Online photo clubs – the killer app for SSPs

2000-03-28

Yahoo! has joined the growing band of portal companies to offer online photo album services. The Yahoo! Photos site offers 15 megabytes of free Web space in which users can upload, share and even have photos printed and mailed back. The growing interest in this sort of service is doing more than threatening the high street photo services. It is also bringing Storage Service Provision, by stealth. And if the companies want this, they’d better start pulling their socks up.

There are now a good handful of companies offering online photo management, with big names including AOL, Kodak and Hewlett Packard. Services do not depend on the ownership of a digital camera – with Kodak’s service, for example one can send a 35mm film and the company will notify by email when the photos have been posted to the site. Digital camera owners can benefit from online albums to which photos can be uploaded and shared with friends and family. It all makes some sort of sense.

So far, we are informed, the service has yet to make too much of a stir. This may not matter, as factors such as bandwidth and the availability of digital cameras will affect it in the short term. The potential is there – companies are currently setting out their stalls and grabbing mindshare, so as to take advantage when the time comes. It seems that, once people start building online albums, it is relatively easy to get hooked and once the expectation is there the market will grow considerably.

Where things get interesting is that expectations are starting to be placed on the portal companies as service providers. For example, it is assumed and expected that there is some form of disaster recovery policy. Yahoo’s terms of service disagree – quote: “YOU EXPRESSLY UNDERSTAND AND AGREE THAT: a. YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK.” Not too good if you lose the family photo collection, really. This is an indication of the shape of things to come: if companies want to be leaned on for services, then they’d better start understanding what the nature of services are.

(First published 28 March 2000)