Joel Liu's Library tagged Competitor → View Popular, Search in Google

Apr

2011

A Mobile Photo Sharing Casualty, Treehouse Hits The Deadpool; Founder Off To Google

techcrunch.com/...treehouse-deadpool

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Instagram Competitor Pivot

It can be easy to forget that despite the early success stories (or irrational hype, depending on how you perceive it), there are many more startups out there that aren’t taking off for one reason or another. And one of the earlier players in this latest wave, Treehouse, is sadly no more. The service has entered the Deadpool.
Treehouse was technically a part of Fliggo, a Y Combinator-backed startup that had originally set out to be one of the “Twitter for video” plays. They had also been known as Vidly. But Bader correctly predicted that mobile photo sharing was poised to take off, and thus we got Treehouse. The service was well executed, and had an interesting sharing model that was sort of a hybrid of Path and Instagram. But again, for whatever reason, it just didn’t catch on in the same way.
1 more annotation(s)...
- We were indeed the first to really identify the market for mobile photo sharing. It all started when we asked the question “What if you could see your friends’ camera rolls?” So many people take pictures on their iPhones that never see the light of day, so by being able to see your friends’ camera rolls, then you can see what your friends are up to.
  
  At first, we decided to focus on privacy and creating a comfortable environment for people to share photos without worrying who sees them. Initially we had great traction in small groups, but quickly reached the realization that private sharing is difficult in groups of friends that do not all have iPhones. This is a problem that Path is facing right now. Hyper-privacy does not work and moves against the natural motion of social products now, which is to be more open.
  
  I’m happy to see Instagram’s success because it will bring forward the possibility of mobile photo sharing in people’s minds which will pave the way for new apps to have a chance to blow the lid off of the space. We’ve barely scratched the surface of the potential of the mobile photo space, and I’m excited to see Instagram lock-down a long-term vision and watch Path slowly become more open.

Dec

2010

Pearltrees Dives Into Social Curating With Pearltrees Team

techcrunch.com/...pearltrees

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Competitor group team

Content curation and mapping service Pearltrees has decided to focus on the fact that people want to do things in groups and has as of today upgraded its core product with a groups functionality, called Pearltrees Team. Now accesible just by logging in, Pearltrees Team allows you to hook up with other people in order to create a Pearltree collaboratively in realtime.
If the team leader accepts, you then can see all the Pearltree curation happening as it happens as well as as comment on individual Pearltree decisions. You can also share your team curation easily via Facebook and Twitter.

In the same space as Storify and Pinterest, Pearltrees currently has 102,000 unique visits, 60,000 active users and 6 million pageviews monthly. Over 4 million pearls have been created thus far on topics as diverse as Windsurfing to Wikileaks.