Lifeblob's World

Earlier this week, google announced image swirl with much fanfare. At this point, it is just a preview of what it can be but certainly good enough to show the potential of this technology.

Since lifeblob is also about connecting people and their memories through photos, it makes an interesting comparison with google swirl. Infact, a lot of people have already asked me how lifeblob is differentiated from google swirl – here are my thoughts:

1) Swirl is about similar photos, Lifeblob is about related photos

With google swirl, you are essentially exploring through similar photos with a specific intent in mind. If I search in swirl for “Washington Monument“, I will essentially see lots of photos of “Washington Monument” neatly grouped up.  You want it, you get it – nothing more, nothing less.

With lifeblob, when you are viewing a “Washington Monument” photo, you see other photos around it that are related to it in some manner. That means, you could see other photos from washington, other monuments of the world, or even photos that are related to the person who took this particular shot.

You don’t get 100 photos of “Washington Monuments” here, but what you do get is the opportunity to meet other people who have similar interests ( perhaps cyclists or photographers or travelers in this case ) and you get a chance to discover other things that are related to this monument.

2) Swirl is about navigation, Lifeblob is about discovery

Swirl gives you a cool way to navigate through photos, but they are all essentially variants of the same photo. You don’t get anything more than what you ask for.

With lifeblob, every photo you view is a door opening into 20 other photos. And any of these photos you choose opens up into 20 more. With every step, you are discovering, seeing the world from the eyes of others and meeting new people.

3) Swirl is about intent, Lifeblob is about serendipity

There are times when you really want to find a specific photo – that is when you go to swirl. And once you are done, you get out of there.

With lifeblob its a longer term relation. We host all your photos for you and discover interesting photos for you – there is an element of serendipity and surprise in there. You may post a photo of your college days and be surprised with photos of 5 of your classmates popping up next to it – try it out, its very likely.

4) Swirl does not connect people, Lifeblob creates ad-hoc interest based groups

Behind the funky visualization, swirl is a search engine and its job is to find photos that match your query.

Lifeblob, on the other hand is a social networking utility and its job is to connect people together. In addition to friends that you already have, lifeblob helps you discover people who have common interests. So if you are a cycling enthusiast, upload your cycling photo and see lifeblob find photos from other cyclists show up next to your photo. Its a great way to meet new people, especially since their photos tell you a lot about them before you initiate a conversation.

5) Swirl gets boring quickly, Lifeblob remains enjoyable for a long time

A part of the motivation for this statement is that we run Lifeblob . But really, to use swirl, you need to think about some keywords first. After a search or two, the initial euphoria dies down very quickly and you log off.

With lifeblob, with every photo, you see 20 connected photos. With each of these 20 photos, there are 20 more. Do the math yourself – its a huge mesh of photos connected together and there are infinite possibilities for moving around and discovering new stuff. Once you get started, it can be very addictive ( don’t say we didn’t warn you ).

I have left a couple of links around in this post so that you can experience lifeblob first hand. And if you have used both these services, do let us know what you think!

Our world is a beautiful mosaic of people with different beliefs, different hopes and different dreams. It is our humble effort at Lifeblob to collate photos of people from around the world and showcase them on a single platform for the world to see.

With this in mind we have started the second edition of the photography contest entitled “People of the world”.

Submit photos of the people you have seen or met, people for different walks of life or just photos of you hanging out with your friends, invite your friends to see your contribution and vote for it. If your entries happen to be the most popular ones then you could win some cool prizes.

For more details and to check the contest rules and regulations visit the contest page.

Lifeblob is all about building connections with your friends and family through photos and videos.

So far, at lifeblob, we have tried to string these photos together along one of these connections and provided you a way to visually navigate through these using our timelines. Now take it to the next level by enabling you to explore and discover through these connections.

The idea is really simple – when you give us one photo, we will show you 20+ photos that are connected to your photo. The more information you provide around your photo, the better connections we will be able to build for you.

So whats the benefit?

Imagine uploading a photo of your college reunion, and instantly discovering photos that other people have added about your college next to it.

Or imagine adding a photo of the Pink Floyd concert you attended and finding photos of past Pink Floyd concerts or other concerts that happened in that location.

Or imagine going out to a trip with friends and seeing their photos next to the photos you clicked. The possibilities are endless.

How does this work?

All you need to do is upload your photo and add some information that describes it – thats it and we will do the rest.

Lets take this example of a recent conference I attended where Guy Kawasaki hosted a tweetup. I came back from the event, uploaded this photo to my lifeblob added a title, some tags and face tagged Guy Kawasaki – same stuff that you would do when you normally upload your photo.

And instantly, the other photos that are connected to this photo start showing up on the right.  There are three sections in this panel that show photos through people, through places and tags – we’ll go through each of these in a bit.

a) Photos connected through people

This section shows photos that are connected through people who are either in your photo or people who are participants in your post or yourself ( in that order ). If you face tag people in the photos you add, you are more likely to see photos that are very strongly connected with yours.

b) Photos connected through place

This section shows photos that are connected through the place where the photo was taken. We always try to infer the place name from the information you add, but it is always better to explicitly specify a location.

c) Photos connected through tags

This section shows photos that are either connected through one of the tags you added or through the caption that describes the photo or through the title of your post. Add as many tags as possible to describe your photos and you will see photos that are very strongly connected to yours.

Its time to get all your photos on lifeblob and see how they are connected to others!

As you capture your photos and build your connections over time, your photos begin to tell a story, a story about you! Our visualization of your lifeblob captures that story, frame by frame, as it unfolds.

Each connection that you add to your photo indicates things that are important to you. And connections that occur across multiple photos indicate things or people that are really important to you. Wouldn’t it be very interesting to see how your connections, your preferences and your relations have  changed over time?

That is exactly what we bring to you with the new lifeblob visualization. Below your lifeblob, you will now see your connections represented in a tag cloud format. The following rules determine what the tag cloud looks like:

• The connections that are more important to you show up bigger and the ones that are not as important show up smaller.
• As you move across your lifeblob, your connections also change to reflect things that were relevant to you in the date range you are currently looking at.
• And when you are looking at someone else’s lifeblob, the connections that are common with you show up in green color.

As an example, here is a screenshot of my lifeblob – can you find 4 connections that are most important to me during this time period?

And here is a screenshot of Rahul’s lifeblob – can you find 4 connections that are common between him and me?

Do let us know how you like this visualization – we are all ears for your feedback

At lifeblob, we are committed to helping you connect with your friends through photos/videos and discover through the connections you build.

Today, we announce the launch of our next major release that will redefine the way you share and discover photos forever. This not only makes us the best photo sharing service around but also comes with an unprecedented offer of unlimited photo storage for everyone who signs up in the month of November ( and our existing users ofcourse ).

Here are the highlights of the new release:

1) Connected Photos

The core concept behind lifeblob is that events that happen in the life of a person connect him/her with other people and places and often are related with specific interests. We are now moving to the next level where we enable you to explore and discover through these connections.

So, whenever you upload a photo and tell us something about it, we instantly show you 20 photos that are connected to it in some manner – through people, through places and through tags / interests.

2) Timescape

Every event that you are a part of has some relevance that spans beyond the timeframe of the event itself. For example, you may have attended the NASSCOM conference in 2009, but the relevance of this conference spans a period of 2007 – 2009. This in a nutshell is what we offer in the timescape section.

3) Visualization of Connection Strength

Over time, various events happen in your life, each connecting you with other people, places and interests. It is often very interesting to visualize how the strength of your connections changes over time and how some connections disappear after a period of time whereas others remain stable throughout your lifetime. We have updated the timeline unit to clearly indicate the strength of connections in a tag cloud format.

We will follow up with detailed description of each of these in subsequent posts on this blog – do let us know how you like these changes.

One of my friends, and a regular user of lifeblob asked this question yesterday. So I thought I might as well post my thoughts here and see what others think about it.

So there are a couple of reasons for our renewed focus on photos:

1) Photos depict reality – The core concept behind lifeblob is that events that happen in the life of a person connect him/her with other people and places. A photo is proof that a real event happened in the life of a person and provides a much stronger and qualified way for building connections with others.

Unless it is in the context of a photo, people generally use text to put their thoughts together. These thoughts may be completely fictional and therefore make it harder to build connections around them.

2) Photos are beautiful – A lifeblob that has photos in each post looks so much more beautiful than one that has pieces of text sandwiched inbetween. This made us feel that there is a much more compelling case for a lifeblob with only photos in it.

3) Photos tell a story – A lifeblob strings together a set of events that have a common connection and lets you navigate through them over time. A picture is worth a thousand words and by itself tells a story – pictures that are connected together in a lifeblob along a coherent theme therefore tell a much more powerful story.

4) Photos are mysterious – A textual description has a definitive meaning for most people, but photos are mysterious creatures. Different people look at the same photo and come up with their own interpretations of the story it tells. As a result, building connections across a photo provides a solid context around it and is a valuable problem to solve.

5) Focus is good – Last but not the least, focus is generally good for a product. Now that we are thinking only about photos, we come up with tons of ideas to connect photos together that we would not have thought of otherwise. Wondering what these are – wait to see some of these in action in our new release that goes live later this week.

Now that you have heard our side of the story, what do you think?