it, but arguably costs more to operate long term than OSX does due to crashes, viruses and spyware. Yes, it's cool that so many people write software for Flickr, but it doesn't make Flickr's base service better.
Second point, regarding the desire for IPTC and/or XMP standard support: Both Flickr and SmugMug support IPTC, but neither of them support exporting IPTC in the files when you download them from the site, unless it was already in the file to begin with. We're going to add IPTC import and export functions to our new release, but it's support is still spotty when it comes to photo management applications. Hello Apple. IPTC for iPhoto!
It's not a strength of Flickr then if you tag your photos and they don't magically get that data written to the IPTC fields in the JPG you download. While it's cool that a service supports importing IPTC, it's lame that nobody (to my knowledge) supports exporting the fields as well. We'll be doing exactly that on Zoto 3.0, FWIW, for exactly the reason that Andy lists for leaving SmugMug - even though Flickr really couldn't do better.
Fourth point - there is no doubt that Flickr's tagging system rocks. While a hierarchy (like SmugMug's galleries) is nice conceptually, it is unwieldy for the user, and making a decent UI that supports it is quite difficult. We made the mistake a while back in implementing a hierarchy for our tags, and I've regretted it since. Smugmug doesn't really have the tagging feature down pat, assumedly because it was an add-on, and never made a priority. Flickr could still use some tagging features, like the limiting you can do on delicious. A good mix of these features on a photo sharing site would be to have a flat namespace tagging system, with an album system that allows nesting of galleries.
Fifth point - permissions: Permissions are hard to implement correctly. Flickr has a way to build a list of contacts into contact lists named "friends" and "family", which make it convenient to limit to those two groups. However, there are limits to what you can do with this as you may have a set of contacts (like "crazy ass work people") that you'll share just about anything with - unlike "family" which has your mom in it, and thus shouldn't see those photos. SmugMug finds itself limited in the perms department because they require all accounts to be paid - thus eliminating your mom from having an account. A good solution would be to allow users with no upload permissions ("viewers") that can view, comment, tag, etc., but can't upload photos, and then allow the user to build contact lists as they see fit. I agree that Flickr's perms are currently the best solution for sharing photos online.
Sixth point - community support: There is no doubt that Flickr has a rocking community section. However, this alone doesn't make a site more attractive to someone who is looking to upload, archive, organize and share their photos online. Many Flickr users never take part in the Groups/Pools area of Flickr. Just for reference, Flickr's groups are pools of photos with comments on them. Pools are just a set of photos. The majority of people looking to put their photos online only care that you have good features for building your own sets/galleries/albums. SmugMug rocks at allowing you to make custom sets of photos for sharing. Much better than Flickr's static white theme on all your sets.
Seventh point - uploading photos: Uploading photos to the Internet sucks. It sucks because user's connections are asynchronous in nature - slower uploading than downloading. Yes, an all Java uploader sucks - but I bet you a plug nickel that is EXACTLY what Don is eluding to with SmugMug's "new feature" he mentions. Flickr's uploader is OK, but it still sucks because you have to wait on it to finish that set of photos to upload. It also sucks because there is a cap on the uploads (if you have a free account). What if someone wrote an uploader client that allowed for batching uploads? That way you could drag, tag, upload, repeat as desired, walk. Hmmmmm. I think I'll do that.
Eight point - geotagging. I'll say this again if you didn't know this already. I know the guy that was the first to implement this with photos. His name is Alex Jarret and his site over at the Confluence Project pioneered putting photos/blogs and geo data together. Zoto was the FIRST site to implement geotagging, and SmugMug was not far behind. If you want to fault them (or us) for anything, it's not continuing to apply updates to that feature. However, and this is important, NOBODY is ever going to use it extensively for organizing their own photos. That is, until every camera ships with a GPS in it. Unfortunately to date, nobody seems to be shipping a decent camera with a GPS in it. I wonder why? Again, it's cool and all that - I've shown that at the least I think it's VERY cool, but still nobody cares about this feature. Note: Nobody is defined as < 1% of your user base.
Ninth point - printing via Qoop. Yeah, Qoop is cool. Here's a shocker for you though - nobody prints photos online via Flickr. I know a guy that worked at Yahoo after they bought Flickr and implimented printing, and he said (take this FWIW) that they did less than 20 print orders a day. With 1 million users, that works out to less than 1% of their users printing in a given YEAR. Yes, I know people that have printed books on Qoop. However, I helped with integration of Qoop and Zoto, and even I haven't ordered a book yet. Printing is one of those things that everyone wants, and nobody uses. You have to have it if you have online photo sharing, but nobody uses it.
Tenth and last point - migration tools. Migration tools are important for one simple reason. Proprietary/closed systems suck, open systems rock. However, I really don't think that you can call Flickr an open system and SmugMug a closed system. Looking at both APIs, you have access to the photos, titles, tags, comments, etc. You are simply lacking the software that utilizes SmugMug's API decently. That said, a lot of Flickr aps don't work because they are free and unsupported. What you really want is a service that allows importing from one service and exporting to another - as you see fit. They are, after all, your photos.
So, I don't think that Andy has really stated a solid reason for moving to Flickr. Again, I agree that Flickr is more appealing to him, and others, but he hasn't really given a blow by blow account like Greg Reinacker did. All he did was list a bunch of excuses for the move to justify one over arching desire to move - Flickr appears to be superior to any other photo sharing site out there. (Yes, I did just type that.)
Now I've posted before about why Flickr sucks, but that was to give a dissenting view to counter all the fan-boy action going on with them. In this regard however, Andy is simply choosing Flickr as a solution because, somewhere deep down inside, he likes the way that Flickr shows his photos to him. Specifically, I'm talking about what we call the "image detail page" - the page that shows the photo to you when you click on a link or smaller image.
This is the real meat of this post. I maintain that Flickr has succeeded as much as they have because of one very important page on their site. The image detail page. To illustrate my point further, here's an image detail from Flickr, SmugMug, Zoto 2.0, and Zoto 3.0.
Notice the amount of links off the page on Flickr, and the speed at which you can move to the next photo. This is what makes Flickr appealing to its users - nothing more, nothing less. The ability to "link" to other photos makes it easy to get around and explore images. It makes the VIEWING experience nice for the user.
If you look at the SmugMug page, it's slow to load, and the links off to the gallery and tags are crammed down below where you aren't going to see them (esp. if they are below a page break). While the page looks nice, it's functionally a dinosaur. Small prev/next links make it impossible to navigate, and the modal popup requires clicking on an impossibly small "x" at the top. Looks great, but feels like poo to the user. If you had to look at your photos with this, you'd kill youself in 10 minutes.
Speaking of killing yourself, Zoto 2.0 will make you kill yourself in half that time. While we have decent prev/next navigation, the pages are hella slow to load, and they don't have a decent way of getting to a larger sized image (click on "other sizes", click on size, wait, view, close window). We also fail miserably in encouraging good tagging, which eliminates links being created, and we don't show any related photos when you are looking at photos in a gallery. Boo Zoto 2.0.
With Zoto 3.0, things are better. Notice the speed of moving between images - there are no page loads occuring there - it's all AJAX. When we add groups and album support, there will be links to the right of the image, just like the good positioning going on with Flickr. We'll also add a "lightbox modal" that will do a popover on the page - working much like Flickr's popopens for sets/pools/groups, but much faster and with more images. We've also added a second type of "image detail" to the lightbox that we call "lightbox modal detail" that will provide rapid fire viewing.
At the end of the day people will choose to use a photo sharing site because of one thing: How fast can they view their images at decent size? The reason Flickr has done as well as they have is because they have excelled at this one thing very well. Their "image detail" page rocks. Hands down.
Anyway, I've obviously plugged Zoto on this post, but that's why this blog is here, after all. My primary purpose was to debunk all this crap about why one service is better than the next because of X feature. These comparison posts don't help the companies any, and they sure as hell don't help the end user any, because there is little to nothing someone like SmugMug is going to do about it when they read the post (other than freak out).
Why they prefer one site over another is a complicated affair, where the user themselves is probably not even aware of the real reasoning. That is left as an exercise for those of us (sort of) paying attention.
Posted by Kord Campbell
at
15:20
| Comments (0)
| Trackbacks (0)