Since I have been asked this question by a few people, I thought I would post the answer: No, I did not have inside knowledge of the Heypix/Webshots deal, I just guessed based on the information Rafat published originally. I just sent him a note suggesting Heypix as the potential target, before blogging it. Rafat kept his commitment not to disclose anything until the following day.
Now on the tiny bit of controversy started by Scoble who stated that "This (the Heypix acquisition by Webshots) might just be a bigger photo deal than Flickr going to Yahoo. Here's why". Then Frank Boosman chimes in using two metrics to demonstrate that Scoble is wrong: a BlogPulse graph showing that Flickr is talked about much more than WebShots, and an Alexa.com graph showing Flickr's exponential growth on a traffic graph. Then Narendra Rocherolle, the founding CEO of Webshots (a very cool dude who just restarted his blog), wrote this piece providing a useful backgrounder on the company he started back in 1996.
I am not going to put myself in the middle of that conversation, as to which is the hottest (with five deals in less than three weeks the whole space is steaming anyway). But I am a bit disturbed by the arguments Franck has been using to prove his point: first, BlogPulse measures the recurrence of a keyword in the blogosphere, but since WebShots has been dealing with a completely different functionality, population and demographics, it does not prove anything. And second, using site ranking to show the relative traction of Webshots and Flickr is a similar artefact to using logarithmic scales to amplify growth vs. stability - it is much harder to get from 1,000 to 100 than 10,000 to 1,000.
Page views, in this graph, show that Flickr has been growing very quickly, but that there is still a lot to do to reach the kind of traction (and revenue levels) that Webshots has been commanding.
I am happy to go one way or the other, but I'd want to see other metrics/arguments (hint: like the potential significance of the deal to Yahoo at large).
"The whole space is steaming"
Steaming like what?
As I posted on Scoble's blog, I just don't get it.
Posted by: Jeremy Pepper | April 12, 2005 at 04:04 PM