New Version of FilmLoop

Do you remember comments like this about the photocasting product called FilmLoop when I posted my TechCrunch party pictures?

This “FilmLoop” outfit is doomed. The scrolling thingie in the browser is cute, but when I click on a picture, I want to see the PICTURE, not a link to download an app that does the same thing that half a dozen apps I already have can do. Frankly, it comes across as a sneaky kind of spamming.

If these clowns are venture-funded, then that will be one more example I’ll cite in years to come of VCs wasting money on stupid ideas. I guess the magic VC hypnosis trigger these days is saying “Web 2.0,” right?

Now when you click on a picture, a new browser window opens, and people can see the pictures without a download and installation. The primary use of the downloaded client is the creation of the loop, not the viewing of it.

Try clicking on the large picture in the window below to see how it works.

If you’re a blogger or a webmaster, you would download the client and create a loop of pictures. Then you can display your photos in your blog or on your site in formats such as portrait (single picture at a time) and ticker (strip of moving images).

If you don't have a blog or web site and want to share your photos, you’d just send people an URL. When they go to the URL, they will see all the pictures. Again, they do not have to download or install anything. For example, the URL for this loop is:

http://invite.filmloop.com/x?u1rtOXvCYKeNEjlgELf0PMzBAu6yT4Wo

(I am on the board of directors of FilmLoop, and Garage is an investor in the company.)

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Comments

[Brad Hutchings]

Guy,

It seems to me that the more FilmLoop goes for mass appeal, the more likely it is to be easily replicated with low cost server software that takes FilmLoop out of the, er, loop. The same functionality you show in this blog could be coded up in a couple days in flash, sans ads. Server side, it's a folder of jpeg files, and a two-week project to make a simple loop maker.

I recall that they were doing something with auctions or e-commerce. The loops could be an attractive front-end to a shopping cart system targeted at emerging sellers. There is a lot of room between $0 and what good shopping carts cost.

[Nicola Mattina]

I forgot one question: why don't you hire me to design amazing products it is worth to invest on?
;-)
Ciao
Nicola

[Nicola Mattina]

Still do not understand why one should invest in this stuff:
1. Do you really believe that people want to use it to have the big opportunity to see some ad between a picture and another?
2. Do you really believe that advertisers want to spend their money on that? Why?
3. Why should I use an application to create a loop? Why didn't you realized something that works on top of Picasa, Flickr, Adobe Bridge an so on? Or that integrates with IM?
Ciao
Nicola

[Gijs van Dam]

My 0,02$:
I miss comments with the pictures. Now it's *just* a slideshow. There's no value for me in Karen M. posting these pictures. Now if she would supply them with some spicy details (hey, it's show news, I want some rancid details) it would get 'news' value and then maybe I would subscribe to it.

Also personal filmloops would be much nicer with some comments.

[John C. Randolph]

Congratulations on a partial fix.  Nevertheless, this is not one of the investments you're going to make a lot of money on. 

If you're lucky, you might sell some of the code to Flickr, but they could probably come up with something far better than this with about a man-month of coding.

Incidentally, when I click on any of the thumbnails in the loop, I still want to see *that* picture, not whatever happens to be the first one in the set.  This isn't just broken, it's an implementation of an idea that wasn't any good in the first place.

Better luck next time.

-jcr

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You're a good foil. How many times have you used FilmLoop?

Guy

[Bjorn Solstad]

This looks like quite ideal for rapid sharing of picture collections for an romour/entertainment site like we are running at http://www.plotki24.com/ I will try to convince the editor to give it a go, and we'll see how it works.

[Martin Henk]

If I didn't have picasa2 with web albums, I'd give it a try :)