I don’t know Derek Powazek personally, I just know of him. Reading his post today really makes me hope that some day I have the chance to meet him in person. Derek is a very talented designer and most recently co-founded 8020 Publishing which produced community-driven media such as JPG.

On his blog today, he tells the back story to his recent departure from the baby he helped get off the ground. While the story of JPG is compelling and worth the read, I think the points he takes away from the experience are the most important:

If it’s any help to other entrepreneurs, here’s what I’ve learned.

Make no assumptions when it comes to roles and responsibilities. Like my dad says: “Someone’s gotta call quittin’ time.”
Communication between partners is mandatory. And you cannot communicate with someone who is not communicating with you.
Decisions aren’t decisions if you have to keep making them. Set on the course and stick to it. If you keep talking about things that have already been decided, nothing will ever get done.
When someone says one thing, but acts in a contradictory way, you have a choice between believing their words or believing their deeds. Believe their deeds.
Never let anyone tell you what you want. When someone says, “You don’t want that,” what they really mean is, “I don’t want you to have that.”
Don’t stay where you’re not wanted, respected, or happy. Even if it’s your company.

Source: powazek.com, “The Real Story of JPG Magazine”

As a fellow entrepreneur, I certainly can relate to the ups and downs of inter-company relationships. Some start out rocky and get progressively worst while others start out peachy and, well, go sour even quicker. I’ve been in all of those situations and it’s never easy, compounded even further if you work with friends.

Ironically enough, it’s this sort of salty advice that is really the most compelling you can find. There’s a quote I once heard: “Reporter: So how’s it feel to be an overnight success? Entrepreneur: It’s great, I just don’t know which night it was.” Success is one of the hardest things to replicate in life but failures are easier to avoid (not that we don’t continuously find new ways to fail either).

Technorati Tags: jpg+magazine, startups, web2.0

Some of the big news today circles around the pending shuttering of the Yahoo! Photos site. Yahoo! Photos, wth its 2B photos, will be giving users of the service the option to migrate to its other photo property, Flickr (currently stacking about 500M photos). Interestingly, this is not a required migration path and instead Yahoo! also offers a variety on exit ramps to patrons including export to Photobucket and Snapfish.

Many in the Web 2.0 universe consider this a huge win for Flickr. I’m not so sure about that, and it’s even much less a guarantee for the Web 2.0 thinking in my book. I think the fact that there isn’t an instant migration to Flickr speaks to the power, and challenge, of establishing communities online. Ben Metcalfe has more:

And this is where the rub lies for the Yahoo! Photo users who are now contemping their options. Yahoo! does run a conceptually similar service, Flickr, however it is wildly different in it’s dynamic. Quite frankly many of the photos, and their owners, from Yahoo! Photos would not be welcome in Flickr’s high-quality, open, community-orientated environment.

Yahoo! has enough smart people to realize this and so it is for that reason they have turned down the otherwise lucrative opportunity of simply merging all those photos into Flickr to create the biggest photo site on the net (2.5bn photos).

Source: Ben Metcalfe Blog, “When your assets are no longer monetizable: Yahoo! Photos to close”

I think that the victor here is Flickr. I agree with Ben that Flickr’s ability to capture customers that love the service enough to part ways with their hard earned cash is the leading motivation. I believe the focus on the customer is certainly a tenet of Web 2.0. However, another tactical hallmark of this new suite of applications is the ad-driven revenue model. To that end, I think this move should serve as a serious wake-up call to the peril of building real, lasting value (the kind people pay for with more than just their time) early.

As a side note, I used Yahoo! Photos for the first time in a long time recently to order prints. It was a really easy experience and one that is not matched by Flickr’s. Hopefully more of it will be integrated.

Technorati Tags: flickr, media+sharing, ben+metcalfe, web2.0, yahoo

Social Media has created new challenges for many different industries and professionals. As more and more “amateurs” have become empowered to create, publish, and distribute their own media, it’s flooded the marketplaces with both new sources of talent and new sources of material.

It must be frightening as a member of one of these groups. Sentiments such as this probably don’t bring much comfort either:

Half a dozen lurid and splodgy pictures in the local paper brought home to me the death of an honourable profession this week. I took them. I am in my small way responsible for impoverishing an old friend, because he, not me, is a professional photographer, and his living has been more or less abolished by the changing world. Just as film has been replaced by digital, professionals are being replaced by amateurs. The changes are partly technological and partly economic, but the final blow to his profession has come from Flickr and similar Web 2.0 sites.

[...]

A picture-sharing site like Flickr contains the work of tens of thousands of talented amateurs, all of them capable of producing one or two photographs a year that could be published anywhere. A British photographers’ site, EPUK, has calculated that if only 1% of the pictures on Flickr are publishable, that would mean 1.5m usable pictures uploaded there every year. Most of the drudgery of identifying good, relevant pictures is also done here – by the photographers themselves, who tag them, and by the other users, who notice them and have their interest recorded by the software.

Source: The Guardian, “We all helped to speed the demise of professional photographers”

The irony is that, usually, the little guy is the one being pushed aside by the incumbent. We’re seeing a reversal in many ways, though. I venture the underdog has always had a sting to them, however small that might be, especially when there’s tens of thousands of them.

Technorati Tags: longtail, blogging, social+media

I got a good chuckle out of this illustration today and couldn’t resist sharing it:

Technorati Tags: web2.0