Archive
Lifetime free Pro accounts to non-profits
At SmugMug, we think one good deed deserves another, so we happily donate free Pro accounts (normally $150/year) to non-profit organizations. We’ve been doing this for years, but I just realized I’d never blogged about it. Silly me.
So if you’re involved with a non-profit and would like to use the world’s best photo sharing site to make your work easier or share it more meaningfully, just drop us a line. We’re happy to help. 🙂
On a related note, we do the same for API developers.
SmugMug supports XFN & FOAF
Read over on O’Reilly Radar about David Recordon’s post at Six Apart entitled We Are Opening the Social Graph. He talks about the emerging tools and technology to allow shared social graphs, like OpenID, XFN, FOAF, and others.
Given that Thursday night is ‘Release Night’ at SmugMug and I had a few minutes to kill, I felt inspired and whipped up XFN and FOAF support to compliment the partial OpenID support SmugMug already has. (I apologize for not finishing our OpenID implementation yet, but I’m finding OpenID 2.0 to be a complete disaster and find myself at a loss as to what to do. Anyway, I digress…).
I’m absolutely positive we’re barely scratching the surface, and people like David will set me straight, but at least we’re making forward progress – 150K SmugMug accounts now have auto-discoverable FOAF, embedded XFN, and are OpenID endpoints.
What does this mean for you? It means, hopefully, that SmugMug can play nicely with other social applications on the web. Your network of friends & family is now published in machine-readable formats so that other networks can do intelligent things with that data. How exactly this will happen remains to be seen, but there are lots of bright people thinking about it, so hopefully it’ll happen.
At the very least, when the Semantic Web actually works in the year 2022, SmugMug will be ready. 🙂
UPDATE: I should have mentioned that these technologies do properly obey your SmugIslands and other related privacy settings to protect you should you not want to share this information.
Arr! Smuggle yer booty outta Sony ImageStation!
Aye, ye be hearin’ right: Sony ImageStation be shutting down, the latest in a long line of free photo sharing sites to make for port and haul down their Jolly Roger. Back when I was just a young deckhand and the Dread Ship SmugMug was barely a gleam in me eye, Sony ImageStation was one of the heavy hitters in these seas, and the thought of running up against them on the high seas in the dead of night did shiver me timbers.
Things be different now, with the Dread Ship SmugMug hailed in all the seas of the living and the dead as the greatest pirate ship to have ever set sail. Once mighty cap’n Sony has hung up his hook for all time. But in a last dastardly act, that scurvy dog tried to foist off all yer booty onto Shutterfly, a true land lubber if ever I saw one.
If ye prefer to sail the high seas with the rest of us honorable scum, though, ye’re not outta luck! A new beta version of SmuggLr adds ImageStation support in addition to the great Flickr support it’s had for quite some time. Simply install the free Firefox extension (instructions here) and a few glugs o’ grog later, yer booty’ll be safe inside SmugMug’s holds, protected and supported by the best o’ me hearties on deck. Best of all? Enter the secret password ImageStation to receive a 50% discount on yer first year’s passage.
As ye can probably tell from me portrait, the Dread Ship SmugMug and her crew are quite fond of grog, booty, and International Talk Like A Pirate Day. If ye be needin’ help from one o’ the deckhands, be sure to throw an ‘Arrr’ or ‘Ahoy’ their way. Oh, and one o’ the slaves in our brig lays tale that the Black Ship Flickr be flying the Jolly Roger particularly high today as well. I raise a jug of grog in their honor, and the honor of all those who plunder the high seas.
Yo-ho!
ClubSmug – $70 off LCD photo frame & more!
ClubSmug has been a bit of a pet project of mine internally, and I’m thrilled to see it doing so well. So what the heck is it?
For years now, we’ve been fielding questions from our customers asking us what the best cameras, lenses, pieces of software, etc are so they can buy them. We’ve fielded them over the years and kept thinking to ourselves that it’d be great to somehow let our customers know what our favorite photography goodies are. We were worried, though, because we didn’t want to come across as promotional in any way – after all, one of our stand-out features is ‘No ads, no spam’.
Enter ClubSmug. We went to the makers of some of our favorite products, like WallHogs, Joby, and more, and talked them into giving all of our customers discounts on their best stuff. Every item on the list is something a SmugMug employee uses and loves, so we feel great recommending them. Best of all, SmugMug doesn’t profit in any way from any of these deals. You heard me – you get all the savings, we’re merely passing them along as a way of saying thanks for being our customer.
You’ll never see a ClubSmug ad on SmugMug, so I apologize if this is the first you’ve heard of it, but we’ll update your News section in your Control Panel with the latest and greatest deals as they come along. So if discounts on photography goodies are your thing, look there or bookmark the ClubSmug page.
From time to time, you may even see us add a product to the list for which we haven’t been able to get a deal – but rest assured, it’ll be a great product that we just can’t resist letting you know about.
Current hot deal? Philips is offering $70 off of their gorgeous LCD photo frames. Yes, that’s right – $70 off if you’re a SmugMug customer. I’ll let you do that math. 🙂
Speaking at 'The Startup Project' Wednesday
I should have posted this awhile ago. I suck. I’m sorry.
Anyway, I’m speaking at The Startup Project, an Amazon and Kleiner-Perkins event tomorrow in the Silicon Valley. I’ll be talking a little bit about S3, EC2, and FPS, the three announced Amazon Web Services we’re most excited about.
There’ll be a Q&A, and I’m happy to stick around after and answer questions about AWS or anything else under the sun, too, if you have any.
See ya there! RSVPs are required, I believe.
(On a related note, I blew it this year and spoke at and attended too many events. In 2008, I’ll be going to far fewer conferences and will be very selective of the ones I speak at, so if you think I’d be a good fit with your event, ask earlier rather than later please)
Apple does the right thing – but no SDK? :(
Apple made a brilliant move today that’ll earn them lots of happy customers as well as lots of free press coverage. Everyone wins.
However, I’m with Scoble: Take my $1400 credit back, Apple, and instead release an SDK. SmugMug’s iPhone interface is totally awesome – about as good as it can possibly get in-browser. With an SDK, though, I promise – we’ll make the best mobile photo sharing app the world has ever seen. And guess what? It’ll help you sell even more phones.
So how about it?
Free idea for anyone who’s got a little time on their hands: Set up a site where those of us with rebates can “pledge” our $100 credits towards an SDK instead. Who knows? Maybe something will come of it with enough pledges.
SmugMug's Don MacAskill 