Ask HN: Please review our Startup: Twitalbums.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review our Startup: Twitalbums.com

twitalbums.com

A little about the app:

What does it do?

Twitalbums lets you share files on Twitter by creating "albums" which are Social Venues for the crowdsorcing of media, by invitation only. Albums provide a simple and powerful way to have control of what you share online.

How is it different?

Different from Twitpic o Yfrog, Twitalbums is "intimate", not public. Only the people you invite to your album will see what's inside that particular album.

Twitter?

We use Twitter as an identification and notification platform. Comments, invitations, etc, get published on your Twitter profile so the people interested can be notified of our activity within Twitalbums.com

We have a business model:

When you log in for the first time we give you 50 "seeds"

Seeds are Twitalbums credit system. Each seed allows you to upload one file to an album. Once you run out of seeds you can buy more. You can find the seeds option within the file up-loader inside any album.

Thanks for your time and I hope you guys check it out and give it a spin.

Basically the value proposition is providing more granular privacy controls for Twitter; you can decide who can see a piece of content or not.

I think it's a good idea, although I probably won't use it since I don't have enough followers on Twitter in each group that I can nicely classify as: "family", "co-workers", "hockey club", but that may change over time as more people adopt Twitter and I am able to label all these people.

Right now, when I want to share something, Facebook is still my primary since most of the people I know and keep in touch with is on Facebook. For me, Twitter is for some people I know, but mostly a discovery tool to find new people I previously did not know. That said, if I have private content, I am unlikely to post it on Twitter. Because if I did want to share it to people I know, they're all on Facebook and there's privacy controls there.

(Just sharing my use case)

Entrepreneur to entrepreneur, I am just concerned that Twitter will decide after you have gained traction that "hey, people _do_ want more privacy controls, and they build in privacy controls and give it away free for everybody" aka what Amazon Web Services did; knee-capping startups that innovated around the edges and giving away their value proposition for free.

Any sane founder will keep such a threat in mind, however much of a stretch it may seem.

It'd be nice if you have a way to hedge against this risk, imho.

- or -

you could be lucky and get acquired, like how Twitter bought the Mixer Labs for the value their created for Twitter users.

I hear you. I guess that is a risk we all take when we build on top of platforms such as Twitter or Facebook.

Of course getting acquired is a remote posibility but we are in it for the long run. Is about creating value for the users.

Twitalbums is a bet in the sense that we are going against the nature of Twitter were everything tends to be public.

Someone asked us the other day: can Twitter and privacy mix together? I believe so.

I read the name as "twital-bums"

Same here - this is like the former expertsexchange , you need to add a hyphen at the right place.

never thought of it like that :)

reminds me of this celebrity jeopardy SNL skit:

http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/25271/SNL-Celebrity-Jeop...

fast forward to 4:05 (:

+1 on this one. Also you might find the "Twit*" name becomes a burden in terms of biz dev with certain other big social networks. I can't say more on that but I have first hand experience.

same here!

Only was able to see the maintenance page so watching the tour video was about all I could do.

I would suggest simplifying the tour video a bit so it's more "what is" and less "how to." Not that howto videos are bad to have, but I got pretty bored by 30 seconds in when all I really wanted was to learn what the service offered.

Along with that, consider a voiceover on the video. I think you could pick up the pace a little that way instead of waiting for people to read everything.

Thanks for your input. I agree with the video having audio. We are working on it.

Sorry guys that could not get in. We had to migrate a server and do some last minute stuff. If you can please try again.

What can you do that is of value that Flickr cannot?

It seems that you are trying to compete with a lot of well established, free technology, such as wikis, stuff from 37Signals and flickr.

I don't see a competitive advantage in here.

Also, your video assumes from the get-go that people know what your service does - all you seem to talk about is restricting access. With all the scrolling text there is only a very small window of time when you are putting a concept forward.

I'd much rather a static splash page approach to conveying this information, perhaps with some of your video of the app being used from the existing clip. By splash screen I mean http://gridspy.co.nz or http://backpackit.com/?source=37signals+home

Well we are not a picture site per se. We understand that in terms of number of items people will upload more photos. But in Flickr you can't create an album and add photos and music for example.

We are in a very competitive arena, however we feel that our positioning as "intimate sharing" is something people will value. (contrary to opinions such us "privacy is dead" and "public is the new standard"

I agree with you that privacy is very important, we have a lot of stuff that we don't share online specifically because we value our privacy.

My point isn't so much that you are doomed, you need to sell the general public (such as myself) on the idea that your system is unique and valuable. You need to figure out why private, intimate sharing is really important and totally sell the benefits and the ease of use.

You also might want to consider slowly regenerating credits, say every day you get 1 free credit to a limit of 30 accumulated free credits. That way noone will leave your site for good after putting 30 photos online and missing the point. Send an email when the points max out to remind your users to come online (habit forming?)

Perhaps you could have album content invitations - a user asks another user to add a certain type of content - "could you upload your birthday photos for Alex please?" That is a nice excuse for user A to remind user B to log in.

Here is the review they did for us on ReadWriteWeb:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitalbums_private_coll...

I like the idea but why did you choose a public channel to share links to a private resource rather than something like direct messages?

When we first discussed this, we came to the conclusion that a lot of people don't read direct messages in Twitter. Based on this we chose to use a mention instead.

However, we are working on letting the user choose its preferred method of notification from within the app.

That's a good point, and given the non-standard treatment of DMs in most twitter clients I've used it's almost definitely the right choice.

Added benefit of it spreading word of the service.

Didn't investigate beyond the explanatory video, but it looks like a half decent idea. Just work on the public/marketing site a bit and I think you could pick up a few users. I also like the idea of intro seeds/credits.

Well done.

Could only see the video.

The scrolling text effect wears thin very quickly, please don't use it. Also you've written "lets" instead of "let's" in there.

Also by the end of the video I still wasn't sure what could go in an album. Photos? You never actually made that clear.

Thanks. Actually the app will take your photos, videos and mp3.

in your about us page the 4 of us is actually five people:

   The 4 of us

   This is our team: our main developers Ramon and Hernan, 
   our designer Lorenzo and our founders: Mauricio and Fabián

Nice catch :) will correct it.

I read the name as Twidal Bums.

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