Thank you for all the congratulations. We're thrilled to be joining the Facebook team. Frankly it's still taking time for everything to sit in.
I'll admit that it's bittersweet. When you spend 18 months obsessing over your company it's hard to see it go. It ultimately came down to the decision that we could touch more people's lives at Facebook...and that's what we've been in this for all along.
<shameless thread co-opt>
Since this post is going to get a lot of eyeballs I want to take this chance to solicit any suggestions/feedback/complaints HNers have for Facebook Photos. I can't comment on exactly what we'll be doing at Facebook, but I can promise whatever you tell me will get in front of the "right people." :)
If you want you can email me directly: sam@divvyshot.com
----
Since their legal department might read this: I'm not yet a Facebook employee and I'm not speaking on behalf of Facebook, anything you tell me is going to be placed in the public domain, you waive all rights to ownership over any IP that Facebook ends up implementing, etc.
</shameless>
I promise you if fb doesn't provide decent access to the high-resolution images, DivvyShot will be reinvented by a different founder under a different name and offered up as a paid service. Yep, its that valuable, and Flickr has proven people are willing to pay for this stuff.
Now, suggestions:
1) ability to resize tag boxes to some degree
2) ability to drag tags around, instead of having to remove and re-click to place them
3) ability to change an existing tag. Example: when my mom joined facebook, I had to go back and delete all of the tags to her name (unlinked) and then add in new tags to her name (linked to her profile). It would have been easier to have an "update tag" button that let me link that tag to her profile (preferably for the whole album, but one-by-one would be better than nothing.)
4) I know facebook stores multiple sizes of photos. It would be neat to have more direct control over that -- say, to pick our own thumbnails, or to allow certain photos to be displayed in higher resolutions.
Even a 5% error rate is unacceptable. People may take offense to machine tag errors.
Second, facebook probably likes the time commitment people make to tagging photos and adding friends in order to tag them to the picture. It increases communication and also adds cases where people get facebook invites so they can get tagged.
i generally wouldn't tag a friend in a picture where they look bad, and there are all kinds of social situations where a friend wouldn't want to be tagged in a particular photo -- because one girl would see them with another girl, for example.
One thing that I'd love to see your guys' hands on is the notion of 'ownership' of FB photos -- this is something that was definitely in the DNA of Divvyshot, and it would be really interesting to see FB explore some models of shared/group ownership of content.
Group photo album ownership.
Example: I would love to be able to make a "family photos" album that is shared between me, my wife, and my son. I don't see any reason to have to duplicate their albums, and think it's silly that people have to add all three of us (or look in three places) to see all of our family pictures. If one of us could make an album and add the other two as co-owners, it would be a lot easier for us to put up family pics.
Larger views would also be nice.
And most important, color correction has to be fixed. It's been improved, but whatever they're doing on the backend for compression is muting and killing all color in my photos when I upload them :/
People occasionally upload party pictures and tag you in them. It is good that people watching the photos can see who are in them, and go to their profiles. The problem is that it also shows up under "Photos of X" where potential employers and girlfriends parents can see them. So you you have to go and untag yourself from any photos where you look stupid.
Let me remove pictures from "Photos of X" while still staying tagged in them.
Here are some major pain points (and some suggestions):
- The reliability of Facebook Photos is pretty suspect - the AJAX picture loader will get hung up randomly, increased reliability here will make the system a lot more polished.
- The Java upload tool really, really sucks. I would even take a Flash uploader over it, and I really despise Flash. Letting the users interact directly with their file systems may not also be a great idea - can you slurp directly from a memory card or camera connected via USB? This may convince more people to use Facebook as their only stop for photo storage.
- Photo API could use some work - right now the Lightroom Facebook plugin can't seem to delete photos. This means that when I make modifications to a photo and re-publish it just creates new photos on top of the old ones. The Flickr API allows overwrites, which means that the files can be seamlessly replaced, preserving comments and other data.
- iPhoto's facial recognition stuff is really really really cool, it'd be great if Facebook shamelessly stole it :)
I think it would be cool if some company would partner with kodak or wallgreens or whoever is running all those 1hr photo developing places that are somehow still in business. They should be outfitted with specialized photo scanners and staffed with professionals who can help scan a lot of photos quickly. Then these photos could be archived online and partially sorted with that facial-recognition software. Maybe dates and annotations could be pulled off of handwriting on the back of photos if it is clear enough. Some kind of family-tree arrangement would be nice, too.
Anyways, I honestly don't expect Facebook or anyone else to implement this. It is too costly and difficult and laborious. I sure as hell wouldn't want to do it. But there's my suggestion.
Translation: $
Plus, Facebook is an awesome product with millions of users. Now they can help Facebook Photos kick its own ass. Sounds like a win-win for everyone. :)
Not being in a position to judge this specific instance, I'd think in general you are better off showing some power, saying no to a deal, maybe entering into a partnership instead that keeps the focus on your product.
I think we can now conclusively prove that having a reddit logo on your homepage leads to a successful exit.
It filled a great niche. A year ago, a bunch of friends and family and I went on vacation, and we all talked about trying to set up some kind of photo sharing spot where we could see each other's photos, but it never happened. Divvyshot, though, fit that bill.
Facebook doesn't do that for me, so I've downloaded the photos and will be deleting this event. I realize that getting bought out is a positive thing for the founders, but it can be a negative thing for your users, and it certainly feels that way to me. Bit of a letdown.
All that aside: great product, and best of luck to you guys in the future.
"I was the one who came forward about the Macbook Air" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160643
Starring Divvyshot founder Sam Odio, Former TechCrunch Intern Daniel Brusilovsky, and Jason Calacanis.
Looks like Sam made out OK.
ps. I've forwarded this to the whole comm school.
If you ever doubted your business, you can feel affirmed now. Being bought out by the largest social networking site with a sizable portion of their site dedicated to photos... well, you obviously did it right.
Get out there and do something else right, now :D
I have to echo the sentiments of another poster in this thread - what is the point if your startup is just an elaborate job application process? Now a really cool app will be shut down, and a couple of guys will land a job at Facebook. Seems like a net loss to me.
