23people.com: photosharing made simple

Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Reboot’s organizer, has launched a new photosharing site. It’s called 23people. It’s functionally is very close to Buzznet and Flickr so apparently there’s no real innovation.

Nevertheless, it has a very nice user interface. I really like the way it eases the moblogging process by creating an email for you to send pictures too your gallery. You can also make zip and email them in one-shot. That’s what users will value more. Simplicity of usage.

I was able to start moblogging from my T630 in just 5 minutes.

The service has just launched so as soon has we were creating our accounts, our photos were all over the Latest Photos banner on the homepage.

I have been looking into this type of services in the last few weeks trying to understand business models, interaction models and social networking models. 23people seems quite simple and effective on what it does for sharing photos, mainly mobile. Has for their business model for now you get 1Gb on a free account to play around but I have read that the paid accounts will be around 29 euros / year for unlimited capacity and I can’t see any other revenue source for now.

The market opportunity is great. The digital photo market is huge worldwide with more that 325 million camera phones and digital cameras sold in 2004 and only about 5% of households with digital cameras utilize photo services.

I don’t know about 23people funding but french company Photoways got 24 million euros of Venture Capital just last week. And they have a much more tradional share-and-print photo service oriented for digital cameras.

So in the end being mobile-oriented 23people position themselves uniquely and I think they’re ‘getting’ the market by letting users play with photos the way they want. Thomas is having a tremendous opportunity on this one and I wish him all the luck.

Update: interesting (and now hot) discussion with Thomas on 23 being different from Flickr.

July 13, 2005 | Tags: photo

comments

5 Responses to “23people.com: photosharing made simple”

Morgy on July 14th, 2005

Para que conste no flickr tamb√�m “I really like the way it eases the moblogging process by creating an email for you to send pictures too your gallery.”
Andre on July 14th, 2005

No Flickr existe essa funcionalidade mas n√�o √� dada relev√�ncia para ela.
Os utilizadores normais n√�o a v√�o utilizar. No 23 ela √� fomentada. Ou seja, h√� mais probabilidade de ela vir a ser utilizada. √� nesse sentido.
Thomas Madsen-Mygdal on July 14th, 2005

Andre,

Thanks for the analysis - i agree completely.

What you’re seeing is the baseline functionality - we’ve got a couple of projects that will get on the site in the coming weeks that is very different in approach - but much is the execution and identity - and as you state we’ve done a lot of work to make the interface and easy to use for all users - not only geeks like us.

Our focus is the individual freedom for the owner of the photos to do with them what he/she wants - not trying to push people into any kind of behavior - but to have the flexibility and diversity of sharing options. Just to send/give photos to others which is the most socially established sharing situation which we’ve done a lot of work in trying to get right - or the more public social sharing of sites like flickr, buzznet, textamerica, etc.
But there’s tons of room for a variety of services in this field - and the real fight imho is the providers marketing digital photos to people based on the old models of printing them - which according to our research is a very little utilized way of sharing them - but is what the BigCo’s are pushing because it’s the business they know and own.

But this is very much beta - we’re just getting started - a small bootstrapped team of 5 people. So loads of things that could be done better, details missing in communication,etc. So please bare with us as we’re getting going.

If anyone knows the right person to be the Portugal ambassador for 23 let me know - we’re experimenting with the right way to make the service local to reach all the people who could use better tools for photo sharing.

Which in my head is what it’s all about instead of discussions of comparisons to other services, etc. How can one get better tools distributed to all the people with digital camera’s - and there by helping them connect with their friends, family or the world at large, share their life’s, document their happy times, sad times, what they see in their daily lifes, etc. That’s the big goal imho.
Bruno Pedro on July 15th, 2005

There you go! Localization is the key! First you’ll need to translate everything to portuguese, then you’ll need to understand the local reality, how people talk, what people do, and so on.

For a starter, why don’t you add some kind of mapping ability to 23people? That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Usually people like to relate a picture with a place (and vice-versa, of course), and you could build geographic communities around that concept (like plazes is trying to do right now). You’ll notice that people tend to relate more easily to other people from their own countries, or even better, from their own towns.

You could then easily localize on demand as the number of pictures (not users) from a given geographic region increases. This approach would get the attention of the local people who would want to see the pictures from their own place. Then they themselves would start posting pictures, and the ball gets rolling from then on.

Imagine, for instance, having 5000 pictures taken at Greece by english visitors. If you then create a greek version of the site, greek people will start to notice it and will want to check out all those thousands of pictures. Then, of course, they will start posting their own.

Translation is, of course, very tricky. Will you simply translate the user interface, locally adapt the whole user experience, or go all the way and try to translate content (if it has the appropriate license, of course - creative commons I mean by that). What about the name of the site - 23people. It doesn’t seem very “translatable” to me. Would it be appropriate to create and launch separate localized ventures?

This is indeed a very interesting subject to discuss…
Thomas Madsen-Mygdal on July 20th, 2005

Bruno,

You’re spot on. Getting local is the key - and we live in times where getting local doesn’t necessarily mean a local operation with huge staff, etc. - but a much more flexible and dynamic process. And getting local is based mostlyon demand - example a high percentage of our current users are from taiwan - not a place we expected a lot of users from when we started out - which now will be one of the first to get a local site.

The name actually is 23 - to avoid the 23people.com thing you mention - but not many people seem to pick it up - we’re looking at options for other urls or other solutions.

We’re both looking at what it means to be local - local language, culture, pricing, payment possibilities, identity of a host, community, presence, etc. - but also the community side of it.

Once again - setting a lower barriere for community to happen - ie. starting with connecting locally through the photos. “Find the others” is what’s imprtant there.