Lifeblob's World

We’ve been thinking how we can help our users do more with their photos and one of the things that we hear very often is:

“Hey, I’m happy to see my photos online and see my friends comment on it, but it would be kinda nice if I could print them!”

So a few weeks back, we decided to figure this out and I’m happy to announce that we will be announcing the launch of a lifeblob photo store really soon.

The lifeblob photo store will allow you to turn your photos into beautiful frames, personalized greeting cards, canvas prints and gorgeous photo books. You will also be able to get your favorite photos printed on T-Shirts, Mugs and several other artifacts.

To take advantage of our location, the store will initially be opened up for delivery within India and will thereafter be scaled up to enable deliveries in other countries as well. If you would like to see your country supported, do send us a note at feedback [at] lifeblob.com and it may just help us prioritize our next steps!

So get your printing wishlist ready and watch out for our launch announcement soon!

Today we are launching a new way to discover photos at lifeblob – the “good old search“.

Lifeblob now has a collection of over 1.5 Million photos and adding search for photos makes it really easy to find photos that match your interests. So go ahead, type in a few words and explore the amazing world of photos.

Here are a few searches to try out: Kid Photos, Pet Photos, Landscape Photos, Bangalore Photos, Road Photos.

Tip for lifeblobbers: Photos that have more comments / likes / views rank higher in the search results. Promote your photos by sharing them with your friends!

We hope you are having a great time submitting your photos to the People of the World Contest and viewing and voting on submissions by other lifeblobbers.

Yesterday, we launched a few tools that will make it much easier for you to participate in the contest:

1) Lets start with the tweeple – we now have a retweet button on the contest page that makes it a breeze for you to run for the Lifeblob Livewire Prize. Use this button to tweet about the contest, spread the word and become a livewire.

2) We have introduced a new “Submit your photo“ button on the contest page. Clicking this button will directly take you to a page where you can upload your contest photo.

3) All of your photos will now have a “Post to contest“ link on top. To submit a photo from your lifeblob, simply click the name of the contest in the dropdown and you are done!

If these tools are helpful, do drop in a comment and we’ll feel appreciated. If you have something in mind that we should do, let us know that as well.

Have a great day and keep blobbing!

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!

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?

Today, we stumbled across this post by Prof Ramesh Jain and were amazed at how similar these thoughts are to what we are working on.

A quick peek at the most popular photo management solutions today will tell you that it is still all about uploading your photos, organizing into albums and creating a slideshow. Flickr, to some extent lets you discover related stuff through tags, but thats pretty much it.

To us, photo management is not just about organization of photos but about discovery, photos connecting with each other and helping users navigate through the mesh of related photos. Add to this the time context around a photo and it has all the ingredients of a heady cocktail that could have you hooked for hours.

Imagine taking a shot of  “The Statue of Liberty” and instantly finding other people who also shot it around the same time. Or imagine going on a trek with your friends and getting a view of what your friends did while you were at the trek. Imagine attending a pink floyd concert and discovering shots taken by fans at several other previous concerts of pink floyd.

The possibilities are endless and there is a huge problem to be solved here. We are trying to crack some of these problems at http://www.lifeblob.com by making it really easy for you to add and organize your photos in a time based manner. We have also built a system that tracks connections of each photo and highlights connections that are more important to you than others.

We are in the process of turning on some discovery options like the examples that I gave above and hopefully you will be able to take a test ride of this before the end of this month.

If you also think that photo management is an unsolved problem, we would love to hear from you!

In an endeavour to make it easier for you to find your friends on lifeblob, we are launching support for AOL and improved support for Yahoo.

If you are an existing user, you can use the following steps to find and invite your AOL and Yahoo buddies:

• Log in to your lifeblob account
• On the right side, choose “Find your friends“
• On the page that comes up, choose the service where you keep your address book to proceed

New users will find the option to find and invite friends as a part of the signup process.

We would love to hear about your experience with lifeblob so far and any suggestions that you may have to make it better for you!

Today we added photobucket to the list of photo services that are supported for import to your lifeblob. If you are an existing lifeblob user, you can use the following steps to get your photobucket photos to your lifeblob:

• Login to your lifeblob account
• In the sidebar on your right, click “Import Photos and Videos“
• On the page that shows up, simply choose the photobucket option and you are done!

If you are joining lifeblob today, you can import your photobucket photos during the signup process.

If you use another photo service that you would like us to support, do let us know!