I got an email months ago saying that the author had written TechCrunch, GigaOM, and Valleywag about Yahoo Photos closing and that they’d ignored it completely. Given that Valleywag posts just about any rumor and that it hadn’t gotten posted, plus Yahoo Photos was so huge, I figured someone was just trying to get me to look stupid on my blog.

Guess not. USA Today broke the story that Yahoo Photo is on it’s way out. TechCrunch has followed up with a post on the subject. One wonders, though, if they wish they’d listened to that email a few months ago? (I know I do!) And where on earth was Valleywag?

The text of the email in question contained a reference to Yahoo only providing migration mechanisms to a single “Web 2.0″ company, Yahoo-owned Flickr, and all of the other options being old “Web 1.0″ dinosaurs like Kodak and Shutterfly. That seemed brilliant, to me, from a purely business perspective, but poor from a consumer perspective. As great as Flickr is (and I do believe Flickr is great), it’s not perfect for everyone.

They deserve kudos for allowing any non-Flickr migration at all, but the really awesome way to handle this would have been to let any service integrate as a migration partner. (Remember, I’m the CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug, so I’m biased all over the place!). Rumor has it we were actually up for consideration, but the decision went against us. D’oh!

Regardless, if you give Flickr a try and don’t like it for whatever reason, SmugMug still has a Flickr Refugee 50% Discount in effect. Plus you can use tools like SmuggLr to seamlessly move your photos over.

Part of me is sad, like we’re witnessing the end of an era. So many of the big old photo sharing sites are dead and gone. I believe there are only 6 big ones left from the pre-SmugMug days. Can you name them all?

I was at MIX this week speaking on a panel about web services. Obviously, the big announcements there were around Silverlight, so I’ve been getting emails asking what I think. Here you go, just a raw brain dump:

• No matter what happens, everyone wins. Competition is good for us. Adobe has urgency to improve Flash at a rapid rate, and Microsoft has urgency to catch up. Awesome for you and I - who cares who “wins” or if there even is a “winner”.
• Silverlight looks amazing. I want to consume Netflix movies using the Silverlight interface - it’s gorgeous and fast. But I don’t want to consume Netflix movies on my PC - I want to do it on my TV. That’s why I have an Xbox 360, AppleTV, and TiVo Series 3.
• I would like to develop for Silverlight just to see how neat it could be for our company, but there are two big problems:
  • The installation process on Mac OS X is horrendous. And we have a lot of Mac OS X customers.
  • Massive chicken-and-the-egg problem. My customers are not technical, and almost always just answer “No” to permission dialogs because they’ve been trained that “Yes” means “I’d love to be infected with a virus!”
• I have some fairly big performance complaints about Flash in some cases, so if Silverlight doesn’t suffer from the same issues, I’ll be pretty thrilled.
• Ray Ozzie & Co didn’t make nearly enough of a big deal about the fact that you can do this stuff in Python and Ruby in addition to C#. That’s huge and should have been the opening headline.
• Offering to host Silverlight videos for free (4GB) is a brilliant way to speed up adoption. Good move, MS!

So, anyway, there we go. I’m excited about it and skeptical about it at the same time. I think if the Mac installation process was a breeze AND I was able to create something really compelling, I’d be willing to show my customers how great it is. So the installation ball is in Microsoft’s court right now.

We’ll see what happens.

(Oh, and whoever organizes MIX next year, can we please please please have a real grid like every other conference? I missed great sessions because there was no grid)

I’m getting emails about Amazon’s new S3 pricing model, so I guess the news is out.

For us, this is great. We’ll save money right off the top (we upload a lot, so $0.10/GB uploaded vs $0.20/GB uploaded is a big deal) first of all, and secondly, they finally have tiered download transfer costs. This is a big one for us, because we buy enough bandwidth that $0.20/GB wasn’t cost-effective enough for us.

I’m going to have to run some numbers (I’m at MIX right now) to see if it’s now good enough for us to start serving more content out of S3 or not, but even if it’s still not perfect for us, it’s a major move in the right direction.

Finally, this illustrates a subtle but important point of using S3. When I buy physical disks at SmugMug, those are sunk costs. They’ll never get cheaper because I’ve already paid for them. At Amazon, though, market forces and changes will cause their pricing model to continue to re-adjust downwards. As disks get cheaper, that $0.15/GB/month fee will drop. And instantly all of your storage magically gets cheaper, no sunk costs to worry about.

That happened today, and I’m sure it’ll happen over and over again as storage & bandwidth both get cheaper and Amazon is able to leverage their scale to get better deals. The more people use S3, the more Amazon can drive prices down.

Since we were already saving a ton of money using S3, this is music to my ears.

We’ve had this program for awhile, but as always, we suck at PR so you probably didn’t even know.

It’s pretty simple: Want to build something on SmugMug’s API? You’ll get a lifetime free Pro account ($150/year value) for doing so. Just sign up for a free trial and then drop us a note letting us know what application you’re gonna build, and we’ll take care of the rest.

Already have a SmugMug account? No worries, we’ll upgrade it and make it free for life. Just let us know.

And yes, we’re cool with everyone building commercial apps on top of SmugMug. Thrilled, in fact - we already have hundreds of them. There are only two exceptions we can think of: ‘SmugMug-in-a-box’ where you’re re-selling SmugMug (lots of people sharing a single account), and a situation where SmugMug is basically a database, like an ad server. When in doubt, just ask. Other than those, go wild.

In case you’ve been living in a cave, the newspaper business is in trouble.

I don’t know a single person born after 1976 that subscribes to a newspaper. I never have, and no-one I know from my generation has, either. Why would we? We could get all of our news online before I even graduated high school.

But I do read newspapers. I just consume them differently than people historically have - I pick and choose my favorite bits from the world’s papers, instead of reading my local paper cover-to-cover every morning. There’s certainly still a place in this world for newspapers - just maybe sans paper. How do I know?

This article is proof in and of itself. One of the world’s most renowned musicians, Joshua Bell, gave an impromptu concert in the DC Metro with his $3.5M violin, and the Washington Post has one of the best articles I’ve ever read about it. Beautifully written, see for yourself, you’ll love it. And if you needed it, it reminds you why traditional media still has a place in this world. (Thanks Matt!)

Oh, and in case you hadn’t already heard, Sam Zell is an idiot. Newspapers are doomed if you listen to his crap.

I sold mine unopened. How a company could make so many blunders, I’ll never know.

It reminds me of how they blew the music player market too. They owned music. Literally. Discman was theirs. Walkman was theirs. They even owned one of the big music labels. Yet Apple is the one who now dominates the market.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist back then to see how Sony could have won, well before Apple even entered the market. How do I know? Because everyone was talking about it online. The recipe for success was on everyone’s lips, ready for the taking. Sony could have made the dominant music player but chose to ignore the customer.

History repeats itself with PS3.

I pray I never lose sight of what our customers want. Thank goodness our customers are very patient with us and keep reminding us of all of our flaws. I promise - we’re listening and working on them.

Chris MacAskill, my father and SmugMug’s co-founder, covers it best: Be different or be damned. It’s in the April 9th issue.

We were lucky enough to be part of a BusinessWeek cover story last November, too.

Phixr, a sweet online photo editor, added SmugMug support back in February using our public API. (Ok, ok, so I’m way behind. Sorry!)

As always (I should probably do a blog entry on this), anyone building something for our API or integrating an existing project gets a free lifetime Pro account at SmugMug. Just drop us a line.

And unlike some other sites online, we love it that you build commercial apps on our API. Go to town, make some money, change the world. We’ll help!

My slides from ETech 2007 about Amazon’s Web Services, especially S3, are up in PDF form.

Holler if something isn’t clear, but hopefully this’ll give anyone who couldn’t make it some good insight into what works and what doesn’t with S3 here at SmugMug.

Enjoy!

I was talking with a friend last night about commercial OSes, specifically Linux and Solaris. It dawned on me that those of you in the midst of your own startups would find our experience useful. Sorry I didn’t think about blogging this earlier.

First of all, I love open source. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a major OS problem and not have access to the source code and a community with access to it as well. I love the idea of building companies on open source and then using the success of that company to give back to the people and the community that made it possible.

There are lots of ways of contributing back, but the low hanging fruit for a tiny company like ours is simply buying service and support from one of the open source players, like MySQL or Red Hat. It’s a win-win, theoretically - they get funding to continue to build and test great software, and you get the service and support you need to grow your business.

We’ve been through a few commercial open-source OS distributions at SmugMug. All the gory details after the jump.

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