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Facebook has acquired the group photo-sharing startup Divvyshot, a three-person team that will shut down its product and work on Facebook Photos as engineers. Divvyshot was an appealingly designed product that only launched to the public in February after participating last year in the Y Combinator program.
According to a landing post on Divvyshot,
Divvyshot will begin winding down operations as of today. Existing users can continue to use Divvyshot; however no new accounts will be issued and our iPhone application will no longer be available for download. We’ve always given users access to their original-resolution photos and we hope that this feature will make the transition off Divvyshot easier.”
Facebook is the world’s largest photo-sharing site with more than 2.5 billion photos uploaded per month. It doesn’t have much in the way of features but just storing and serving photos is a major feat. Earlier this month the company bumped up photo sizes by 20 percent, but personally I’d love to see a better premium photo archive solution, even for a price.
By contrast, Divvyshot had low hundreds of thousands of photos, but it had a nice drag-and-drop interface and brought together repositories of images taken by different people at group events. That’s a great function and one that few photo sites offer today.
Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.
It is too bad they are closing down. I guess it is good for the founders, but not for the users of the site.
Cool for Divvyshot but seems like a lot of other people are doing similar things, if not more. Clixtr is another photo sharing service that leverages location and allows for exploration and group photo sharing. It’s for iPhone and web. http://www.clixtr.com/iphone
Liz,
I’ve never paid for any online application, except for web hosting. However, I’ve told my wife many many times that if facebook offered a premium photo hosting service, I’d pay for that in a second.
Congrats to the DivvyShot team! For those looking for a wedding specific solution, The Wedding Lens lets the bridge and groom collect all their guests photos into a single online photo album. We’ve been around for a couple years now and brides love our service.
Thanks Justin. I think that is a totally useful service. However I had some friends who used the Wedding Lens last year and I found it hard to sort through the piles of very similar photos. It was also awkward because when they first sent it out there were very few photos, but it wasn’t the kind of thing I would check back on too often. I’m sure these are things you’re already thinking about for your product, but just my feedback.
2.5 BILLION per month…not million
Darn, thought I caught that before it went out to RSS. Hate that typo. :(