Archive for the ‘story’ tag
Why focus on photos?
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?
