OurDoings Unlimited

(Bruce Lewis) There is no limit on the number of photos you can upload to OurDoings. Please, upload all you want! A key differentiator between OurDoings and the plethora of other choices is that OurDoings can take a huge number of photos and present them on enjoyable, varied web pages. On other sites, if you don't put extensive work into being selective, the enjoyment level goes down as the number of photos goes up.

In fact, the key problem OurDoings has to overcome is people who sign up, upload one or two photos, then leave. It's understandable. There are "early adopter" people out there who like to try out every single photo site, and they're experienced. Experience has taught them that the one-or-two-photo stage is when a photo site looks its best. But that's not how it is with OurDoings. To be honest, it looks a little empty and lonely. Other photo sites fill the page with lots of ancillary stuff. OurDoings wants the page filled with lots of decent-sized thumbnails making it easy to skim through looking for interesting doings.

What I've said so far is my answer whenever someone asks what the upload limit is. But my answer leads to another question: how will OurDoings ever make money? Advertising-supported photo sharing has never been successfully profitable, except possibly if you count the limited-resolution photos Facebook hosts. "Freemium" is what Picasaweb and Flickr do, where there are limits on the free accounts to encourage people to pay for premium service.

What limits should OurDoings put on free accounts? I don't know yet. What I do know is that I won't pull the rug out from under my early adopters by taking away features that they helped test and improve with their suggestions. To be clear, every feature you get now will stay free for you.

Internally, OurDoings already can distinguish free/premium sites. Right now, all sites are created as premium-for-20-years. I think most "forever" promises are a bad idea, otherwise I would have made them permanently premium.

If suddenly OurDoings grows to the point of needing more server resources, I'll make the switch so that new sites are "free" and limited, but existing sites will stay premium. No pulling the rug out from under anybody.

I don't know for sure yet what the feature differences will be between free and premium. If you'd like me to write another post on my ideas so far, let me know.