Archive
WordPress – an overnight success!
Sorry, Matt, I couldn’t resist. 🙂
Seriously, Matt’s post entitled Meaningful Overnight Relationship really hit home over here. For whatever reason, we’ve started getting the “Wow, you’re an overnight success! How did you do it?” questions a lot here at SmugMug lately. (Answer: “Work really hard for 6 years and maybe, just maybe, people will start to notice” … of course, that leads to the inevitable “Wow, you were so young!” line of questions that Matt is still getting…).
Sam Walton probably said it best when talking about Wal-Mart: “Like most other overnight successes, it was about 20 years in the making.” But Matt says it extremely well, too. I think his story, and Ben & Mena Trott’s, and Howard Schultz’s, and SmugMug’s are much more exciting than a typical get-rich-quick story. These are the kind of stories that power lasting successes and this list is long. Most of your favorite brands these days have a story like this behind them, rather than a “I sold to Yahoogle” story.
On a related note, we’ll send you a free copy of Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur’s Soul if you’re interested in these sorts of stories. The book is full of great ones from lots of “overnight successes”. 😉
And finally, we do love WordPress. You’re reading a WordPress blog right now.
Bye Yahoo Photos – Hello Flickr (and SmuggLr)!
I got an email months ago saying that the author had written TechCrunch, GigaOM, and Valleywag about Yahoo Photos closing and that they’d ignored it completely. Given that Valleywag posts just about any rumor and that it hadn’t gotten posted, plus Yahoo Photos was so huge, I figured someone was just trying to get me to look stupid on my blog.
Guess not. USA Today broke the story that Yahoo Photo is on it’s way out. TechCrunch has followed up with a post on the subject. One wonders, though, if they wish they’d listened to that email a few months ago? (I know I do!) And where on earth was Valleywag?
The text of the email in question contained a reference to Yahoo only providing migration mechanisms to a single “Web 2.0” company, Yahoo-owned Flickr, and all of the other options being old “Web 1.0” dinosaurs like Kodak and Shutterfly. That seemed brilliant, to me, from a purely business perspective, but poor from a consumer perspective. As great as Flickr is (and I do believe Flickr is great), it’s not perfect for everyone.
They deserve kudos for allowing any non-Flickr migration at all, but the really awesome way to handle this would have been to let any service integrate as a migration partner. (Remember, I’m the CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug, so I’m biased all over the place!). Rumor has it we were actually up for consideration, but the decision went against us. D’oh!
Regardless, if you give Flickr a try and don’t like it for whatever reason, SmugMug still has a Flickr Refugee 50% Discount in effect. Plus you can use tools like SmuggLr to seamlessly move your photos over.
Part of me is sad, like we’re witnessing the end of an era. So many of the big old photo sharing sites are dead and gone. I believe there are only 6 big ones left from the pre-SmugMug days. Can you name them all?
Thoughts on Silverlight
I was at MIX this week speaking on a panel about web services. Obviously, the big announcements there were around Silverlight, so I’ve been getting emails asking what I think. Here you go, just a raw brain dump:
- No matter what happens, everyone wins. Competition is good for us. Adobe has urgency to improve Flash at a rapid rate, and Microsoft has urgency to catch up. Awesome for you and I – who cares who “wins” or if there even is a “winner”.
- Silverlight looks amazing. I want to consume Netflix movies using the Silverlight interface – it’s gorgeous and fast. But I don’t want to consume Netflix movies on my PC – I want to do it on my TV. That’s why I have an Xbox 360, AppleTV, and TiVo Series 3.
- I would like to develop for Silverlight just to see how neat it could be for our company, but there are two big problems:
- The installation process on Mac OS X is horrendous. And we have a lot of Mac OS X customers.
- Massive chicken-and-the-egg problem. My customers are not technical, and almost always just answer “No” to permission dialogs because they’ve been trained that “Yes” means “I’d love to be infected with a virus!”
- I have some fairly big performance complaints about Flash in some cases, so if Silverlight doesn’t suffer from the same issues, I’ll be pretty thrilled.
- Ray Ozzie & Co didn’t make nearly enough of a big deal about the fact that you can do this stuff in Python and Ruby in addition to C#. That’s huge and should have been the opening headline.
- Offering to host Silverlight videos for free (4GB) is a brilliant way to speed up adoption. Good move, MS!
So, anyway, there we go. I’m excited about it and skeptical about it at the same time. I think if the Mac installation process was a breeze AND I was able to create something really compelling, I’d be willing to show my customers how great it is. So the installation ball is in Microsoft’s court right now.
We’ll see what happens. 🙂
(Oh, and whoever organizes MIX next year, can we please please please have a real grid like every other conference? I missed great sessions because there was no grid)
Amazon S3: New pricing model
I’m getting emails about Amazon’s new S3 pricing model, so I guess the news is out. 🙂
For us, this is great. We’ll save money right off the top (we upload a lot, so $0.10/GB uploaded vs $0.20/GB uploaded is a big deal) first of all, and secondly, they finally have tiered download transfer costs. This is a big one for us, because we buy enough bandwidth that $0.20/GB wasn’t cost-effective enough for us.
I’m going to have to run some numbers (I’m at MIX right now) to see if it’s now good enough for us to start serving more content out of S3 or not, but even if it’s still not perfect for us, it’s a major move in the right direction.
Finally, this illustrates a subtle but important point of using S3. When I buy physical disks at SmugMug, those are sunk costs. They’ll never get cheaper because I’ve already paid for them. At Amazon, though, market forces and changes will cause their pricing model to continue to re-adjust downwards. As disks get cheaper, that $0.15/GB/month fee will drop. And instantly all of your storage magically gets cheaper, no sunk costs to worry about.
That happened today, and I’m sure it’ll happen over and over again as storage & bandwidth both get cheaper and Amazon is able to leverage their scale to get better deals. The more people use S3, the more Amazon can drive prices down.
Since we were already saving a ton of money using S3, this is music to my ears. 🙂
Phixr adds SmugMug support
Phixr, a sweet online photo editor, added SmugMug support back in February using our public API. (Ok, ok, so I’m way behind. Sorry!)
As always (I should probably do a blog entry on this), anyone building something for our API or integrating an existing project gets a free lifetime Pro account at SmugMug. Just drop us a line.
And unlike some other sites online, we love it that you build commercial apps on our API. Go to town, make some money, change the world. We’ll help!
ETech 2007 SmugMug Amazon Slides are Up!
My slides from ETech 2007 about Amazon’s Web Services, especially S3, are up in PDF form.
Holler if something isn’t clear, but hopefully this’ll give anyone who couldn’t make it some good insight into what works and what doesn’t with S3 here at SmugMug.
Enjoy!
"You're not free? You're gonna die!"
When doing interviews or chatting at conferences, I can always tell who was paying attention during the “last” boom-bust cycle here in the Valley. Sadly, most weren’t. They’re the ones telling me my company is on the brink of death because we’re not free and, thus, going to lose the land-grab that’s sure to ensue. According to them, some free site is always about to steamroll over us. 🙂
Imagine my surprise to find an article today on GigaOM entitled Free: a Tactic, Not a Business Model. Is this a sign of the Apocalypse? Is the latest bubble about to burst?
Probably not, but it’s surprising none-the-less. At nearly every tech conference, the vast majority of the business models seem to be either “Grow fast, sell to Google” or “Grow fast, slap AdWords on it”. While these may actually work from time-to-time, I find it strange that no-one seems to think these are risky approaches.
The article is right on the money: free is a tactic. For some, it’s an incredibly good one. For others, it’s not. At SmugMug, we dabbled with free and found to our great amazement that it damaged our product, our brand, and pissed off our customers. I really need to blog about what we learned one of these days….
The article also references another fascinating blog post entitled The Penny Gap. It’s definitely worth a read, too.
Our mantra? You get what you pay for.
Amazon S3: The "speed of light" problem
I was interviewed yesterday by Beth Pariseau for an article about Amazon’s S3 at SearchStorage.com. All-in-all I think it’s a good article that covers some of Amazon’s strengths and weaknesses, but would like to clarify some of my quotes in the article.
I’m quoted as having no read speed issues, but having write speed problems. As is common in articles like this, that’s boiling down a long conversation and much is lost in the translation. 🙂 In reality, Amazon has been blazingly fast for us (both reads and writes), relatively speaking, except for the few times they’ve had problems, which I’ve blogged about before. That particular quote, especially about it being less than a 10th of a second, was my attempt to explain the “speed of light” problem, which applies to both read and writes. Even mighty Amazon hasn’t yet figured out how to transfer data at faster-than-light speeds. 🙂
Basically, we’re in California and Amazon isn’t. This means that when we initiate a read or a write to S3, we’re sending bytes to them and they have to cover, at minimum, the physical distance to Amazon’s datacenters (wherever they are) before anything can be done. Assuming that one of their datacenters in on the East Coast, and assuming we have to read or write from that one occasionally, we’re talking 60-80ms of time just to get bits there and back. No-one on Planet Earth can get around this problem, so it bears consideration when you’re planning for S3 usage.
Obviously, our data in our own datacenters suffers from this problem too – only it’s inches, instead of thousands of miles, to our servers, so it’s almost negligible. But we do have clients all over the world, so the problem is still very real. Our friends Down Under, for example, have to wait much longer for their photos to start drawing than our friends at the Googleplex down the street. If we really wanted to solve that problem, we’d have to build or use a CDN (Content Distribution Network). So far, we haven’t wanted to.
Beth mentions how Bob Ippolito at Mochi Media got better performance in Taipei with CacheFly than with Amazon S3. To me, this seems sorta obvious. To my knowledge, S3 doesn’t have a datacenter in Asia at all, and secondly, they’re not a CDN. Let me say that again – they’re not a CDN. Amazon has their issues they need to overcome with S3, but dinging them for lower performance than a CDN is sorta silly. S3 doesn’t provide web search faster than Google either. See my point?
I’m sure Amazon has thought (or is thinking?) about extending S3 to offer CDN services, but I believe the way Amazon builds these things, it’d probably be a separate service that could be layered on top of S3. They’re into offering building blocks which you can mix & match, not complicated services that do too much. (To any would-be Amazon Web Services competitors reading this, the building block approach is the Right Way to do this.)
Beth’s article is right on the money with regards to data transfer costs, though. S3 currently has two sweet spots: small companies who can’t buy large bandwidth, and companies who need a lot of storage but not a lot of transfers. There are, of course, companies which need a lot of transfers but not much storage (CDNs are probably appropriate here), and companies which need a lot of transfers AND a lot of storage. SmugMug potentially falls into this latter category, but you can imagine someone like YouTube falling into it even more than we do. How they solve the different requirements of different companies will be interesting to watch.
Let me reiterate in case it’s not abundantly clear: I love S3. It’s saved us tons of money. I’m a normal, paying customer – not an Amazon shill. It has problems and growing pains, just like every single other online site or service you can name. It may not be right for you – but it’s certainly right for a ton of us.
I address the “speed of light” issue (and some ways of minimizing it) and the whole “sweet spot” pricing issue on my ETech talk (which I’m still working on). If there’s anything specific you’d like to see, be sure to let me know – I’ll be posting the slides here.
Twitter = microblogging
I’m still trying to wrap my head around Twitter and why I find it so fascinating, but I definitely have a new term for it: microblogging.
If you put SMS, IM, and blogs into a “Will it Blend” commercial, I think Twitter is the result.
I believe you’ll see me post less “small” things on this blog and more “articles” while I move the other stuff to Twitter. It’s so fun to just whip off a one-liner about something I’m reading, or learned, or thinking about… Very addicting.
Oh, and Twitterific rocks.
WordPress
Nice! I love WordPress (you’re reading a WordPress blog right now), and they have a huge number of users. They’ve just joined the party!
I think this brings the “large” (I define large as >100,000 users) OpenID supporters to 4:
- SixApart (LiveJournal, Vox, etc)
- AOL (AIM, specifically, so far)
- SmugMug (only providing, consuming soon)
- WordPress
Microsoft, digg, and 37signals have all announced support, so there are certainly some other heavyweights on the horizon. It’s going to be fascinating to see what happens once critical mass is reached.
OpenID is going to cause some problems, I think, but hopefully it’ll solve more than it creates. The important thing, though, is that there’s momentum in the right direction, the right players are getting involved, and smarter people than I are thinking about the problem.
Very cool.
SmugMug's Don MacAskill 