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.
Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS)
To answer the questions, yes, we’re definitely going to be using FPS in a big way (millions of dollars per year) shortly. We aren’t, though, going to be using the part that all the press are talking about – the so-called ‘PayPal killer’. We don’t talk about un-released features at SmugMug, so I’m afraid I have to leave it at that – but feel free to speculate. 🙂
On a personal note, I’m really excited about FPS because, like many, I hate PayPal. When we were getting SmugMug off the ground, I was interested in using PayPal either as our main payment option, or at least as an alternative. Their developer support was terrible, though, and the ability to do big batches was apparently nonexistent. I even knew people over there, and they’d just shrug with a ‘what can you do?’ look on their faces when I’d ask them if we could use their stuff.
Definitely not Amazon’s approach. 🙂
UPDATE: Apparently I was too abstract in my initial post about how we’d be using it, so here’s a quick clarification. We’re not going to use FPS to enable you to signup for SmugMug service or buy prints & gifts using FPS. We have something else in mind. 🙂
Why not use FPS (or PayPal, for that matter) for signup & purchase, you might ask. Our answer is that we’re not totally comfortable passing customers along to a UI we don’t control and isn’t branded at such a crucial point in our monetization process. The establishment of brand, and even more specifically, trust in that brand, is extremely important to us. These are people’s priceless photos, afterall, and we want to be clear on who’s taking care of them. It’s entirely possible we’re shooting ourselves in the foot with this stance, but that’s our prerogative.
More SmugMug on iPhone
When I’m not busy screaming at my iPhone because it’s hard to sync with my LOST episodes, I’m busy rolling out new SmugMug features specifically for iPhone with the help of GreenJimmy and BigWebGuy. Here ya go:
- Global SmugMug interface now. You can search & browse through the entire SmugMug site using iPhone, not just individual homepages.
- Added search to both the global and user interfaces.
- Added Friends & Family links so you can easily browse through your social network and that of your friends and their friends and….
- Added a Keywords browsing interface. I’m not really happy with it, so I think we’ll keep playing, but traditional keyword clouds don’t work well with finger tips on this small of a screen, so we’ll have to get creative. Ideas in the comments, please?
- Spiffy UI improvements to make things look nicer and feel faster.
- Fixed a rotation bug where the images wouldn’t properly re-render.
Enjoy. I know I am. 🙂
iPhone features? What would you like?
Last week we released some great updates to our iPhone interface, and today I’m sitting at Apple in the iPhone Tech Talk workshop. So if you’ve got any feature requests, now’s a great time to leave a comment – there’s a good chance I’ll ship it today. 🙂
Here’s what we released on Thursday:
- A link from your homepage to iPhone if you’re browsing on your phone.
- A link on your iPhone back to ‘Full Homepage’ so you can go back to regular SmugMug
- A cookie so if you’ve visited your iPhone interface, it remembers that you’d like to browse that way. Don’t want it anymore? It clears itself if you hit ‘Full Homepage’ on your phone.
- Browsing your most popular photos.
- Browsing through your photos by date. Full timeline supported.
- A green & black interface to get more similar to SmugMug’s traditional color scheme.
Anyway, leave a comment if you want me to build something for you 🙂
A Support Hero's true identity is revealed!
As most readers know, we’re a different kind of company. Everyone at SmugMug is a Support Hero and spends time every week helping customers. And slowly, our secret identities have been coming out. (Here’s mine)
Today, Dustin, one of our most heroic Heroes (and anyone who’s used our support knows just how high of a compliment that is) revealed that he is, indeed, Ghost Rider. He’s not new to the company – he’s been helping customers for years but we’d always wondered what lurked underneath that pleasant smile of his….
SmugMug's Don MacAskill 