pseudorandom

I think it's potentially bigger than Flickr. Measuring Webshots by how often they're mentioned in blogs is like measuring Coke against Izze or Red Bull. The latter may get the buzz, but I'll take Coke's market share any day.

The key difference is they have a screensaver product that puts them on the desktop of everyone who likes screensavers, not just everyone who likes RSS.

Ask yourself this: which one will your Mom bother to download & install? Which one has crossed the chasm (groan)?

If I Google "Coke", "Izze", and "Red Bull", I get the following results:

• "Coke": 5,190,000 hits
• "Izze": 11,500 hits
• "Red Bull": 928,000 hits

Now, technically, you wrote, "mentioned in blogs", not "mentioned on the Web". So let's do Technorati searches:

• "Coke": 127,703 blog mentions
• "Izze": 156 blog mentions
• "Red Bull": 21,284 blog mentions

You mention Webshots having a screensaver. Flickr has an open API that enables any developer to create a screensaver. Here's one for you.

You ask me to consider which one my Mom will bother to download and install. Take another look at the graph of Website traffic in the post. Clearly lots of Moms must be using Flickr, because its traffic is rising by an order of magnitude every three to four months. So ask yourself this: which would you rather own, the service that is larger today, or the service that has 10 times the buzz and is growing 20 times faster?

I understand your personal investment in this topic. But, as a customer (I have a flickr account), you've actually lost my trust a bit. Because I see your arguments as being misleading in a number of ways:

"I have to say, this really surprised me. Can Webshots really be that big? I suppose I haven't paid much attention to them because they aren't really talked about all that much in the blog world..."

* You're a fallible human being (as are we all). Just because you haven't heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

* So, they aren't blogged much. Maybe. I myself have never been terribly satisfied with any of the methodologies of blog-tracking services, so it's hard to say. But... So what? Blogs are not the end-all and be-all of net communication. Esepcially if you search only on English language terms (more in a moment).

* Your charts are what Tufte might call "chartjunk". By your own figures in the top chart, the blogs who don't talk either about flickr or Webshots are 99.8% vs. 99.95% or so respectively. Distorting the scale by chopping out the feet and feet of screen space needed to show the 99% that isn't there is just plain misleading. In the bottom chart, flickr's ranking levelled off at the beginning of 2005 -- one could just as easily infer that flickr's ranking has been fairly steady for 3 of the 12 months shown. The most recent 3 months at that. Meanwhile, 950-975 places above you, Webshots has been remarkably consistent for a year.

* Being also a Webshots account holder, I've browsed through their galleries before. And, yes, this is anecdotal, but my impression is that Webshots is very big in places like Europe and Brasil. Given your emphasis on bloggers, I can see how this could easily go under your radar, because Amurrican bloggers, lord love 'em, don't notice the rest of the world very much except for travel. (This is true of techies in general. A very large software company I know offers no Spanish-language support for the US, despite 10-15% of their users being Latino. They end up referring customers to their Mexican subsidiary.)

So, basically, you come across as an auto executive in Detroit in the 1970s, going, "What do you mean people are buying Japanese cars?" Or a game developer who really likes First Pesron Shooters, going, "What do you mean The Sims is the best-selling PC game of all time? Where's the gameplay? None of my l33t d00dz play that!"

You may well be right, at the end of the day... But the presentation style here is less than forthcoming.

First, let me make it clear that I have nothing at all against Webshots. I really don't. I was simply responding to an assertion by a friend that their parent company's acquisition of HeyPix might be more important (along some axis) than Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr. That's it.

So, they aren't blogged much. Maybe. I myself have never been terribly satisfied with any of the methodologies of blog-tracking services, so it's hard to say. But... So what? Blogs are not the end-all and be-all of net communication. Esepcially if you search only on English language terms (more in a moment).

Your charts are what Tufte might call "chartjunk". By your own figures in the top chart, the blogs who don't talk either about flickr or Webshots are 99.8% vs. 99.95% or so respectively. Distorting the scale by chopping out the feet and feet of screen space needed to show the 99% that isn't there is just plain misleading.

In the bottom chart, flickr's ranking levelled off at the beginning of 2005 -- one could just as easily infer that flickr's ranking has been fairly steady for 3 of the 12 months shown. The most recent 3 months at that. Meanwhile, 950-975 places above you, Webshots has been remarkably consistent for a year.

Being also a Webshots account holder, I've browsed through their galleries before. And, yes, this is anecdotal, but my impression is that Webshots is very big in places like Europe and Brasil. Given your emphasis on bloggers, I can see how this could easily go under your radar, because Amurrican bloggers, lord love 'em, don't notice the rest of the world very much except for travel.

So, basically, you come across as an auto executive in Detroit in the 1970s, going, "What do you mean people are buying Japanese cars?" Or a game developer who really likes First Pesron Shooters, going, "What do you mean The Sims is the best-selling PC game of all time? Where's the gameplay? None of my l33t d00dz play that!"

Again, I really have nothing against Webshots. I'm a Flickr fan. Given the acquisition, I have no ongoing incentive to promote Flickr except that I like it and the team behind it. My specific point in the original entry was simply that I think Flickr is a more significant acquisition than HeyPix. On any sort of reasonable basis of measurement, I can't see how that is arguable. As for the broader issue, the Flickr team has taken an ecosystem approach to building their service. To the best of my knowledge, the Webshots team has not. There is definitely room for plenty of different takes on photo sharing.