thoughtstart

Two similar questions posed today on O’Reilly Mac DevCenter and Lifehacker got me thinking. Is there really a competition between .Mac Web Gallery and Flickr? Or, are they instead complementary?I gave the new .Mac Web Gallery a spin last night. It’s fast and very easy to use. Literally within minutes, I created a new event in iPhoto ‘08, published it to .Mac and sent out a polished invitation. Setting access restrictions is painless should you decide not to go public with an album. Capabilities to upload via email and from the iPhone are great to have. One neat feature that may be easily overlooked is that, once an album is published, it is in effect a subscription. Any future additions, either from other people such as event participants or from yourself via the iPhone will automatically sync back to iPhoto. Performance was decent; browsing through an album or playing a slideshow were fast, responsive and smooth even on the iPhone over EDGE. As for looks, I found the rather subdued interface with a selected few large icons to be just about right for its intended purpose and audience.Surely, it holds no comparison to Flickr and its many features. But I don’t think it was ever intended that way. Instead, I think its purpose, from the start, was to simply enable you to quickly and easily get your pictures out there, and do it in style. In this case, I think it fits the bill very well and it will be a hit. And for me, it will be complementing Flickr just nicely.