if your photo app is going to bring something radically different to the table, then i say 'bring it on'
Sometimes I think hacker attitudes are way too dramatic. "Precious development time", "... my baby." Discouraging projects unless they are "radically different." Commit 100% or don't bother! Utmost passion and dedication to your online power saving widget! GO BIG OR GO HOME!
A lot of really good software was created on a lark. Some of it even became financially successful. It doesn't need to be quit your job and drop out of school to make the next Google (using Haskell, this time) or else you're wasting your time.
That said, at my day job I have genetically engineered biomolecules to act as a massively parallel neural network which can design new derivative investment instruments on the fly and corner the market on them before other hedge funds even know they exist. As a clever side-effect, this process unearths retrotransposon based cures for AIDS hidden in "junk DNA". My work has been "certified green" because the biological residue from the computations can be dumped onto ocean oil spills and automatically transform the petroleum into vegan friendly biodiesel which swims to shore on its own. I have also hacked my roomba to perform an advanced form of lasik surgery which restores sight and plan on sending it on a world tour to communities in the rain forest afflicted with "river blindness." Hopefully these advances in the state of the art more than make up for the time I'm wasting on my boring photo site.
EDIT: gotta give a shout out to my homies at CERN for hooking one of my molecules up with a free trip to the 11th dimension after they find the higgs. thanks, guys!
Imagine you know a friend who quits his job to focus on his photo-sharing startup that you know will be exactly the same as Flickr.
What would you do? Would you just support him blindly or would you advise him to differentiate his product from the competition?
"...but how I want it" are powerful words. If existing products don't do what you want, and you can find a way to make them do what you want without a huge team and lots of $$, why not?
It's just that I've seen too many startups doing photo-sharing sites (admit it. You've seen your fair share of them) promising something different but in the end, they offer nothing compelling over the current services.
It's like someone saying they want to build a craigslist killer because of all sort of cool features that they can't do with craigslist. And when they launch it, yeah they're right. There are some cool features that they can't do with craigslist like advanced filtering but these are not compelling enough to differentiate themselves.
