• Fun Photo App Treehouse Has The Simple Sharing Mechanic That Facebook Needs

    Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

    MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in... → Learn More

    What I want is simple: a way to share certain things with my friends, and other things with everyone. “Simple” is the keyword there because you can do that with Facebook, but it’s not simple enough. I want flick-one-switch simple, not create list, use drop-down, choose Everyone or Friends and Networks, Friends of Friends, Friends Only, Customize simple. A few startups are starting to get this level of ease — Treehouse is one of them.

    When we last wrote about Treehouse back in June, I noted that it was perhaps the perfect app for sharing Bros Icing Bros pictures. Sadly, that meme died at the hands of Smirnoff Ice. But luckily, Treehouse has become even more useful since then. Notably, the iPhone photo-sharing app has a revamped interface that allows you to comment directly from photo pages, swipe left and right to quickly browse photos, and swipe down to see comments, likes, and location. There are also some nice new overlays that show all this information. And you can now leave photo comments.

    They’ve added these features while keeping the app simple, which I like. It’s not trying to do too much, just share photos amongst your friends. That said, as I alluded to, they did add the element to make it easy to post photos outside of your social circle. On the post screen, there is now a “Friends Only” toggle that is set to “On” but default. If you swipe this to “Off”, a new option appears that asks if you want to post your photo to Facebook. You can choose “On” or “Off” for this, and if you choose “Off”, the photo is simply shared with everyone on Treehouse. Easy.

    Yes, I know you can basically do this type of sharing with Facebook, but it’s too convoluted with all those options. And Treehouse has the default set to “Friends Only” as it should be. I still believe Facebook needs this simple toggle to switch between sharing with your friends or with everyone (though I’d prefer “followers” like Twitter). As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is well aware, the UI and UX is very important for this sharing dynamic — and I think Treehouse has nailed it.

    Treehouse co-founder Chrys Bader says the app had over 100,000 downloads in August. The latest version is 0.3 which is a free download from the App Store.

    Company: Fliggo
    Website: fliggo.com
    Launch Date: July 1, 2008

    Fliggo is instant video communities. Fliggo offers anyone the ability to create their own video-uploading site, and share the videos either privately or publicly. Fliggo hosts and streams the videos, and gives site owners easy management tools to customize and monitor activity on the site. While the basic service is free, Fliggo charges for commercial features such as serving ads on a site or controlling the domain that it is on. Create the next YouTube or just a private place...

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    Company: Facebook
    Website: facebook.com
    Launch Date: February 1, 2004
    IPO: NASDAQ:FB

    Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 845 million monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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