The Debris From the Mobile Photo Explosion
Since I first started working on Treehouse with my co-founder Daniel Rhodes over a year ago in January of 2010, the mobile photo space has become a spectacle and a bandwagon. It has attracted several high profile individuals, investors, and a serious cash injection. Well-funded companies like Path and Color have chosen mobile photo as the jump-off point of their long-term strategies. More than $65M has been invested into this space in 2011 alone.
We strongly believed that there was an opportunity for a product that took advantage of mobile phone cameras with GPS. We envisioned a way to tie people together with photos and everything surrounding them. We grappled with privacy, openness, follower/friend model, proximity relationships, and we've seen all of these things implemented in multiple ways not too long after we brainstormed them. All of these products (Instagram, Color, Path, Treehouse, etc) have put together a few pieces of the puzzle, but none of them has hit the nail on the head. Yet.
Through building our product and watching our competitors, I've made several observations about the behavior around mobile photo sharing.
Hyper-privacy in social doesn't work
Privacy is not binary. It's not just "on" or "off." If you try to replicate a private social graph, you'll find that it's quite challenging. Personal relationships are far more complex than one might notice at first glance. Your relationship with your mother is different than the one with your father, which is different than the one with your closest friends. Even within your group of close friends, the way you relate to each individual is different. The type of content you share changes from relationship to relationship. These sets of connections are different for every single person. As you add people to your private sharing graph, the type of content you share inches towards your normal sharing habits on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
It's impossible to take such an abstract social graph and convert it into simple UI/UX that makes sense. What you end up with is a smaller picture-only Facebook that is not inherently viral
Candy filters are a game mechanic, not a full product
The first time we saw Instagram a couple months before it launched, it never even occurred to us that the filters would make a difference. When they launched, it spread life wildfire. Why?
The recipe is simple and effective: one part filters, one part hyper-public social, and a dash of a popular photos.
Filters give you a strong incentive to take a photo just to apply them. Very much like gambling, every time you take a photo you go through an anticipatory period of excitement where you're hoping that a filter will magically make your photo look amazing. (Path, while the implementation is very impressive, doesn't accomplish that same effect because it applies the filter in real-time. You can't change it afterwards so you become stuck. You can't soak it in and hope it looks better with the next filter.)
You can share everywhere: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, the works. When you post that beautiful picture you've created and your friends/followers end up on your Instagram page, they're hooked. They have to have it. "How'd you do that!", "I want to make awesome photos like that too."
The popular section glues it all together. You want to seize any opportunity to take a photo of an object at the perfect angle and hope that you'll bubble up to the popular feed and be recognized for your artistic superiority.
The downside is that Instagram is pigeon-holing their product into a photo app that only produces a specific type of photo, generally of inanimate objects/scenes and not people. Candied photos lend themselves more to objects that don't move and makes everyday photos of people look worse. Whether or not this can scale to a meaningful product is up to Kevin, his team and the direction in which they take this traction, but they can't do it on filters alone.
How to disrupt photo sharing with mobile
The product that realizes there is more to photo sharing than just photos will win. All of the current products in the space are very simple: You have a stream of photos from people you've connected with (explicitly or implicitly) that you can comment on and/or like. Facebook has had this functionality since 2007. These products aren't disrupting anything beyond the number of TechCrunch posts about photo sharing. Facebook is still by far the leader in mobile photo sharing, and they haven't even tried. In fact, they're focusing on mobile photo sharing in 2011, so prepare for the bar to be raised.
We need to look at the deeper meaning behind why people take, share, and consume photos as well as the contexts in which those photos are meaningful to the people involved. Facebook changed our lives in the way we connect and share with the people we meet and Facebook is still the best place to share photos and get feedback, and they will fight to keep their position. It will take more than a simple social CRUD application to truly disrupt the way we take and share photos.
The answer? Well, I can't give it all away at once.
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