If You Took a Photo, You're Sharing it, Right?

Back in the olden days, or at least to the 1980s, proud parents would take photos of their family, have the film developed at a photo lab, and then take the hard copies of these photos home. Some of the photos would be placed in keepsake books. Others would be framed. But you pretty much had to be in the same physical location as the person holding the photo. They brought the photos to you, and you looked at them, lovingly, or at least passively, for a moment, before handing them back or to the next relative down the line.

Entire histories of lives come and gone are frozen in these physical collections - to be viewed irregularly, as memories are shared with nostalgia. But in the last two decades, our ability to take an exponentially increasing amount of photos, more quickly, in higher quality, and share them instantly practically anywhere, has turned the notion of scarcity on its head. Now anybody, should you choose, can see any photo you've ever taken, on any number of social outlets of your choice - whether you're using a phone or a more professional camera, or even +Google Glass.

With these barriers out of your way, with everyone having this seemingly infinite capability to capture practically every moment, you're also seeing people's intent for distribution change not for nostalgia to the past, but for a time sharing window of minutes or days. Photos are no longer looked back on as bits of the past that one happened, but in many cases, a lens (so to speak) into a shared present. Here's what I'm doing right now. Here's an experience I just had that you need to know about and engage with... right now.

I took all of these photos, but only shared some.

So as a parent, as I take photos at home or out on our trips, and see others with their various cameras and smartphones taking images in, I'm not thinking of these hardbound photo books that get passed to future generations, or even in most cases, online photo book equivalents like +SmugMug or +Shutterfly, but instead to ephemeral destinations in the stream, be it Facebook, Instagram, Google+ or Twitter. And the target audience has changed as well. The photos you're taking of your kids and friends aren't always for them to have a shared memory of what you did together, but instead for you to update other friends, other colleagues, and often strangers, to the experience you're having.

If I didn't share it, did it happen?

The more professional photographer may take hundreds or even thousands of photos on an adventure. They'll painstakingly go through each shot and find the very best ones that were captured with the optimal setup and lighting. Then, after much editing, they'll share a select few - a best of the best, to an audience who has come to expect a high level of quality from them. But for the rest of us, usually the best we'll do is pick our favorite few and lob them to the nearest social networks where our friends and family will see it. Or worse, we'll just delete the ones that make us look bad, and post the entire glob of photos as a collection - a digital slide show that hopes our friends will care enough to find their favorite, and leave us a comment, Like or +1 in return to give a head nod of agreement.

Now that my kids are entering their sixth year of life, and are on the home stretch of kindergarten, I've captured my unfair share of thousands of photos - some good, some bad. I've backed them all up to +Google Drive so I can get to all my photos on all my +Android and ChromeOS devices - or any device with an Internet connection, really. With online storage space becoming cheaper and the ease of posting getting down to almost zero, there's nothing stopping me from taking more photos. And the more smartphones and wearables we get with cameras, the more we can be constant amateur shutterbugs.

And think forward a bit - away from today's streams. As technology advances forward, the way we share changes. We've moved from slide carousels of vacations and Walgreen's photo labs to online photo book replicas, and in-stream editing. We're not backing up our photos to CDs and DVDs, and I don't see a future where I'll hand my kids a microscopic Flash drive upon graduation. They'll just know. Any photo that's ever been taken that I want them to have will be available - and I shouldn't have to do anything. We've eliminated the physical barriers that dictated how we share. Even more, these virtual walls are coming down. In the mean time, I bet when you take that photo, you're thinking where you're going to share it.

Shoreline Amphitheatre Waits for the Clouds to Arrive

It's been "California Cold" the last few weeks in the Bay Area. Dark clouds during the day seem to be followed by clear and cold nights. You can complain about the weather, or embrace it. Here's a fun view I snagged this afternoon above Shoreline by the Google campus, with the clouds coming in from the West. No fancy camera needed. Just me and my phone.

/via My Google+ Profile.

Pictures, Or It Didn't Happen on Mobile

Foursquare made waves two weeks ago with the launch of their newest application, which more broadly emphasized recommendations, discovery and tips from friends than the original use of the app - a simple checkin, alongside the race for badges and mayorship as you traveled from place to place. Some sites called it the death of the checkin altogether, not wanting to miss an opportunity to be sensational.

But the application's refresh did more than take the focus of all my minor comings and goings. It made photos an even greater part of the experience, putting pressure on me, more than ever before, to include something visibly pleasing as part of the checkin. With the upgrade, Foursquare joins many other leading social apps that have rallied around photos as a major part of their approach to mobile.

Images from my Path and those from a friend.

Instagram's recent sale to Facebook for a gaudy $1 billion thrust them into the spotlight, as the photo sharing app had users preferring its emotion-grabbing images and filters to the standard fare seen on the largest social networks. Given Instagram's iOS-only approach during its early period, I'd never gravitated toward using it, but many embraced its simplicity - the presentation of photos, and encouragement of light social signals for friends to react.

In some ways, this is similar to the Path app, which initially made waves for going mobile only, and focusing on a 50-friend limit, when other networks let you friend freely into the thousands and tens of thousands. Their push for an intimate network, making every share a selective one, where you can see who has liked a moment, or even just seen it, puts more focus on the user to share something meaningful and personal, instead of the mundane.

Now that Path's on Android, and with people I respect, like Shak Khan (formerly of Spotify) and Dylan Casey (formerly a colleague at Google) on board, I've been using the app a lot more, even if it's just as a simple way to send high quality photos to Foursquare. It's been fun to tap into the casual photos and moments from those friends on Path and see things from their view, in color.

Now I Feel Guilty If I Check In Without a Photo, Even At Home

Of course, like Path, selective sharing has been a hallmark of Google+ since the network's launch a year ago. The idea of getting the opportunity to share the right content to the right people at the right time, parallel to that of how you share offline, has struck a chord for privacy-seeking individuals, families and groups. But it's also been a good showcase for photographers who want to bring the images to the world. Prominent camera slingers like Thomas Hawk and Trey Ratcliff had gained followings in the millions, and there was even a  conference in San Francisco for the Google+ Photographers community at the end of May.

On mobile, as many noted, the refresh of the Google+ app, first on iOS and quickly following on Android, made photos take center stage. Like Instagram, Path and Foursquare, the mobile app displays photos to the full width of one's screen, letting the images do the talking. While Google+ also is home for lengthy comment threads, and longer text-centric posts, if there is an image available to display in the post, it gets the headline, and everything else is below the fold.

Google+'s Mobile App Delivers Full Bleed Photos and Full Color

The move toward photo-centric experiences in social mobile apps is one that reflects a few things - that smartphones are increasingly capable of taking high quality images, but also having improved displays to bring pictures to life, that wireless download speeds can handle the increased demands of a photo-centric experience, unlike the days of WAP and text-only mobile sites, and that users love it when updates from friends come to life.

Facebook Also Pushes Large Images In Its Mobile App

Google's Chrome browser was famously named as a reverse expression of its qualities. Chrome referred to all the borders and features that surrounded the app's content. Chrome took them away, for the most part, going to the edges and trying to put the emphasis on the pixels inside the browser window. These apps, including Facebook, on the news feed and individual timelines, are doing the same - putting photos in the center of the experience, and encouraging lightweight social actions.

As many people are turning to social interactions with micro-updates and away from lengthy text-centric blogs, something beyond incredible prose has to catch one's attention, and it's becoming photos - from memes to LOLCats, Instagram, Path, Foursquare or others, you can see how the photos on mobile really have become as powerful as a thousand words.

Disclosures: I am a Google employee, and have worked closely with the team focused on Google+ Mobile. One can assume that in some way Facebook, Path, Foursquare, Instagram and others could compete with various aspects of Google's different products.

LiveShare Preps Real-Time Visual Communication Platform

Forget everything you think you know about the humdrummery of the competitive but me-too echo chamber of the social photo sharing space. While most of the world has gone gaga over faux artistry around filters that make amateur photographers feel like experts, CoolIris' LiveShare team has been creating one of the most intriguing visual platforms I've seen - taking what I already liked about their platform, including a fun way to share photos around events and groups and vaulting into a new world of real-time, with video, shared links, and text updates.

The result looks almost magical, even to the cynical observer who thinks he's seen everything.

Sitting in on a preview of their new platform, which is expected to become available in the next month or two, LiveShare looks like they've finally delivered on their name, as I saw the company's three cofounders create and share photos, video and URLs instantly between devices, and this content was available for immediate playback and interaction from the receiving party.

For all the hype about "real time" and "near real time" and instant, maybe the terms have gotten fuzzy, but if there was any kind of delay, to me it was imperceptible. When one person would hit publish, the item would immediately display on the other device. Multiple photos would cleanly lay themselves out in a sharp grid, and video never even considered buffering. The result is a new platform for real-time visual communications that I haven't seen anyone else attempt, and one that should be available on any modern platform, thanks to adherence to cutting-edge Web standards.

"By the time you move your finger from the button, it should show up," said Soujanya Bhumkar, explaining his interpretation of real-time.

In an internal note to the LiveShare development team, he wrote: "For the first time, you can capture moments and share them with friends and family with absolutely no delay at all - the instant your finger taps the camera icon your photo or video instantly appears in your personal stream on your phone, iPad and the Web even before the content is fully uploaded. No waiting, no uploading - there is nothing out there in this space that delivers such instant gratification."

LiveShare's origins are in the photo sharing space, and the company may be known for its media consumption, but as they said Wednesday, the natural evolution, based on user feedback, is to discover media highly relevant to the individual, and to assign social velocity to relevant people, so that instead of broadcasting to everyone or narrowcasting to a select few, you and your content is discoverable by those interested.

"If this is possible, my expectation for what live sharing is has completely changed," said Austin Shoemaker, cofounder and CTO of CoolIris. "No more progress bars and hourglasses. Reality and speed are matched to consumer expectations."

The new platform is engineered using WebGL on HTML 5, meaning that on day one, it works in Safari, Chrome, FireFox and Opera. Not only can you passively view content in the browser, but you can drag and drop content from your host PC onto any LiveShare stream and make it an active participant in any ongoing stream. "Consumption on the Web is not a second-class experience," Shoemaker added.

One doesn't have to think too hard about the dramatic use case of curating events around topics and locations with the new LiveShare platform, going beyond siloed areas for photos and other siloed areas for texts. As the company promises, they aren't trying to create yet another walled garden, but instead, to fill the gaps that remain in email and social networking. And I'll tell you, even for this Android-leaning geek, the demo of sharing content on the new LiveShare between two iPad 2s was so sleek, it was tempting to jump back on the bandwagon. Make sure you check out their demo video. It'll have you lusting after their new platform - coming soon.

Path Planning Photo Imports for Historical Memories

On Friday, I participated in a panel at SXSW discussing the rising world of mobile photo sharing, specifically addressing two approaches - mass broadcast of photos through sites like Twitter and Facebook, or limited sharing, such as that espoused by Path, who famously has limited sharing to your self-selected network of 50 people. During our panel, Danny Trinh of Path let slip that the company is planning a feature that will let you tap existing photo sharing accounts you may have, and import them into your Path, making the service a better and more full account of your event history.

In our discussion, Trinh doubled down on the service's limited sharing approach, advocating the select network more accurately reflected human nature, best exemplified by the famous Dunbar's Number (150) which shows humans typically interact with a smaller number of close friends, rather than blasting out to thousands of loosely connected followers. For Path, the magic number isn't even 150 or 50, but 15 - fifteen amazing connections upon whom you could call to ask for help if you were in the hospital, for example, he said.

Trinh spoke to how sharing photos with a select group of people sets up memories - and how scrolling back even a few weeks of photos brings back the feelings of the event where the photos were taken. With this in mind, combined with the service's relative newness, he said the company was investigating the option to let users import photos from external photo sharing sites (assuming Flickr and Facebook are top of the list) to extend these memories within Path itself, even if Path was not the original source. The idea could possibly be like MemoLane, where one could scroll right to left to go back in time and see one's prior history.

During the panel, Trinh also spoke to the company's design philosophy, saying features often would make it to the very edge of code release only to be pulled at the last minute because they weren't quite perfect. He also promised Android support was planned in the near future, and speculated the company might eventually move into including video as part of one's Path. But if you're expecting Path to open up outright, don't hold your breath.

Cooliris Launches Group Photo Sharing, Raises $9.6M

The convergence of two major trends in the world of social - intimate hand-selected social networks and mobile photo sharing have converged on Cooliris, the Palo Alto-based company best known for its 3D Wall application, and the geniuses behind my personal favorite Gallery application for Android. In the crosshairs of this intersection, the company today is announcing LiveShare 1.2, a new group sharing photo stream service, and in parallel, the addition of nearly $10 million in series C funding from existing investors, including Silicon Valley legend Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

In the same frothy environment that has pushed peers like Instagram, Path and PicPlz to significant levels of visibility and in some cases valuation, Cooliris has delivered an application that lets users create photo streams on the fly, share them with any number of friends, including the option to make them fully public, and enable others to take action on your photos.


   Starting With LiveShare, Creating a Stream and Adding Friends

While there are dozens of photo sites and applications out there, I've long felt a big gap has not been met in unifying the ability to support groups and events for shared experiences. If one has a hashtag at an event where everybody, including strangers, can participate, then why not also deliver a shared photo stream for all who took place in an event? Cooliris' new LiveShare capabiltiies make this a reality as you can view public streams, search for stream titles, or ingeniously scan your local area for streams nearby.


   This Social Media Panel Photo Stream Has Multiple Contributors

Even if you are starting cold on LiveShare, the application asks you to select whether you want to see pubic streams from Music, Sports, Film, Festival or Nightlife. Select all of them to get the entire gamut of updates from friends and strangers in your area. Find a stream nearby, and you can give the location a tap to reveal photos in that stream, complete with relative time of the pictures to show recency.


   Checking Cooliris Streams Nearby and Setting Filters

Unsurprisingly, LiveShare brings with it a like feature, as do most top social apps these days. Spot photos in your friends' streams or public streams that catch your eye? Simply hit the Thumbs Up button and provide positive feedback. Alternatively, you can share the item or flag it for being inappropriate - standard moderation tools for apps of this type.


   Checking Out Public Streams and Liking Cool Photos

The most powerful delivery from the application isn't the fun stuff, like the fancy geolocation features and sharp photo quality, but instead that core value of multiple people posting to the same stream. Instead of having to wade through many different friends' streams to find all the photos of an event, all the friends can share to the same event, and retain record of authorship, so you don't have to worry you're giving away your art.

The $9.6 million in series C funding follows $15.5 million in series B funding from April of 2009 and $3 million in series A funding back in July of 2007, according to CrunchBase. In aggregate, the company has raised just over $28 million.