Facebook has acquired Divvyshot (YC W09)

http://divvyshot.com/facebook

by kevintwohy • 16 years ago

196 108 16 years ago

divvyshot.com

gruseom• 16 years ago

That is intense! Way to go Sam!!

dpritchett• 16 years ago

Related Valley drama:

"I was the one who came forward about the Macbook Air" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160643

Starring Divvyshot founder Sam Odio, Former TechCrunch Intern Daniel Brusilovsky, and Jason Calacanis.

Looks like Sam made out OK.

megamark16• 16 years ago

Wow, somehow I missed all that drama when it happened (other than hearing about the macbook bribe). Thanks for the links.

omarish• 16 years ago

UVa startups are 2 for 2. Way to go, sodio!

ps. I've forwarded this to the whole comm school.

maukdaddy• 16 years ago

As a Hokie let me add my congrats =)

dnaquin• 16 years ago

Excited to be working in close proximity with Sam and Paul again! Congrats guys.

Disparity• 16 years ago

and now there's a good chance you can walk into a random café and see someone using your product.. :)

ivankirigin• 16 years ago

Awesome!

icey• 16 years ago

Hot damn, congrats Sam, Paul & Michael!

zaveri• 16 years ago

Congrats Sam!

lyime• 16 years ago

This is great news. Congrats to Sam and the team.

mattiss• 16 years ago

Nice man!! I've been following your progress for a while, congrats congrats congrats! Very curious to know how you made out...

jedberg• 16 years ago

Congrats to the team! Also, thank you for featuring the reddit logo on your homepage. ;)

I think we can now conclusively prove that having a reddit logo on your homepage leads to a successful exit.

gaborcselle2• 16 years ago

Congrats Sam, Paul, and Michael!

ruslan• 16 years ago

Omg, yet another YC startup has been killed^H^H^H^H^Hacquired ? Oh well, hope the team has been offered something little bit more material, beside "the resources and freedom to build cool stuff". :-)

lanstein2• 16 years ago

If you're going to go to the trouble of doing the witty ^H thing, you should at least delete the correct number of characters.

bkudria• 16 years ago

Also, it's 2010, you have ^W at your disposal, which, gasp, kills a whole word!

tensafefrogs• 16 years ago

You haven't heard of the new startup fad of being "Kacquired" ?

pinstriped_dude• 16 years ago

Whats witty about typing caret H ?!

cmelbye2• 16 years ago

Why the heck did they do that? I mean, congratulations to them, but they just released an amazing rewrite of their product that kicked Facebook Photo's ass. I wonder why they didn't go through with it. Sad...

jfornear2• 16 years ago

"...we’ve received an offer we can’t refuse."

Translation: $

Plus, Facebook is an awesome product with millions of users. Now they can help Facebook Photos kick its own ass. Sounds like a win-win for everyone. :)

fauigerzigerk4• 16 years ago

And I believe that. I would have done it as well. That said, there's something wrong with a startup system that's little more than an elaborate job application process. No problem for that kind of consumer space site but at the end of the day the message is clear: Never trust a startup with something important.

robryan• 16 years ago

I see this as a problem for startups to get traction in the future if there continue to be these early product shut-down exits. What wants to go use a marginally better product when the is always the chance it will disappear into one of the bigger options at any time.

Not being in a position to judge this specific instance, I'd think in general you are better off showing some power, saying no to a deal, maybe entering into a partnership instead that keeps the focus on your product.

jacoblyles• 16 years ago

Early acquisition seems like a natural extension of the "minimum viable product" strategy.

Sam_Odio3• 16 years ago

Hi everyone,

Thank you for all the congratulations. We're thrilled to be joining the Facebook team. Frankly it's still taking time for everything to sit in.

I'll admit that it's bittersweet. When you spend 18 months obsessing over your company it's hard to see it go. It ultimately came down to the decision that we could touch more people's lives at Facebook...and that's what we've been in this for all along.

Since this post is going to get a lot of eyeballs I want to take this chance to solicit any suggestions/feedback/complaints HNers have for Facebook Photos. I can't comment on exactly what we'll be doing at Facebook, but I can promise whatever you tell me will get in front of the "right people." :)

If you want you can email me directly: sam@divvyshot.com

----

Since their legal department might read this: I'm not yet a Facebook employee and I'm not speaking on behalf of Facebook, anything you tell me is going to be placed in the public domain, you waive all rights to ownership over any IP that Facebook ends up implementing, etc.

</shameless>

lotharbot3• 16 years ago

First off, congratulations!

Now, suggestions:

1) ability to resize tag boxes to some degree

2) ability to drag tags around, instead of having to remove and re-click to place them

3) ability to change an existing tag. Example: when my mom joined facebook, I had to go back and delete all of the tags to her name (unlinked) and then add in new tags to her name (linked to her profile). It would have been easier to have an "update tag" button that let me link that tag to her profile (preferably for the whole album, but one-by-one would be better than nothing.)

4) I know facebook stores multiple sizes of photos. It would be neat to have more direct control over that -- say, to pick our own thumbnails, or to allow certain photos to be displayed in higher resolutions.

cmelbye2• 16 years ago

Sorry, I accidentally voted that down (the arrows are not very iPhone friendly), but yes, all of the above!

necubi• 16 years ago

The biggest issue with facebook photos is the resolution. Most people have 7MP+ cameras now, but facebook resizes them to ~600x450. While I can understand facebook being reluctant to store large pictures, it has become the primary way for many people to share their photos, and it's a shame that so much gets thrown away.

drusenko2• 16 years ago

agreed, that's pretty much my only frustration with facebook photos. the resolution is horrible. i can understand not storing the full resolution, but 600x450 or so is just WAY too small.

bradgessler• 16 years ago

Yes, meaningful access to the original high-resolution images. By "meaningful" I mean stuff like downloading everything in a zip archive ($10 says fb doesn't do this) to working with iPhoto, Picassa, Flickr, etc. I would even be willing to. pay a couple bucks to download high-res images in a zip file

I promise you if fb doesn't provide decent access to the high-resolution images, DivvyShot will be reinvented by a different founder under a different name and offered up as a paid service. Yep, its that valuable, and Flickr has proven people are willing to pay for this stuff.

phreanix• 16 years ago

I have a feeling that will be something tackled down the line with a 'premium' paid account. Divvyshot seems to have this as a future offering as well.

dustingetz• 16 years ago

hmm, I've never found it to be an issue, and I'm not sure facebook's dominant demographic cares either.

kevintwohy• 16 years ago

Congrats again, Sam!

One thing that I'd love to see your guys' hands on is the notion of 'ownership' of FB photos -- this is something that was definitely in the DNA of Divvyshot, and it would be really interesting to see FB explore some models of shared/group ownership of content.

gaborcselle2• 16 years ago

I'd like to sync certain directories on my harddrive with FB photos so I don't have to go through the current Java applet-based upload photos process.

mixmax• 16 years ago

Maybe facebook should acquire dropbox...

budu3• 16 years ago

They need to fix the performance problems. I've had problems viewing pictures on several occasions. It feels sluggish at times. This is understandable though, seeing as they are the largest photo storage site on the internet.

naner• 16 years ago

My grandmother has boxes and boxes of old photos that are unorganized and as it stands will probably be lost forever soon enough.

I think it would be cool if some company would partner with kodak or wallgreens or whoever is running all those 1hr photo developing places that are somehow still in business. They should be outfitted with specialized photo scanners and staffed with professionals who can help scan a lot of photos quickly. Then these photos could be archived online and partially sorted with that facial-recognition software. Maybe dates and annotations could be pulled off of handwriting on the back of photos if it is clear enough. Some kind of family-tree arrangement would be nice, too.

Anyways, I honestly don't expect Facebook or anyone else to implement this. It is too costly and difficult and laborious. I sure as hell wouldn't want to do it. But there's my suggestion.

timdorr• 16 years ago

View counters would be nice.

Larger views would also be nice.

And most important, color correction has to be fixed. It's been improved, but whatever they're doing on the backend for compression is muting and killing all color in my photos when I upload them :/

potatolicious• 16 years ago

The Java applet is really bad, pleeeease find another way for users to upload their photos.

Here are some major pain points (and some suggestions):

- The reliability of Facebook Photos is pretty suspect - the AJAX picture loader will get hung up randomly, increased reliability here will make the system a lot more polished.

- The Java upload tool really, really sucks. I would even take a Flash uploader over it, and I really despise Flash. Letting the users interact directly with their file systems may not also be a great idea - can you slurp directly from a memory card or camera connected via USB? This may convince more people to use Facebook as their only stop for photo storage.

- Photo API could use some work - right now the Lightroom Facebook plugin can't seem to delete photos. This means that when I make modifications to a photo and re-publish it just creates new photos on top of the old ones. The Flickr API allows overwrites, which means that the files can be seamlessly replaced, preserving comments and other data.

- iPhoto's facial recognition stuff is really really really cool, it'd be great if Facebook shamelessly stole it :)

BrandonM2• 16 years ago

Face recognition technology has been around for years. A partner and I even implemented a rudimentary tool for it in a few weeks in an AI course. I always wondered why Facebook couldn't take advantage of this and save the world thousands, if not millions of cumulative hours tagging photos.

Caligula• 16 years ago

Two reasons come to mind,

Even a 5% error rate is unacceptable. People may take offense to machine tag errors.

Second, facebook probably likes the time commitment people make to tagging photos and adding friends in order to tag them to the picture. It increases communication and also adds cases where people get facebook invites so they can get tagged.

jakecarpenter• 16 years ago

I'm not an AI guy, but isn't having people tag their photos is creating a gold mine of data for when they do automate the process?

pclark• 16 years ago

I read facebook looked at doing this, but their users were already manually tagging all their photos (and cool with that) so the additional hardware/implementation resources were errrr spent elsewhere.

makeee• 16 years ago

Tagging friends in a photo is a meaningful social action, just like commenting or liking a status update. Automating this would give users one less way to interact with their friends on the site.

drusenko2• 16 years ago

there are a lot of situations where you don't want to tag a photo of a friend, the way tags are implemented on facebook.

i generally wouldn't tag a friend in a picture where they look bad, and there are all kinds of social situations where a friend wouldn't want to be tagged in a particular photo -- because one girl would see them with another girl, for example.

lotharbot3• 16 years ago

I thought of something additional:

Group photo album ownership.

Example: I would love to be able to make a "family photos" album that is shared between me, my wife, and my son. I don't see any reason to have to duplicate their albums, and think it's silly that people have to add all three of us (or look in three places) to see all of our family pictures. If one of us could make an album and add the other two as co-owners, it would be a lot easier for us to put up family pics.

diN0bot• 16 years ago

fun widget for viewing a random photo a day from one friend. i have tons of friends, each with tons of photos....i want to engage with them (these aren't folks i speak to normally), but it's overwhelming.

TorKlingberg• 16 years ago

One-way tagging.

People occasionally upload party pictures and tag you in them. It is good that people watching the photos can see who are in them, and go to their profiles. The problem is that it also shows up under "Photos of X" where potential employers and girlfriends parents can see them. So you you have to go and untag yourself from any photos where you look stupid.

Let me remove pictures from "Photos of X" while still staying tagged in them.

flipbrad• 16 years ago

How's about not claiming to take ownership of my IP for the mere service of hosting and labelling my pics?

adamsmith• 16 years ago

Hopefully facebook will let them open source, just as Google did for EtherPad and Remail. It always feels regretful when a service gets bought up and shut down but I hope open sourcing becomes a common mitigating factor.

Sam_Odio3• 16 years ago

The Divvyshot team has talked about this and it's definitely something that we want to do. Ultimately it depends on Facebook's legal department.

dantheman• 16 years ago

Congratulations! This is a great app.

johnyzee• 16 years ago

... Which is now going to be closed down.

I have to echo the sentiments of another poster in this thread - what is the point if your startup is just an elaborate job application process? Now a really cool app will be shut down, and a couple of guys will land a job at Facebook. Seems like a net loss to me.

paraschopra3• 16 years ago

Ultimately the founders are maximizing their net gain and this offer may seem best to them, at this point of time.

superjared• 16 years ago

What was Divvyshot, exactly?

oneplusone• 16 years ago

Photo sharing site. The website is still up so go take a look at the tour: http://divvyshot.com/#to-details

johnfn• 16 years ago

It's a sort of photo manager that links together photos based on where they were taken from rather than by who took them. It seems especially aimed to manage photos from groups of people.

ryanb• 16 years ago

For how much?

borism• 16 years ago

cash or stock?

axod• 16 years ago

Who made the first move?

minus1• 16 years ago

From TechCrunch: "The amount of the acquisition is not being disclosed, but it was likely small. Buying Divvyshot is a talent acquisition for Facebook."

andrewhyde• 16 years ago

Congrats for divvyshot!

josh33• 16 years ago

Congratulations! And for the record, photo sharing can do good in the world. Just think of people collaborating on a disaster with photos, helping to know the extent of the disaster and the help that is needed. Of course, they would need to take photos intermittently so they might actually help, but I think photo sharing is definitely something that can improve the world around us!

eekfuh• 16 years ago

Big congrats!

Batsu• 16 years ago

Wow, congratulations.

If you ever doubted your business, you can feel affirmed now. Being bought out by the largest social networking site with a sizable portion of their site dedicated to photos... well, you obviously did it right.

Get out there and do something else right, now :D

jayair• 16 years ago

Congrats guys!

TodoneApp• 16 years ago

That's pretty expedient. The Wayback Machine hasn't even taken a snapshot of you yet. :)

adriand• 16 years ago

This is a real shame, because I just started using Divvyshot (first event: birth of my daughter on March 8) and I really, really liked it.

It filled a great niche. A year ago, a bunch of friends and family and I went on vacation, and we all talked about trying to set up some kind of photo sharing spot where we could see each other's photos, but it never happened. Divvyshot, though, fit that bill.

Facebook doesn't do that for me, so I've downloaded the photos and will be deleting this event. I realize that getting bought out is a positive thing for the founders, but it can be a negative thing for your users, and it certainly feels that way to me. Bit of a letdown.

All that aside: great product, and best of luck to you guys in the future.

lotharbot3• 16 years ago

I'm curious... what is it, specifically, that you want from your friends-and-family photo sharing that Facebook doesn't offer? I can't figure it out from your description.

volida• 16 years ago

dropbox seems to be perfect for that kind of sharing

TheBranca18• 16 years ago

Congratulations!

tocomment• 16 years ago

Umm what is Divvyshot?

savrajsingh• 16 years ago

baller life!

medianama• 16 years ago

For how much? Doesn't mean much without that info.

Facebook has acquired Divvyshot (YC W09)

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