One more Social Mobile Photo-Sharing service: Shutterfly

This may be the last one I cover - Shutterfly has released a free application for iPhone that lets customers easily upload, manage and share their photos. When Shutterfly is running in the background, every pic you take automatically begins uploading to the Shutterfly site. Then you can arrange them into albums and set access rights for friends and family from the application. But there have been a LOT of these services announced in the last fortnight. Is Shutterfly any better?

From the release:

“At Shutterfly, our goal is to give our customers access to their most treasured images so they can share their memories wherever they are,” said Peter Elarde, chief marketing officer of Shutterfly. “With our free photo sharing iPhone App, we are simplifying the mobile photo experience, while adding something no one else can - the ability to share these memories in award-winning photo books, cards and photo gifts, or on a personalized Shutterfly website.”

What we think?

Man, there’s been a lot of these things recently. Yesterday I talked about what I thought a Social Mobile Photo-Sharing service should do if it wants to see a lot of use. In order to keep things brief, here’s the short list I came up with:

1. Be free - no one likes paying for services they can get for free elsewhere… even if it’s more awkward
2. Be social - don’t just upload to your site. If you upload to multiple services people already use for photos like Bebo, Facebook, Flickr and Picassa, more users will be attracted. The more the better.
3. Be useful - if you’re focus is on the social and sharing aspect of photographs, then there’s no point in having a million editing features. Most people just want to stick a tag and a caption on there and forget about it.
4. Be accessible - being on the iPhone is all well and good… but there are more OS and handsets out there than that. And don’t forget how many feature phones have good cameras and storage, and would really benefit from a service like this.

So, Shutterfly is free and it’s useful, but it only uploads to the Shutterfly on-line site and it only works on iPhone. Shutterfly as an on-line service dedicates a lot of services to printing and publishing pictures on various items. But the iPhone app isn’t going to attract users outside of the already existing Shutterfly user-base.