Here's my 10 second review: I have no clue why I should want to use this instead of flickr.
I'm sure there's some reason -- but whatever it is, you might want to point it out more clearly on the front page, because otherwise those 10 seconds are probably all you're going to get from most people.
Honestly, I think it's a design issue. Interaction design, not visual design (the site's very pretty) because the answer to your question is right there on the home page, it's just nowhere near prominent enough to grab your attention in the 10 seconds you mentioned.
"No account needed!
It couldn't be easier! You can share photos with friends and family right now!"
You can tell it's important because it's repeated again directly below, with a minor change in wording:
"
Share your photos NOW - No account needed!
"
That's actually huge, I'm guessing it's even the main feature that sold YC on accepting them (to me, "photo sharing made stupid simple" = "no account needed") especially considering that trend in recent YC startups like posterous.
Actually, posterous is a great example, go look at their home page, the super prominent crossed out "make an account" line at the top of the page gets across the point really nicely.
I hate if I have to enter a username when I just want to quickly try what something is about.
I always try to build my apps so that you can use most of the functionality without an account. I think that should be the standard way to do it and not other way round.
I'm also confused about who this service appeals to. Flickr is incredibly popular across a whole age range, and was pretty much built around sharing and tagging photos. Most people who want to share photos but don't know (or care) about flickr will simply create a Facebook photo gallery, which is limited feature-wise but dirt simple to use. If this site had a facebook app it might be able to reach those users, but third-party applications seem to be loosing prominence since Facebook's UI overhaul last year.
I believe Divvyshot is largely for grouping high-res photos centered around events (multi person gatherings with more than one camera)... and I guess it isn't as clear as it should be. Any idea on how to convey that message more clearly?
Two quick and unfiltered thoughts:
Host photos of actual high profile events (i.e. a conference, a concert) and link to this on the front page to show unregistered users what the site is capable of.
Add a tagline to the divvyshot logo in the top left.
The site's a piece of crap right now, but hopefully things will be better over the coming weeks. Release early and frequently, right? If you find any huge bugs email me: so / at / divvyshot / dot / com
Features we've built and haven't yet launched include:
- A Desktop client (PC & Mac)
- Twitter, Flickr, & Facebook synchronization
- Facebook application
- An iPhone app (you can see real time what's happening at the event you're attending and push photos to the event from your phone)
I don't use MS Windows or Mac for handling photos, so this is useless for me. for If you had a Linux client I would probably use your service. (Even a 100 line command line program would probably be good enough for what I want).
Very cool, event-based photo sharing with easy group sharing is a good idea. Two quick suggestions -- you shouldn't have to give a name to each photo you upload, and you should look at the exif data for the image orientation so pictures don't display sideways.
Dear Sam,
Congratulations for the website.
After using it for couple of days, I think that you have a too long journey to make it in a beta edition!
The idea of the startup is really cool, but it's not about ideas only... as someone said before: Ideas are worthless!
The website lacks a zillion essential features, and even the existing features don't work properly!
For example, someone added me as a friend without my permission and I am trying to remove him, but noway!
Also there is a killing security hole in the website that could double or maybe trible your bills in the future, if someone "idiot" abuses it.
You have too long road... you need a developer with you!
You need someone who just can't develop the website, but also someone who has a vision to take this startup to the next stage!
If you think that you have chosen the wrong programming language, then there is no shame in choosing another easier language like PHP.
Also it's ok to code it from the scratch.... even big projects are re-coded from the scratch!
Till now... you did not even fix the "30 charachters limit" for the email addresses!
There are other ways to prevent automation (JS) -- captcha is like one of the most damaging ways of fighting it, and it will always lower your conversion rate significantly.
When you're starting out, lower conversion is a death sentence.
My take: solve problems like this when you have to, not before.
About the frontpage question:
"You and your friends went to a party. where do you put the photos? Right here!"
--- ehh wrong, personally I'd put my photos on facebook. I have an account there, my friends do as well, so I don't get it... sorry :S
If you want your photos on Facebook, divvyshot is the best way to get them there, as well as the best way for Facebook users to receive them, but I'm not sure how much of the functionality is in beta/secret.
Facebook. You can tag your friends and they will be notified. That's a huge advantage, because not only the tagged person comes to see but also her nosy friends.
Facebook without a doubt. It's what everyone does, and while it's slightly broken because all the albums for one event aren't linked, it's not a huge problem. It's something that would be nice for Facebook to fix, but isn't major. At least that's my opinion as a user.
Divvyshot centers on events -- not albums by individual photographers. You can quickly post a few pics and get folks uploading their photos to the same event with almost no effort. Check out the immediate photo upload -- just drag and drop into your browser! And you can click to download a zipfile of all photos in an event, at full resolution. Think of it as a new spin on photo sharing, similar to how Posterous is a new spin on blogging.
It's drag and drop from the finder to the "Mini Divvy" app. Then it does some sort of synchronization to everywhere that's registered interest in that "event".
Not sure what the use cases are, and whether it justifies a whole other app, but it's an interesting spin on sharing. You don't just get notified of something, you just get the file.
Sure, party pictures are one thing, and facebook handles those quite well. I don't believe Divvyshot stands to take that market from facebook. That said, if you've ever travelled overseas, it's likely you've had friends and family ask for your photos... and facebook just doesn't cut it with that use case IMHO.
Why not store the photos at whatever resolution they were uploaded, and add options for lower-res viewing or downloads? That would provide them ost functionality for everyone.
You are displaying people's email addresses? And you say you don't like spam?! Shame on you. I'm already weary giving divvyshot my email address, and now divvyshot is passing it on to every other registered user. And of course I couldn't tell that it was going to do that ahead of time b/c I had to log in to see that feature.
(Looks like you can prevent the display of your email address by entering a display name in your profile, but that is not obvious at all.)
You may want to turn off directory browsing ... Playing around for a few seconds didn't reveal anything particularly bad (although, this was very interesting: http://divvyshot.com/static/bandwidth_costs.xls).
The Java applet also seems to hang firefox for me (Ubuntu 8.10 x64). I don't have another 64bit linux machine handy, so I can't tell if it's something particular to my setup though.
The design looks really nice. I already use drop box with friends to accomplish pretty much the same thing, and it wasn't immediately apparent what the added value would be to using Divvyshot.
Also, the first time I went to the upload page I got a "unknown certificate. trust/don't trust" dialog which disrupted the otherwise excellent UX. Mac OS X 10.5.6, Safari 4 if that's relevant.
Overall great work. I think this will be really appealing for people looking to share photos without any setup.
I'm a little confused - really great execution (!!) but I don't see the business sense. I'm not sure how this differentiates itself from other file hosting/photo sharing sites. For instance can you have private photos on Flickr? At the very least there are things like drop box as mentioned. What about people who tend to share photos through Facebook? Besides which, what is the monetisation strategy? Freemium? What features will be added?
There must be some sense or it wouldn't have got YC investment - maybe the idea is to execute this so well that Google buys you you as I don't think they have a good photo sharing method yet and it would be a great way to expand?
So I've been beta testing for two weeks and I think Divvyshot is a great service for a few reasons:
1. It allows you to share high res photos without downloading a client, sending an unreasonable number of emails with attachments, or resorting to other archaic methods like swapping jump drives.
2. You can invite other people to add photos to the same event which is awesome when you go on vacation/to a party/etc. and everyone is taking pictures with different cameras.
3. Facebook integration = one-stop posting. (Though I wish it would present separate albums on Facebook as they were created on Divvyshot).
4. It’s easy.
5. I never have to right click “save as” again if I want a friend’s picture off of Facebook.
Sam, congrats on getting techcrunched! Can you share with us your marketing/outreach efforts and how you got them to write about you in such an early stage of the product?
A little YC easter egg: If you keep refreshing until you get to the little girl's birthday photos, you'll notice all of the names are of the YC principals + baby George.
2. the HTML alternative http://divvyshot.com/event/F2z3/photo/add/form/ only allows one photo to be uploaded at a time. I have 7 photos I'd like to upload, varying in size between 1.7 MB and 3.4 MB. I want to be able to tell it to upload the lot in one go, not have to go back to the site 7 times and do it.
3. there should be a command-line application to upload photos. This would only be 100 or so lines of Python. It should of course allow multiple photos to be uploaded at a time (see note 2 above).
4. I uploaded a photo -- http://divvyshot.com/event/hv4x/ -- and can't give it a name or title. I even created an account but that didn't seem to do anything useful.
Not sure what you have for the Mac client but a suggestion: I can select an album in iPhoto (or event(s) or multiple selects) and then use either contextual menu or menubar app to upload photos. No need to drag and drop.
When I open iPhoto, that's usually the time I feel like sharing.
I like the simplicity, but I'm not yet sold on posting event photos here instead of Facebook. Maybe the ToS would be a deciding factor. Speaking of which, what are the ToS, especially with regard to content rights?
If you can find a way to help users "move"/import their stuff from their current service to yours, then it would be really great.
Also if you consider adding service like printing or something...
I'm sure there's some reason -- but whatever it is, you might want to point it out more clearly on the front page, because otherwise those 10 seconds are probably all you're going to get from most people.