The RSS Blog

Om Malik: Photobucket, the plain vanilla photo hosting site is now officially the king of online photo business. It now has a whopping 44% of the total market. [cut] Amazing - success has nothing to do with Ajax, or cool stuff. It has everything to do with simplicity and giving users what they want.

http://gigaom.com/2006/06/22/photobucket-rules/

Randy: Om hits the nail real hard here. A couple years back, I tried to start a photosharing company called BubbleShare. Unfortunately, I could never convince the team to keep it simple and today they still have one of the coolest unused photosharing websites on the Net. Too bad, I still think there's room for an ultra simple photosharing website to clean house and knock these guys off.

Truth be told, the image above is hosted on photobucket. Why? Because I've tried them all and none allow me to simply upload a photo. I use to use Flick, but then I got a copyright complaint on a thumbnail (fair use) that I uploaded (with a link back to the source). I also used ImageShack, but they blocked me because I was hosting porn (their words). I replied back asking where the porn was and they replied with a URL with pictures of sexy women. But the women had clothes on (some bikinis, but others fully clothed) and none were in sexual positions. I replied back asking which of the pictures were pornographic and they immediately re-activated my account and apologized. A week later I was blocked again and I've never used them since.

For the last 3 years, I've had this dream of the perfect image hosting website. Simple to use, even for my mom and dad. But honestly, my mom or dad wouldn't even know how to use Photobucket. Image sharing has a long way to go. If anybody wants to spend a couple hours in Toronto talking about how to do this, then ping me.