Flektor is a definite winner - they really put extreme effort in making it as versatile and dynamic as possible for an online service

These slide show apps make me think why is it that filmloop is sitting in your dead pool.

Remember - you had called it a winner.

Yes, but what about newcomer FlipFrames? Recently launched, they allow users to upload photos and then flip through them (instead of waiting through long, boring slide shows.) They also offer a unique way of discussing photos - leaving “push pin” comments RIGHT ON the photos. (Of course, they disappear once you mouse off the frame.) Users on networks across the globe (even Japanese social network Mixi) are already using them and spreading the word. I’m keeping my eye on FlipFrames…I think they’ll be the winners of this round.

Photobucket got lucky. Saying that the “widget” space is important is like calling the del.i.cious acquisition a sign that the “social bookmarking space” will explode. One or two acquisitions do not an industry make.

One would hope that Myspace and other social networks will be smarter after seeing how costly the Photobucket acquisition was. I still don’t get why Myspace paid so much given the leverage they have to destroy Photobucket’s business. That’s like paying someone who put graffiti on your house for “decorating” it.

Also, the widget companies are going to start running into hiring difficulties. No kid dreams of growing up to design widgets. The top engineers do care about money, but doing something interesting to them is often quite important as well and it will take a lot of money to convince them to work at a company like Slide. This means that these start-ups are going to have to pay really high salaries to motivate their staff.

Finally, if things like Slide are successful, it just makes Myspace look even more foolish. Photobucket replaced by Slide replaced by ____ replaced by _____. What’s the flavor of the month? It’ll just be a neverending game where buyers will look foolish.

Photobucket made sense not becuase the technology but because of -

- all the users it already had.

- Myspace will develop almost all the other technologies, then shut them all down…. besides their own version.

-RB

Widgets are successful because they offer the all in one business model.
Widgets allow publishers to offer visitors more content; content is King.

Why do NONE of these services connect to my flickr account? They all want me to upload pics one by one.

That seems like such a no brainer to me.

Flektor does connect to Flickr, at least when I tried. It’s impressive, but still, I find desktop photo slideshow software (such as MemoriesOnTV) more compelling. The wait for uploading my pictures before I could start authoring is painful.

What does the Photobucket purchase do to the chances of a Slide.com exit?

And so the dance begins. This is obviously a prelude to selling Slide. Now the question is valuation. Big numbers but is this really strategic?

The interesting question is how many slideshows are using photos stored in Photobucket? Also, I have to imagine most of the Slides are posted in Myspace. Anyone willing to wager a bet that 60% are in Myspace?

So, imagine that Myspace rebuilds Slide in a couple months (there really isn’t much there) and then one night it scans the Myspace database and replaces all Slides with looki-alike MyspaceSlide (at least the ones which are stored in their database - Photobucket).

This is why Photobucket was a strategic buy for Myspace. Myspace owns the media and now they host any number of presentation tools.

Just a heads-up that the RockYou link at the begining of the article appears to link to slide.com (as does the Slide link, or course) :-). Cut and paste error maybe.

It’s hard to argue in the face of a 300million sale, but I still find it ironic that all of these companies are building value on top of MySpace. I mean, have you tried MySpace? It sucks! I tried it for a few months and kept having technical issues. The site performance was slow, there were numerous glitches such as friends disappearing and the features were few and far between.

I don’t know, this feels like a lot of value built on top of a rotten core.

GJ
http://www.60in3.com

In the viral widget space, number of features has a lot less impact on success than first-mover advantage, the simplicity of the offering which drives virality and how quickly users ultimately associate certain brands to product lines. There are many competitors in the slideshow space with a ton of great features, but few if any have had any material success (check columbiametrics.com which breaks down the widget space by reach on MySpace). With our fairly simple offerings (done with a very set purpose to drive viral growth) RockYou currently embeds more than 200K widgets daily, with over 150M views a day.

This is really nasty, Mike.
Slide gives YOU the first scoop on big insider stats, and you spoil it by adding some no-name Flektor at the end, with a nasty sentence “Slide and RockYou have valuations that prohibit speculative acquisitions”

I have a content question on this -
When Myspace got bought by Newscorp, they had to do a lot of work to clean up the porn content on their site. Both RockYou and Photobucket have pretty clean output as far as I can tell. Flecktor looks pretty clean to me also. If you search for porn terms on Slide, it insists that they are clean, but if you check out their slideshows
http://www.slide.com/public
and go in 12 pages or so, they are hosting porn.

So how does porns presence, or lack of presence impact acquisition prospects? Does it limit your appeal to the “big guys” or can you behave like Myspace and clean it up after the fact?

Winning the post-Photobucket-acquisition photo widget war is going to be like a farting war. Cool, but you still stink.

Flektor does in fact connect to Flickr, and Photobucket. We are working on cross-domain deals with others as well to allow users to import media from other sites, and we’ll be updating the “Add Stuff” button to make it easier to find these in the future.

-Jason

Do the Slide numbers count MySpace embeds that play automatically whether the viewer wants to see them or not?

How much revenue did those 150 million slide show views generate yesterday?

Drama: probably around $10k-$15k per day - for the Hosting companies and bandwidth providers only though