If you snap photos with your camera phone, you probably mean to share them eventually. But if you’re like 75 percent of camera phone owners surveyed by Ontela, a Seattle mobile imaging firm, those pictures are still sitting in your phone’s memory, because you’ve never succeeded at transferring them to your PC, or a photo sharing site, or another mobile user. Even though phone makers and cellular carriers have had years to work on the problem, the photo-sharing software that comes on the “decks” or top-level menus of most camera phones is still too complicated for most users to bother with it.
But lately there’s been a flurry of startup activity around Web-based mobile photo sharing, and two of the newest competitors are right here in Greater Boston. This week Needham, MA-based Mobicious, which has been publishing a directory of mobile-phone applications and resources since late 2006, is officially launching a new service called SnapMyLife, which allows members to upload camera-phone photos to a Flickr-like public “timeline” or common collection viewable from a mobile Web browser. Also launching this month is Chelmsford, MA-based Moborazzi, which has its own Web-based public timeline but is focused on direct picture-sharing between members and any friends and family who sign up to receive photos on their own phones via e-mail or MMS.
Both services make sending a photo from your phone about as simple as it could be, given current technology. And both work with a wide range of devices. At a minimum, users need a phone with a Web browser or an e-mail program and a data plan (most new phones come with all of the above). Sending photos to the public timelines or to your followers is generally as easy as sending an MMS picture-mail message or attaching your photos to an e-mail. Viewing the pictures involves surfing to the companies’ mobile websites, which—if you set a bookmark—you can often do in only one or two clicks. Of course, the larger your phone’s LCD screen, the better your pictures and others’ will look on it. For the best possible experience with both SnapMyLife and Moborazzi, you’ll want to try the services on an Apple iPhone; both companies offer versions of the service optimized for the iPhone’s Safari Web browser.
I first met the folks from Mobicious a couple of weeks ago at Mobile Monday Boston’s iPhone app party at the Apple Store in Cambridge, MA, where they were just starting to show off SnapMyLife. CEO George Grey filled me in at more length about the service in an interview last week. “One of our aims was to emphasize the ability to have a complete mobile experience—not only taking the photo but carrying out the viewing experience on the mobile phone as well,” Grey says. “You take out your phone, go to our site, and see the latest pictures from your friends and family and others you’re following.”
Having users view photos via the mobile SnapMyLife website is key to the company’s business plan, which rests (for now) on revenue from text and display ads that are shown underneath each photo. “We decided to do it that way because it’s not very intrusive, yet we’re seeing good click-through rates, according to the ad networks we’re dealing with,” says Grey. He says SnapMyLife may also work with advertisers to build whole sub-communities around a single company’s ads. “You can imagine having a Jeep user uploading photos to a Jeep community and creating an opportunity around a brand,” Grey explains. “Anyway, we’re looking at what works and doesn’t work.”
To ensure that members would have the chance to stumble across interesting photos from around the world, Mobicious chose to make make SnapMyLife an open network—that is, to build its service around a public photo timeline, rather than restricting users to seeing only their own photos and their friends’, the way some other services such as San Francisco-based picture sharing network Radar.net do. The company also chose to keep that public timeline PG-rated. And those two decisions together have created an interesting challenge for Mobicious: sorting through the thousands of pictures being uploaded every day to make sure they don’t contain offensive content.
“We made a decision that we were going to make it an open site, where you can find something really interesting from Africa or China or somebody going on holiday,” says Grey. “But we also wanted to create a site for people who don’t want the kind of flirty, dating, or
