Preserving Family Memories Reaches Epidemic Proportions

Did you ever notice how innovation on the Web comes in lemming-like waves? Yahoo! Photos (for printing) and Flickr (for sharing and blogging) together claim the lion's share of the online photo market. Snapfish, Kodak EasyShare Gallery, Shutterfly, and PhotoWorks are just some of the old favorites that keep improving. Dory wrote about family websites where photos are pivotal. I reviewed Scrapblog, the online scrapbook, and I've written about photo sites and products to keep the memories alive.

We haven't even scratched the surface! I'm starting to think that there's one service per photo taken. Two new twists on the theme:

Multiply is sort of MySpace meets Snapfish meets iTunes meets Blogger. You get unlimited space to post your photos, music, videos, and even your own blog. Then you invite the world—or at least the piece of the world you want to see your site—to use it as a destination. Contacts will invite their contacts and presto, you've got a social network. You can even use RSS feeds to have friends and contacts subscribe to your Multiply page. According to Cade Metz at PC Magazine, some of the tools are more primitive than others, but it's still a strong enough site to make him set up shop there.

Riya wins this week's novelty award. It's a photo storage and sharing site that uses face and text detection. You can train it to recognize Uncle John and it will pick out Uncle John in all of your photos, forevermore. As for text, it'll actually read the writing on everything from T-shirt logos, to billboards, to products. I searched for Graco (as in the stroller), and sure ‘nuff, the carriages came rolling into view. The technology on this site is remarkable, though I'm not sure it wouldn't be more appreciated at the CIA.

Both of these websites are stunning technical achievements, but my guess is that we mere mortals may be experiencing a sense of overkill. I'm happy if my family and friends take an occasional peek at our photos. If I had them subscribe they might disown me.