I realize I’m a little late to the game on this one, but I just found out about the social photo sharing, some say twitter with photos, whatever you want to categorize it as, DailyBooth about a week ago.  The idea is simple and was immediately apparent  to me; post at least one (preferably new) photo of yourself every day.  People can then comment on them, and you can do the same to others.  Simple, one dimensional, and social, which is the best way to do it for a site like this. First I’ll focus on what they do well.

Getting a photo up is incredibly easy.  Narcissists everywhere rejoice! You can upload a photo, which is straight forward, or if you have a webcam, you can post a photo directly to the site from it, which leaves no room for an excuse about not being able to post each day.  I even set my account up to email when I don’t post a photo within the last 24 hours, to keep the stream going.  Along with the photo you can post a short (or long if you want) message that goes with the photo.  The social aspect of this, beyond just the commenting system, is that you can follow other users, much like twitter, only instead of their tweets, you see their photo updates.  You can use the @ reply like on twitter to reference others in your comments, it’s great for replying to multiple people at once, or as I’ve seen lately, promoting a group of people you think your followers should follow.

There’s a search feature, which I haven’t found much use for (there is no tagging, unlike youtube, but rather search is based of the blurb you post with your photo as far as I can tell), but is kind of fun for checking out trends, such as “Naked Friday” (more about that later).  The “Live Feed” under the People tab is by far the best discovery tool available to users of DailyBooth.  There’s also a variation on the live feed, called the “Live Map” which shows the same information, in a visual format on a map, showing you where each user resides in the world.  You can also favorite photos, although from what I can tell it’s a tool very underutilized by most of the users.  Each user has their own profile page with space for a short myspace/facebook like bio as well.   There also seems to be some sort of direct messaging system…

The user base seems to be, at least what I can tell from those posting frequently, mostly people in the sub 18 yr old category.  Although there are plenty older users as well, including some notable people like internet’s iJustine, WineLibrary TV’s Gary Vanerchuk, as well as celebrities like Ashton Kutcher.  Gary Vaynerchuk also was one of DailyBooth’s early investors.  As I mentioned earlier, there seem to have been little trends/memes appearing, one such trend being “Naked Friday.”  My interpretation of it was to take a tasteful photo of yourself, implying nakedness, but not to actually be revealing any body parts that wouldn’t be allowed to be publicly displayed in a non nudist community.  There are a few major problems with this particular trend in particular.  The first being that most of the users appear to be minors.  And from what I could tell the problem isn’t the minors being exposed to all the naked adults… it’s the minors exposing themselves publicly, on the internet, to the world.  Even more disturbing is the 20 somethings commenting on the 14 year olds nudes.  But wait, I thought this wasn’t about taking nude photos of yourself… well like all things, some people take things too far… so there are plenty of full frontal nudes that get posted (see: narcissists rejoice).  Of course just viewing the photos of those you follow, assuming you used discretion when clicking the follow button, you won’t have to worry about seeing this kind of thing.  But, in the public feed, you see everything, everyone, and their lack of judgement, and there’s no way to filter the results.

Since I’ve already got one foot in the pool, i might as well jump and dive into all — and there’s a lot — that can be improved about DailyBooth.  Firstly, the navigation has to go, it’s the thing staring me in the face every day, that I must buy into, and I don’t want to.

Let’s take a look:
It’s a mouse-over based system, consisting of different tabs.  Besides being a little too finicky and jumping to the wrong tab sometimes, this system is wayyy to cluttered in my opinion.  For example, the “Snap a picture” tab.  You have three options, Snap a Picture, Upload A Picture, and Mobile & email upload.  The first two options could easily be combined onto one page (like YouTube does) and the third one…. all it does is go to a page with a check box to enable the uploading of photos via email.  That should really be under the general settings…. oh look there’s even a Mobile category under the Settings tab… hmmm please tell me why it’s not there?

Beyond the navigation the problem is that there really is way too many ways to do a similar activity.  Going back to the navigation, look at the main Dashboard tab, this is the one you are brought to first when you load up dailybooth.com.  Everything loads up the people you follow’s photos they post, comments they post on other peoples photos, any replies to you, etc…. way too much, and maybe I’m alone in this opinion, but I don’t think I want to be notified of all the comments people post on other’s photos, unless i’m searching it out.  I think I remember this being a mistake Facebook made when they first started the news feed.  I guess it does let you discover new people if your friends are commenting on people’s photos that you don’t already follow… I guess I’m not sure how they could do it better, but it doesn’t feel like it’s being done right, now.  The Pictures section is what I would expect to be the main feed, similar to your all friends feed on Twitter.  Again, Comments is redundant, just separating out the comments from the Everything section.  @jordansteffen is where you find people’s @ replies to you, this is an extremely important part of the social experience on DailyBooth in my opinion, and should have much more prominent placement, as well as maybe some sort of notification icon when you have new replies, because right now, i have to go and click it to see if I even have any new replies.  Another problem with the comments/replies system, is that If someone does comment on my photo, without using the @ symbol to reference me, I find myself missing out on the comments, unless i manually go back through all my old photos and check to see that there are no new comments, which is a big pain and time sucker.
There are a few other minor annoyances is for me.  This first one appears to be a problem with the database they use to store how many followers/people you are following numbers.

It states that I have 18 followers and that I’m following 26 people, but as you can clearly see by the user icons, in reality I only have 7 followers, and I’m only following 11 people.  I thought maybe the system just took a while to update, since I first noticed this problem when i unfollowed most of the recommended users, and followed a few new people.  It counted each unfollow as a follow, as well as actual follows… not sure how the following number gets messed up.  But these numbers have remained incorrect for a few days now, so I can only think the logic is incorrectly coded into their database updating mechanism.  This next one is a biggy for any photo that gets more than just a handful of comments.  There needs to be some sort sort of threaded comment system.  One where I can click reply to a particular persons comment, and it automatically includes the @ reference of their name, and places the comment directly below theirs, instead of all the way at the bottom of the page.  This would make following conversations in the comments way, way, way, wayyy easier.

All that said, I still think DailyBooth has earned a spot on my “Vices” list.  I continue to use it daily, even though it frustrates me immensely. But for what it does, and that is allow me to post photos of myself on a daily basis, it does it well.  It’s provided an outlet for those photos that I don’t feel would be welcomed by users of Facebook.  Here people are expecting to see photos of you… self portraits in almost every case.  And while I could just post a photo from my iMac’s webcam, which is in a fixed position on my desk, I’ve taken it upon myself to upload at least one NEW, thought out, self portrait, taken with a real camera every day, as much as I can.  See you on DailyBooth, mine’s at http://dailybooth.com/jordansteffen!