A Hint of Social Networked Photo Done Right

For years I have been searching for a ray of sunshine to fall on consumer digital photography. Yesterday I think I saw a little light coming from a digital player that just might have the resources and market position to make a difference. It didn’t come from Kodak, Fuji or even HP…it was hidden in the release of Buzz from Google. To be sure, Google is a very late entry in the social networking space, which today is totally dominated by platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Besides, in addition to being the dominant web search engine, Google has a lot of other significant irons in the fire. Big initiatives like Gmail, Voice, Picasa, Chrome and Nexus One, just to name a few! Its anybody’s guess if Buzz can leverage its family ties to Gmail and Web Albums and grow share over its already well entrenched competition.

But Buzz’s social networking features themselves are not my “eureka” for consumer digital photography. What makes Buzz so interesting is it’s seamless and uncomplicated linkage to full quality digital images, which remain accessible and safely stored for posterity in a consumer’s Picasa or Flickr Web archives. If done right, Buzz offers simple Facebook like photo sharing, but at the same time it maintains the full capability of the shared images for virtually any use.

Today, the “print everything” mentality has lost its appeal for a lot of consumers who frequent our web connected world (and probably for good reason.) However, I don’t believe that these consumers have consciously adopted a “print nothing” model either! I have serious concerns about photography’s continued consumer relevance if once priceless personal pictures are relegated to the “display only” quality of images “archived” by Facebook and other social platforms.

I have always believed that the road to successful innovation starts with finding real consumer problems and ends with packaging the right technology to solve them. This can often be very difficult in the consumer market as users are often need solutions to problems that they don’t overtly recognize. In the mass market a better motto might be “give the consumer what he needs, disguised as what he wants!”

My professional photographer friends may see this little ray of sunshine as a gathering storm of copyright infringement, but this need not be the case. There are plenty of existing technological solutions to solve those problems as well. What’s good for consumer photography adds gloss to professional photography!

Its way to soon to tell if how Buzz will do against Facebook, but I have tremendous hope for its modern consumer photo model. I would highly recommend that Facebook and others get on the bandwagon!