Michael,
Thanks for your reply, it is very useful feedback. Since you were kind enough to offer some ideas, I figured I would share some of my plans and give you an opportunity to weigh in again. My initial plan was actually to make PicTag.me capable of tagging multiple social networks. In other words, the person would be able to tag people on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Bebo, even Gmail, etc. all in the same photo. As you said, Facebook and Flickr offer tagging that is proprietary to those networks, but this would offer more of a cross-network functionality. I started with Twitter first, since I wanted to get sometihing out the door as soon as possible and it seemed like there was at least a "minimum" value proposition to offer, since this does not exist for Twitter currently. Your response seems to suggest that you think this may be too minimal to interest even early adopters?
I tried to address the concern about having to upload to "yet another" photo-shaing site by allowing import from TwitPic and Flickr (yFrog and Tweetphoto on the way soon). Do you think I need to make this more obvious/eaiser, or it just a more basic problem of even having to remember one more site/app to go to? I think this is a hard problem for any web app - I cant tell you how many beta tests I tried in the last year that I thought were brilliant, but never went back to after the first week.
My plan to address this was to offer a number of off-site features, including the iPhone app, which I have already begun working on. I had planned on making it a free app, but perhaps it is something that people would pay for?
A few other ideas were:
1. A firefox/chrome extension that allows user tag any photo anywhere on the web. This most squarely addresses the have to "upload another to another website" problem by allowing you to tag any photo anywhere. This would allow you tag people on Twitter, etc. in photos that were already on Facebook or Twitpic. This seems to offer some promise, but has some technical complexity beyond what I could comfotably build and test quickly and cheaply. Also, not everyone uses browser plugins.
2. A javascript widget that allows website owners to easily add tagging functionality to any photo. I think you suggested something similar with the idea of a wordpress plugin.
3. A tagging API that Twitter desktop/mobile clients could leverage to provide their own tagging frontend.
4. Social media plugin to Picasa that allows tagging of twitter screennames and other social networking IDs.
5. Etc.
The evolving idea is that I would not neccesarily need to host the photos if I can own the data around (1) where the photos are and (2) who is in them. My assumption is that TwitPic, yFrog, et al. WILL offer tagging functionality at some point, but I would like to position myself to the point where they will leverage my API or would share the data with me.
I think the iPhone app is the most immediate next step, but I am struggling with how to test the viability of each of these ideas without going out an building each one. What I am hoping to do with the intial site is to identify some core passionate users that can help me identify what to build. Does this make sense or do you think I am going about things the wrong way?
