A great mind and voice in photography once said:
Photographers have already photographed everything too many times, except cheese.
That is one of the many great quotes about photography that I have collected over the years, and one that you might have seen appear once or twice in the sidebar of my blog under Inspiring Words.
A few years ago, I started a photography related internet service called FocalPower. The goal was to build a photo sharing service that filled a number of the holes in the online photo sharing industry. As way to get the name out across the Nets, we invested some programing elbow grease in solving another personal pain point I had at the time: how to store my list of photography quotes on line and share them via my website. We created a photo quote database and a bit of web code (a widget) that pulled a random quote from the database and displayed it on your website or blog.
Fast forward a few years and FocalPower the service hit the uneven tracks that derail a lot of boot strapping startups…and never got out of alpha. However, the FocalPower quote database and widget still survives and both are continuing their organic growth. The database archive contains over 700 photography related quotes thanks to myself and a number of other quote contributors. The quote widget is still deployed at 1000’s of sites and delivering close to half a million quotes a month.
But this has lead me to consider what to do with the FocalPower Photo Quotes Archive. While I enjoy hosting the service and find value in it myself, I figure there has to be more value that it could be providing to the wider photographic community…and so I’m asking: What would you find more valuable from the FocalPower Quote Archive and Widget?
Do you have your own secret stash of photography related quotes? How would you like to share them with the world?
How would you like to tap into and leverage the Photo Quotes Archive on your own blog or website? What things do you wish it would do that it doesn’t do today?
Do you even care about a Photo Quote Archive available online? (looking for the good and the bad here…)
I’ll be collecting this feedback over the next month or so and will see what are the most dominant threads. I’ll then look into the feasibility of incorporating some of those ideas and expanding the current FocalPower.
I appreciate your thoughts! And would appreciate it if you pointed other photographers here to share their ideas as well. If you’re a current user of FocalPower, I also appreciate your continued patronage!
PS: someday I should writeup a post mordem on the FocalPower Service and some lessons learned about the photo sharing SaaS business model and world…until then feel free to contact me directly if interested.