Andrew Pollack's Blog

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Lotusphere Plans: Open Live Photo Blogging

By Andrew Pollack on 11/18/2008 at 11:02 AM EST

I'm going to take something I built for Second Signal and apply it to Lotusphere 2009. The application works like this:

The Basics

1. Take a picture with your camera phone.
2. Send that camera phone picture and a short text caption to a mail in address that I'll publish
3. The site will receive the photo, create a snapshot, and add it to a live index page

The Details

Who can use it? Anyone - but you could get banned if you try hard enough.

Photo Limits? There will be a maximum size per photo -- its meant to be snapshots, not flick'r. I may also limit total volume per day from any single source if it gets to be a problem.

Must you Sign-Up? No. If you sign up and associate your mobile number, your pictures will be categorized by your user handle and they'll have a link to your home/blog/facebook/whatever page, and a way for people to send you an SMS response if you want -- but your mobile number will NOT be exposed. If you do not sign up, a random handle that is some kind of salted hash of your mobile number will be used instead.

Can you email photos in? Yes, you can, but if you're doing that because you've got a fancy camera, you'd better make sure they're sized down to whatever the limits are. I'm not going to store a hundred 5 megabyte pictures for you like flick'r. I may provide a way to reference or in-line flicker streams from your profile. I haven't decided.

Will I be using Connections? No. Of course not.

What about international cell carriers? If your carrier lets you SMS to an email address, or your iPhone or Blackberry can do that, you'll be fine. If not, it won't work. Nearly all US based carriers support this. SMS charges are different in Europe and Asia so your mileage may vary.

Update: How outrageous can the pictures be?

I think I'll publish a separate mail-in address for any that are potentially NSFW.

Update: Maybe We'll Tie this to C.U.L.T.

Perhaps a contest for most outrageous photo involving a C.U.L.T. shirt? Most people wearing shirts in a single picture? Best use of a C.U.L.T. shirt? Best & Worst dressed C.U.L.T. shirt wearers?

Anyone got something to add?


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    re: Lotusphere Plans: Open Live Photo BloggingBy Ben Langhinrichs on11/18/2008 at 11:39 AM EST
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    re: Lotusphere Plans: Open Live Photo BloggingBy Eric Mack on11/18/2008 at 01:11 PM EST
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    re: Lotusphere Plans: Open Live Photo BloggingBy Yancy Lent on11/18/2008 at 01:20 PM EST
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