There is a lot of options to share your photos with the public. Many started up long before Instagram but have not had the buy-in from the masses. And, if they did get great quantities of visitors, they were unable to turn eyes into money to pay for servers. SteamZoo is a recent but amongst many, photo sharing sites to close up shop. When a service shuts down, where do you go?
Recently, many of the services I have used for storing and/or editing photos online have been bought up and shortly there after shut down. A person builds relationships and workflows around services only to have it taken away. I don’t believe it is an easy decision for a small shop to shut down, it always feels like the funding gods are just around the corner. For big corporate buyouts though, it’s a shame they can hide behind their big visitor counts and push through the few folks they have caused to rethink how they do things. On the subject, while sharing photos is fun and builds friendships from far away places, the biggest impact to my life has been Task Managers shutting down and causing work successes to slow as a whole new system has to be learned.
OK, back to StreamZoo. Since they did give warning, most folks posted up what their ID was on other services so folks could rejoin. Lost is the groups that StreamZoo encouraged for the building of like photos within a area (like Views of San Francisco, Black and White, HDR, etc…).
I thought I would toss up a couple screen shots of the UI so months from now we don’t forget how we interacted with others via this service. Perhaps, a lessons learned for other services to use when thinking about how their visitors like to interact with each other’s snap shots of life.