| I'VE FALLEN IN LOVE WITH SHUTTERFLY. BUT ITS A TRAGIC affair. My heart aches for what I cannot have.
Shutterfly, for those who don't know, is a consumer photo service on the World Wide Web that lets you print and share digital photographs. There are many such services (at least 108, according to Google), and I've visited quite a few, including Ofoto (now owned by Kodak), Snapfish, and FotoTime. No, I haven't made an exhaustive analysis of every digital photo service. It's just that Shutterfly has managed to create enough magic to get me using its services in a serious way. The titillating, frustrating part is that Shutterfly is so good now that you can see how wonderful it could be within two or three years. But you can't get all that now.
Still, love springs eternal. The magic that really hooked me was Shutterfly's greeting-card feature. Until a couple of months ago, the service provided exactly what digital photographers have come to expect: You can print your pictures in various sizes; edit your pictures by, say, removing red-eye or cropping nasty relatives; and share digital photo albums by sending people e-mail links. But then, sometime before Christmas, Shutterfly added a new application to create photo greeting cards. That in itself isn't big news, since all the services let you create a greeting card with your own photos. But it is a lot of fun. I have more than 2,000 digital photographs on my hard disk: I log on, upload a photo that I know will mean something to a friend, design a nice card, and write a greeting—then the Website sends off my card by U.S. mail. That's how I spread a lot of photographic joy this past holiday season.
So where's the magic? Shutterfly designed its application so that you can see a pair of hands holding the card you designed. It's a nifty way to envision what your card will actually look like in the hands of your correspondent. True, this feature is no big deal technically, but it's a brilliant piece of customer service: As a consumer, you can now be absolutely sure that your card is going to look the way you want it to. I sent seven of these personalized cards in December, and I've sent a few more in January. STEWART ALSOP is a partner with New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. Except as noted, neither he nor his partnership has a financial interest in the companies mentioned. He can be reached at alsop_in fotech@fortunemail.com. His column may be bookmarked online at www.forlune.com/technology/alsop. |
And now we get to why customer service like this really matters. I've spent enough time on Shutterfly making the cards to figure out the other applications the service offers. I bought myself a four-megapixel camera after Christmas, so I'm ordering more big prints from Shutterfly. And I've discovered something Shutterfly calls Snapbooks, which are personalized, bound photo albums that you create online, complete with captions you write for the pictures. I've already made a few such books for friends and family, but next time I host a big party or have a bunch of people over for the holidays, I'm going to make up Snapbooks of the event and have Shutterfly mail them to everybody who came. It will be expensive, but I'll bet none of my guests will ever have received that kind of memento. Anyway, I've spent nearly $100 at Shutterfly since the beginning of December. The last time I had such an explosion of economic activity was when I started to get into Amazon.com to buy books and CDs, or when I discovered how I could use Harry & David to ship edible presents to my siblings around the country. No, $100 isn't all that much money. But believe me, I'm just getting started. And remember, my dollars will not be going to Kodak or to my local drugstore for traditional photo processing. After 30 years of taking pictures, I am beginning to handle my photography in a completely different way. That seems significant. Now that I've got you all excited, let me bring you down again. Digital photography is laborious. To send a greeting card, I download photos from my camera onto my PC's hard disk; I find the right picture; I upload the picture to Shutterfly; the uploads fail about a third of the time; I get the photo and greeting card prepared; I go through the process of paying for this transaction. If I want to distribute the same photo to my relatives who have Ceiva Web-connected frames, I must go through an equally time-consuming process. If I want to send it as an e-mail attachment, I must resize the file with a program like Adobe Photoshop Elements. Forget trying to print my photographs on my own printer—that's far too much work for far too little gratification. In other words, digital photography is still a pain in the butt. I know someone is going to solve the problem in the next few years. But that's a ways off. In the meantime, I'm in love but pining for something more. |