Pixamid is similar to Color, in that we instantly share photos with those around you. But Pixamid gives the user more control, allowing them to limit sharing to just friends at the same place.
We also focus on aggregating photos from whatever source we can. Today, when people are together socially and taking photos, those photos end up spread out all over. If a Pixamid user is at a particular place, Pixamid will collect any photos taken at the same place from Pixamid, Foursquare, Facebook and Instagram.
The more nuanced sharing model and the aggregation are not currently features of Facebook clients. From what we have learned, a lot of people are not happy with any existing photo sharing solution, and we hope to provide some of them with a better service.
It is a matter of scale to a large degree - supporting so many developers efficiently, while still preventing harmful abuse.
They both could improve in many ways, for sure, and given the contributions developers are making.
Sure, it was a factor. The whole backend was built in 3 months, photo upload would have added another few weeks. But again, we aimed not to do that at all, wanted to be more virtual. At least until we heard form enough users that they wanted that option.
We knew well the risks going in, but still sucks when you run into the worst-case scenario. It certainly moved forwards our plans to get in alternatives.
Exactly... they are only creating more of a problem, in that everyone now uses different methods to take, store and share photos. And no one organizes photos, so it is a huge mess. If only someone could address that...
oh wait, we do. For less than half of what Color spent on a domain name, we build our Pixamid app...
Since our tiny 4 person startup built a photo sharing app with very similar core ideas, I was scared shitless this morning on first reading about Color.
That passed. Wrote it all up on the blog, but here is what I think they have wrong and our Pixamid has right:
Privacy: I think most people want to more privacy on their photos, not less. If the camera can sense who you are with (like Pixamid and Color try), by default, share ONLY with those people. By default, Pixamid shares with only your friends at he same place as you - you can choose to share with everyone there too.
Network Effects: Color™ might be cool in a world where everyone uses Color™. But we don’t see such a world anytime soon. People will use lots of different apps: Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Picasa -hell, even Ofoto (thanks Mom). We want to pull in your friends’ photos from any of these services, automatically as much as possible. See our post below about the Instagram magic we do; we’re dong a lot more of this cool stuff now.
Addressing a real problem: We are all taking more photos with our great phone cameras. But we hate to organize our photos. And if we add in Friend photos, it is even worse. Users of Pixamid get automagical photo organization as a byproduct of using the app. Each set of photos, with place, event, and who you were with. The things we will do with this in the future - can’t wait to show everyone! But we believe that our solution will revolutionize how people share photos online.
We also focus on aggregating photos from whatever source we can. Today, when people are together socially and taking photos, those photos end up spread out all over. If a Pixamid user is at a particular place, Pixamid will collect any photos taken at the same place from Pixamid, Foursquare, Facebook and Instagram.
The more nuanced sharing model and the aggregation are not currently features of Facebook clients. From what we have learned, a lot of people are not happy with any existing photo sharing solution, and we hope to provide some of them with a better service.