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Yahoo adds SmugMug support!
Yahoo! in cloud OR Hadoop? (Яху в облаках) by Alexander & Natalie
tl;dr: Yahoo adds SmugMug support to Profiles. Windows Live coming. Lots of other services, too.
Wow, what a pleasant surprise! Woke up this morning to this story on TechCrunch about 20 new services they’d added to Yahoo Profiles (here’s mine). Lo and behold, SmugMug is one of them! In fact, in Yahoo’s blog post about the new features, SmugMug was the one mentioned for photos. Cool!
As far as I know, we haven’t talked to Yahoo about this at all – which is part of what makes this so great. Microsoft was supposed to have rolled something like this out to Windows Live profiles awhile ago, but I still haven’t seen it drop. We’re very excited about that, too, but the two company’s approaches were very different: Microsoft came over, chatted with us about the product, then had us sign a contract to participate. That was months ago, and I have no idea when it’s actually coming. Yahoo, on the other hand, seems to have just built it and shipped it.
I can see the arguments for both approaches: Microsoft is probably being extra careful about privacy, and working through their internal rules and regulations about re-using user generated content. Yahoo, on the other hand, is scrambling to catch up now as the underdog. I assume Yahoo realized that SmugMug already has strong privacy controls around our feeds and simply hit the gas – full speed ahead.
Either way, what’s especially heartening is the number of sites, services, and pieces of software that now support SmugMug. At The Crunchies last week, we weren’t nominated (we won for Best Design last year), but it still felt like we were winning – many of the winners use or integrate with us: Google Reader, Windows Live Mesh, Cooliris, lots of companies using Amazon Web Services, lots of apps on the iPhone 3G, and FriendFeed. Very cool.
(And all of that despite what we *know* is terrible and/or nonexistent documentation around our feeds. Yes, we’ll work on that.)
iPhone SDK, NDA, and SmugMug
Getting lots of requests about an iPhone app for SmugMug. As you no-doubt know, we’re enormous Apple fans over here, and iPhone fans in particular. Most of the company camped out in line at the Palo Alto store (see stories here and here), we were the first photo sharing app with an iPhone optimized interface (and one of the first web apps anywhere), and we designed our awesome new video sharing service with iPhone in mind. So I think it’s no secret that we’d love to have rich, intuitive native iPhone applications for ourselves and our customers.
However, the iPhone SDK NDA is still in effect, so I can neither confirm nor deny that we have an iPhone app in the works, or even whether we’ve been accepted into the iPhone SDK program. I have no idea why so many companies have chosen to break the NDA and talk about their apps today, but that’s just not the way we roll around here – we like to maintain a great relationship with any partner companies, and Apple is a company we’re especially fond of. (Ok, ok, so I’m a fanboy 🙂 )
If / when we get to build an iPhone app or two, we’ll do our absolute best to make sure they’re intuitive to use and takes advantage of all the power the iPhone provides. As you can imagine, we’re especially excited about iPhone 3G. 🙂
(Thank goodness Michael Arrington stole the wrong iPhone from me this morning. Whew! 🙂 )
SmugMug's Don MacAskill 