PhotoJoy: Perfect for Sappy Bloggers with Kids

Having kids is clearly impacting my assessment of applications… And there is no greater proof for this than a new product by IncrediMail called PhotoJoy, an application I would never have given a second thought were I not a father of two.

PhotoJoy is a free downloadable application that uses your photos to produce neat desktop widgets, 3D photo screensavers and wallpaper collages. You can either use photos located on your computer, or ones uploaded to your Flickr account. PhotoJoy can also use your Flickr stream to keep your photos fresh. Notably missing is the ability to import photos from your Facebook account, which is where I for example keep all my online photos on.

The application should run on most Windows XP setups. Sorry, no Mac support at the moment. I’ve been running it on my machine for a week and have noticed no negative performance impacts.

To see PhotoJoy in action check out the video embedded on the bottom of this post for a demo the company whipped up using some photos of my kids.

In many respects the product is similar to long gone Filmloop (remember them?) which both had a hard time dealing with increasing competition courtesy of Slide and RockYou and a blatant lack of support from one of its VC’s. Filmloop was also a one-trick-pony, whereas PhotoJoy is just one of several IncrediMail products—HiYo is another one.

Seeing no immediate business model and with the company’s history in mind, I requested a clarification on PhotoJoy’s ad-ware practices and its business model strategy. IncrediMail’s CEO, Ofer Adler, addressed my concerns:

“We are never going to push any other installation with this product.

We are going to use an advertising through search business model similar in concept to the one of picasa / yahoo messenger / now even AVG antivirus and that to have a free version that will suggest the user during the installation to accept our Google / other partner search properties such as homepage / toolbar / default search provider, assuming a certain % of the installations will accept them. (of course any one who doesn’t want will be able not to accept them). In addition there will be probably a premium version with some more features / content.”

So go ahead and call me a sap, but PhotoJoy puts a smile on my face and sometimes that’s not only good enough, it’s plenty!