Lifeblob's World

Last saturday, the 6th of Feb, 2010 we had our first “official” photowalk, though we started photowalking some time back.

Siddharth, Suman, Rakesh, Prashanth, Vikas, Vishwas, Pranav and yours truly met up near Vidhana Soudha (which is a seat of state legislature and one of the most prominent monuments in Bangalore)  and walked towards Cubban Park, taking photos of the High Court, Central Library along the way. It was great fun meeting the the photography enthusiasts in Bangalore and we learnt a trick or two from them.

Here are some of the snaps clicked by the fellow photowalkers. For more photos go here

Siddhartha Reddy	The Photowalkers - Pranav Bhasin
Dragonfly - Pranav	Statue - Pranav Bhasin

We are organizing another photowalk on Saturday, the 13th of Feb 2010 near Shivajinagar-Commercial street area. For more details and RSVP go here. See you there!

flow by sicknessclown

When we ask our users how they like to browse through photos, the thing that we hear most often is:

“Whatever you do, just don’t make me click”

Well, we took that rather seriously and have come up with a very interesting way to browse through your photos. We call it the river view for the way it offers a free flowing way of browsing your photos.

Simply keep scrolling down the page and we keep adding more photos until you have seen all – cool, isn’t it?

Click here to check it out

So what can you do with this? Here are some of our thoughts and we would certainly like to hear how you end up using this!

a) Open up your lifeblob page in the river view and breeze through your entire photo album in <15 minutes. Really, I’m serious!

b) Open up a friend’s lifeblob page in river view and stumble upon photos that you’ve never seen before. Do comment on some of them too, your friend will appreciate it.

c) Think of the first word that comes to your mind, stick it at the end of http://www.lifeblob.com/tag/ and see the photos that everyone else has posted related to your word. It could be something cheesy like http://www.lifeblob.com/tag/cheese or it could be something funny like http://www.lifeblob.com/tag/funny or any random word like http://www.lifeblob.com/tag/random but you are bound to find some great photos!

The photos are currently ordered by popularity, but if you want to see them time ordered too, shoot us a mail and we’ll build it for you. We would love to hear how much you like this one!

Celebrate the happiness that friends are always giving,
make every day a holiday and celebrate just living!

Lifeblob today announced the launch of the third edition photography contest with the theme “Celebrations”. The contest is free for anyone to join and is currently live on http://www.lifeblob.com/welcome/contest. The contest closes on 15th January 2009. The contest is open to people of all nationalities above the age of 13.

SUBMIT your photos which adheres to the theme “Celebrations” on lifeblob.com

PROMOTE your photo on twitter, facebook by inviting friends to view and vote for it

WIN!!! 50$ Amazon gifts and much more!

So, what are you waiting for!

This holiday season showcase your celebrations in style on Lifeblob!

For those who have been asking for it, its time to rejoice – we changed the profile photo defaults to make them more colorful. Yay!

Now thats not much of a news, so we decided to check out what each of these colors mean in the language of photos. And guess what, the results were very interesting.

Click on any of the photos below to check out what that color means:

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!

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!

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!

Tagging yourself and your friends is passe. We obviously allow you to do that now, but we also let you tag anything in the photo that you care about – your dog, your cat, your flowers or that expensive flower vase you got from China.

Here is how you do it:

1) Maximize a post on your timeline by clicking on it.

2) Click the “Start Tagging” button on the right.

3) Click on the object in the photo that you want to tag and start typing the name of the object. We will help you by auto-completing as you type, but you are free to type in something new.

4) If this object is a person, enter their email id otherwise just click on “Add” or press “Enter” to save the tag.