We just released PhotoRank this week, and it’s already taking off in a big way. But enough talk. Here’s what it is:

No login required, single-click user participation to rate photos. No friction – just find photos you like, and give them a thumbs up. Don’t like it? Thumbs down.

Then, see the results.

You can browse most popular photos by time, by keyword, by photo community, by category, and by user. You can even mix and match some of the parameters.

So go wild. Rate the world.

UPDATED: Michael just got back to me and has removed our mention in the article. We’re scheduling a time for us to do a more in-depth look at SmugMug, which I appreciate. It was obvious from his entry on it (which was mostly positive) that he liked what he saw – and it’s probably our fault for not making it obvious that we have all of these so-called ‘web 2.0′ features. In general, we don’t really feel they’re all that special – every site should just have them – so we may miss out on a lot of press compared to sites that do buzz about those things. Oh well.
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Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has some nice things to say about us – except he’s ‘urging them to add the obvious web 2.0 features to round this out, starting with RSS feeds for photos and tagging’ because we’re not ‘very web 2.0′. Right. Here’s the comment I posted, in its entirety, in reply:

As the CEO at SmugMug, I feel compelled to comment.

SmugMug has had RSS, Atom, and even Google Earth feeds since before any of these other companies were even announced. Ditto for tagging. And do any of them have a public API? We do.

How about completely democratic, friction free, no login required ranking of popular photos? Look what’s bubbling to the top already.

I could go on and on about our AJAX’d interface for much of the UI, robust search engine, Google Maps integration, etc…

But maybe I just don’t get this ‘Web 2.0′ term. Maybe it’s that we’re a bootstrapped, self-funded, profitable-for-three years company, so we don’t qualify for the name. Does it only apply to those companies without business models?

75% of our customers are refugees from other sites. Flickr is easily our largest “switcher” demographic, followed by most of the other big boys: Kodak, Shutterfly, Yahoo Photos, and Snapfish. We must be doing something right – even if it isn’t ‘Web 2.0′.

Don

SiN Episode 1: Emergence, the sequel to a video game I worked on, SiN, is now available for pre-order via Steam! What’s more, you’ll save 10% and immediately be able to play the original SiN and SiN multiplayer.

What are you waiting for?

Past blog entries about SiN Episode 1: Hands On and Your questions answered.