Thursday, October 2nd, 2008
As indicated in a previous blog posting on world-wide demographic interest in Snapact, a part of the rush of interest in Snapact is (thankfully!) due to a couple of product/website reviews. One is Japanese, the other Brazilian; as the Japanese review of Snapact (although positive in nature) had a bit of explicit content in it, I won’t be speaking of it here - although we’re grateful for the feedback and exposure!
The Brazilian review is fairly domestic in content, yet revealing in the user viewpoint. It demonstrates that we have done a great job in putting out a first version of the Snapact Photo Manager and the Photo Sharing website - even as it (almost) silently says that there are still refinements to be made. We take this type of feedback well - it means that we’re on the right path; that we have done some really good things and also that we have a good chunk of work ahead of us to improve the service. We’re on it! Now… for the review.
Here’s a (translated) excerpt from the Brazilian review of the Snapact Photo Manager:
“Snapact is without any doubt, a complete solution for organizing and managing images. With powerful tools and easy use, this program has advanced features that make life easier for anyone who has many photos on their computer. Snapact is lightweight, stable, and visually pleasing. It is an excellent program that is really worth having installed on your computer”
“… [One of the objectives of] Snapact is the sharing online. Anyone can register on the site [and] then share your images with other users. The site acts as a sort of social network, where you can add friends, edit your profile, create albums and publish your photos [through] the program directly… To send pictures from Snapact, click the “Sync images with your online albums.” - Team Baixaki (URL: http://baixaki.ig.com.br/download/Snapact.htm)
This was translated via Google Translate. View the English translation by clicking here.
Thanks Baixaki, for the kind words! The review correctly asserts that the Snapact Photo Sharing website is intended to be a community - a social network. We know that there are many features missing from the website in order for it to function as a full-on social network, but believe us, it’s coming. We want to enable - and be a part of - further photography-related social interaction!
We would really like to encourage feedback from our current and future users. You can do so in a non-hostile, generic feedback environment at GetSatisfaction.com, where we have “claimed” ownership of the Snapact product and server and will be listening attentively for your feedback.
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
As discussed in the first report on world-wide Snapact interest, there were a couple of surprises. Additionally, as originally thought, these numbers were largely coincidental and not expected to remain consistent throughout future reports.
The one anomaly that remains is the Japanese market, which maintains a strong interest - of course, we’re not complaining. Of course, we would welcome the Swedish if they maintained a high level interest in Snapact photo management and photo sharing… 
Here are this week’s numbers:
- Canada
- Japan
- United States
- Brazil
- Sweden
- Germany
- United Kingdom
- France
- Czech Republic
- India
Surprise! Japan overtakes the US in terms of visits to Snapact web pages. I wasn’t expecting this, but we’ve apparently had a glowing review of the Snapact Photo Manager 1.0 on a Japanese website. We’ve also had a really good review on a Brazilian website, which explains the rocketing rise of Brazil to #4 this week on the Top 10 Snapact Countries. More on that in a followup posting.
Thank you to all new Snapact-ers! I urge you to speak to your fellow citizens to convince them to raise your country in the Snapact Top 10 Countries!
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
It’s been about a week and a half since we made ourselves open to the public, and we’ve had some modest user growth. This blog has helped immensely in getting the word out but I’d have to say that it’s been the user’s word of mouth that’s helped the most.
We’ve had traffic from 48 different countries so far, with a couple of surprises: Sweden has a fairly large amount of interest in sharing photos with Snapact but the real surprise to me was Japan’s interest. Realistically, these are probably just early spikes in traffic. Regardless, user interest from the US and Canada far outstrips Japan and Sweden - but still, thank you to everyone for stopping by - and do come again!
Here is the ordered list of traffic sources by country in descending order of number of visits:
- Canada
- US
- Japan
- Sweden
- Germany
- France
- India
- Czech Republic
- Australia
I’m confident that user growth rates will continue to rise, so be sure to sign up for Snapact now to ensure you get you unique account name! If you have any questions or concerns, please do head over to our Snapact Get Satisfaction discussion forum. Post a question, concern, feature request, bug, or perhaps even a thank you… we’ll be sure to follow up!
Sunday, September 14th, 2008
We are overjoyed to announce that www.Snapact.com are now available for general public use!
The Snapact Photo Manager can be downloaded for free by visiting www.Snapact.com now - or if you’re anxious and can’t for another webpage to load, just click here.
I encourage you to explore the Snapact Photo Manager thoroughly; we’ve put extra effort into keeping it simple and even though we’ve only just released it to the public as of 10 minutes ago, we already have plans to make it even easier to use. We even have some new features that we’d like to add in - but we believe that simplicity is important to users.
Most of all, we really want you to create your own photo albums within the Snapact Photo Manager so that you can easily share them online with the click of a button. We’re excited to see your mad photography skills.
Over time, we will be adding great new community features to the Snapact Photo Sharing website. We’re thinking of things such as contests and a rating system, but really, it’s all up in the air until we hear what you want. If you have something you’d like to share with us - a neat idea to make Snapact better, a problem you’ve noticed or perhaps you’d like to just as a question - you can do so by going to our Snapact partner page on GetSatisfaction.com.
GetSatisfaction.com is a great way for users to share their thoughts, ideas and frustrations regarding ANY business. I’d recommend them for companies and individuals alike.
Monday, September 8th, 2008
It’s been a while since anything has been posted - this is a big no-no in the world of blogging. I know this, but really when you’re hammering away at work during the day and then hacking PHP and SQL in the evenings, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for the all-important communication that users need. The Snapact team plans to improve our communication with you once we get the first public release out there - we promise. Now, some news:
I am happy to report that we have made some major strides in the couple of weeks. We’ve migrated our static content hosting to S3 to offset the bandwidth and server load from our main web server, which - in a somewhat humorous fashion - has been located in my closet at home up until yesterday. www.Snapact.com has been in testing, and I had a great system for it sitting at home… a piddly little 1.6ghz, 396mb RAM, 120gb hard drive machine. Perfect to see if all of the PHP and DB script would bog it down - and guess what? It proved to be an excellent choice!
That junky little machine was handy in identifying the need for caching DB results in memory; it also helped to identify the need to offload static content to an external server. All that having been said, it has reached the end of its public involvement with www.Snapact.com - but please, don’t worry about its future. It will continue on merrily as a development and staging system!
Some details of how we’re currently operating:
- The PHP website is hosted via www.Slicehost.com (referral link - feel free to sign up via the link; it helps us with our hosting costs!). These guys ROCK. A great virtualized setup, easily upgradable, affordable and very flexible. That, and their website is very pretty.
- The Upload from the Snapact browser is done via www.AmazonAWS.com’s EC2. This is a great way to get items into S3 with only a single hit of uploading bandwidth.
- www.AmazonAWS.com’s S3 is where Snapact stores your photos for the website to reference. Having the user photos as well as the Snapact CSS, Javascript and miscellaneous other static files for the website lets the PHP website hosted by Slicehost be fast and focused.
On the Snapact website server, we use a couple of caching mechanisms:
- MySQL has some built in caching that’s done - but I don’t count that…
- XCache is a PHP plugin that caches the compiled PHP script pages (preventing future interpretation)
- Memcached is a distributed, in-memory caching system cleverly devised to share any sort of cached information across multiple servers. This is where many of the database query results will get stored in order to prevent redundant database hits.
All in all, while there are further optimizations possible (and planned), this is the foundation from which we will launch into the public. Both Amazon EC2 and Slicehost offer multiple avenues for scalability, so we feel fairly well prepared for our growth.
We look forward to opening up Snapact for users to use; in the future, we really look forward to having developers build on our platform using a planned developer API. Exciting times call for … sharing. Photo sharing.
Monday, July 28th, 2008
It’s been a flurry of activity recently, based on great user feedback. A host of bugs have been addressed, along with some improvement of existing features in both the Snapact Photo Browser and the Snapact Community Website.
For the website, one of the more crucial changes has been to move to a small-business, entrepreneur-like infrastructure using services like Amazon’s S3 and EC2 - this has been proceeding well, and is forecasted to be complete within the next week or so. We plan to (re)launch the new-featured beta by mid-August.
Stay tuned for more updates over the coming weeks - we’re more excited than ever!
Monday, July 28th, 2008
While downtime is never a pleasant experience for users, how it is managed and communicated is important on the part of the provider. That communication is key to maintaining retaining users after a meltdown of any sort.
Amazon’s S3 service recently experienced a fairly large system outage, but it was handled well by the S3 management team. Read their public response to the user outcry and an explanation of a) what happened and b) what they’re doing to mitigate the issues for the future.
This is the type of response customers and users deserve - nothing is perfect, but aiming for higher highs is crucial, both in terms of technical and customer service. Well done, Amazon S3 team.
Friday, July 4th, 2008
We’ve been hard at work not only fixing bugs, but also trying to add what people have been asking for.
We knew Privacy was important, but hearing your feedback helped us to prioritize - so now, we’ve got a great start for profile, album and photo privacy in place on the beta website. Numerous fixes and optimizations have been added in as well, including:
- Xcache: prevents unnecessary ‘compilation’ of PHP scripts
- Memcached: prevents redundant hits to our database
- mod_deflate: reduces page size by compressing web page content
Fun stuff!
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
I just wanted to share some simple news: our beta is alive and going well. It has been operational for a couple of weeks now and we are opening the beta program to more individuals as we address issues that float to the surface.
Feedback has been good so far; excellent new features (and defects!) have been brought to our attention. We appreciate all the efforts that the keen, bleeding edge folk are putting in!
In the coming weeks, we will be putting the website in the public eye, however we will still be restricting access to our growing closed beta group. We’ll be sure to put a “Request an invite” feature up for those of you interested-photo-sharing-people.
Thank you and take care, all Snapact followers!
Sunday, June 1st, 2008
It’s been far too long since we’ve posted news in regards to our great new snapact product and service - for this, we do apologize. We’ve been enormously busy with putting some final touches on the initial feature set of the snapact photo browser and the snapact photo sharing community.
We are fast approaching our initial beta testing, which is slated to start in the next 2 weeks, pending the review of current features and functionality. So far, things are looking fantastic. We have decided to each select 5 participants for the first early, closed beta of the website - making a total of 20 new people we’ll be introducing our ideas to… and the culmination of months of effort.
We’ve gotten more excited with each passing day, as the product and service prove themselves. It’s a great feeling knowing that we are about to show what we’ve created to ‘outsiders’ - although we actually want them to become insiders. We want everyone who tries the product and service to want to stay; to be a part of our community and help build it up over time. We know there will improvement and feature requests - in fact, we’re hoping for them. We want people to share with us what they believe will make an excellent photo sharing solution.
If you’ve read previous postings on how busy we’ve been working full time as well as creating snapact, you’ll know that the simple fact that we’re still working on this adventure - our adventure, including you - means that we are dedicated to seeing what we can accomplish together.
First, there were 4 people. Soon, there will be 20 more. To infinity, and beyond!
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