5 ms·

I bookmarked your site and may get around to trying it sometime, although I may have almost as little time as a new parent. :) Quick thoughts, no intelligence

I bookmarked your site and may get around to trying it sometime, although I may have almost as little time as a new parent. :) Quick thoughts, no intelligence guaranteed: Your pricing plans are organized backwards. Click the link, glance at the leftmost column where the cheap option always is, see "$52", have a 500-millisecond heart attack. Then keep reading and notice that it does get cheaper. Great! Except that the damage has been done: the $52 sticks in my brain. Not good. $52 is too much to quote. Especially with your wacky (nifty?) "pay for what you use" plan. If you have that plan, use it! Quote a price per picture! Or, if that's too late-night-infomercial a tactic for you, quote a price per 250 pictures, which is conveniently about $26. (Price of a 1 year Flickr Pro account with unlimited pictures: $25. Unless I'm missing something. If I am missing something your site needs to explain it to me or I'm just going to buy Flickr.) "TBD" is bad. Flickr doesn't give me any of this "TBD". I can tell exactly what the limits of my free account are. You should pick a number and put it there... having "TBD" there gives the subliminal impression that you're a newb and haven't figured it out yet. :) You have a hard row to hoe. Flickr has the mindshare, they've got the network effect, they've got deep pockets in the form of a giant corporate owner who may soon be sold to an even larger corporate owner. You might consider positioning yourself as the perfect place to move to when you get sick of having your Flickr photos owned by Microsoft. I'm only half joking. How's your Flickr import tool? :) Finally, if you have good photo support for bloggers but can't get the bloggers to move to you, can you move to them? Can you take any small bites of Photobucket's market? Is there any point in a Facebook app? (Doubtful, but what do I know?) A plugin that lets you embed slideshows into a Blogger/Livejournal/MySpace/??? page?

brlewis 19y ago
Good point on the TBD. I've changed it. I'm actually not worried about Flickr. I'm gunning for a much larger competitor: people's hard drives. Flickr is a perfectly fine social network for photography enthusiasts. For normal people who want to share their doings, I've made something clearly better, in ways you can see at a glance. Flickr is a grid. OurDoings is an illustrated story. The only problem I expect to encounter related to Flickr is people getting the expectation that your photos won't be organized unless you put effort into it. That said, your point about MSFT is a good one. Perhaps the time is now to make a Flickr import tool.
- mechanical_fish 19y ago
  I've made something clearly better, in ways you can see at a glance. That presumes that I have seen my photos in both places. I haven't. I barely use Flickr, and I've never used your site. My glance at your demo didn't sell me on the difference thoroughly enough. Make the demo even more of an illustrated story, perhaps? More timepoints? More captions? A screencast might be nice if you want to show people the automatic-organization feature in action. Get your first ten users cracking! Get some photosets into the system and showcase them in a box on the homepage! Nothing moves the flock like the sight of other happy sheep. :) I'd make sure iPhoto import worked well before I went for Flickr. I really am mostly joking about the MSFT thing. I don't actually think that very many Flickr users harbor illusions that their data is private, and getting invested Flickr users to convert is a completely different marketing game from the one you're playing now.
  - brlewis 19y ago
    Ok, I should have said "one" instead of "you". Screencast of the automatic-organization feature (among other things) is here: http://img.ourdoings.com/tutorial/windows1.htm http://img.ourdoings.com/tutorial/windows1.htm Almost all of my users are using it for non-public photos. One notable exception: http://ourdoings.com/neverlandtheatre/ http://ourdoings.com/neverlandtheatre/ I will improve the demo.
    - mechanical_fish 19y ago
      Ironically, non-public photos are a great feature. But it doesn't advertise itself! So find some less-shy sample users, or send someone out to a parade or something and document it. Sorry I missed the screencast, but I guess that's the point of the drive-by demo: to see what casual visitors notice and what they don't. Of course, at this point, I should remind you that I may not be the ideal sample of your target demographic. :)

brlewis 19y ago

Good point on the TBD. I've changed it. I'm actually not worried about Flickr. I'm gunning for a much larger competitor: people's hard drives. Flickr is a perfectly fine social network for photography enthusiasts. For normal people who want to share their doings, I've made something clearly better, in ways you can see at a glance. Flickr is a grid. OurDoings is an illustrated story. The only problem I expect to encounter related to Flickr is people getting the expectation that your photos won't be organized unless you put effort into it. That said, your point about MSFT is a good one. Perhaps the time is now to make a Flickr import tool.

mechanical_fish 19y ago
I've made something clearly better, in ways you can see at a glance. That presumes that I have seen my photos in both places. I haven't. I barely use Flickr, and I've never used your site. My glance at your demo didn't sell me on the difference thoroughly enough. Make the demo even more of an illustrated story, perhaps? More timepoints? More captions? A screencast might be nice if you want to show people the automatic-organization feature in action. Get your first ten users cracking! Get some photosets into the system and showcase them in a box on the homepage! Nothing moves the flock like the sight of other happy sheep. :) I'd make sure iPhoto import worked well before I went for Flickr. I really am mostly joking about the MSFT thing. I don't actually think that very many Flickr users harbor illusions that their data is private, and getting invested Flickr users to convert is a completely different marketing game from the one you're playing now.
- brlewis 19y ago
  Ok, I should have said "one" instead of "you". Screencast of the automatic-organization feature (among other things) is here: http://img.ourdoings.com/tutorial/windows1.htm http://img.ourdoings.com/tutorial/windows1.htm Almost all of my users are using it for non-public photos. One notable exception: http://ourdoings.com/neverlandtheatre/ http://ourdoings.com/neverlandtheatre/ I will improve the demo.
  - mechanical_fish 19y ago
    Ironically, non-public photos are a great feature. But it doesn't advertise itself! So find some less-shy sample users, or send someone out to a parade or something and document it. Sorry I missed the screencast, but I guess that's the point of the drive-by demo: to see what casual visitors notice and what they don't. Of course, at this point, I should remind you that I may not be the ideal sample of your target demographic. :)