Posted in Features on February 18th, 2009 by Jon Wheatley – Comments
Documenting your life is cool and everything but doing that is nothing if you can’t show it off.
For the past few days we’ve been building a feature that allows you to export all the pictures in your picture stream to a youtube video like the one below. All you need to do is click the new option on your widgets page and it will automatically generate a video.
(As I’m sure some of you know, youtube video processing can often take sometime. Because of this video generation doesn’t happen instantly but if you click the “generate” link on your widgets page and then check back later, it should all be sorted).
Right now all the videos are uploaded to the dailybooth youtube account but soon we’ll be adding the option to export them to your own youtube accounts, if you have one. We’ll also eventually be adding the option to upload your own song to go along with the video.
As always we’re open to suggestions so if you have any please let us know.
The “DailyBooth Story” has been riddled with unexpected problems and interesting twists and turns. I figured it would be beneficial, for me if nothing else, to try and go back and document everything from coming up with the initial concept to launching a completed website. Hopefully other people will find this post useful.
The idea for dailybooth was coined a few days after I was laid off from a job I had at a web development company in Edinburgh. Everything happened quite quickly so I was frantically brainstorming some startup ideas that could potentially bring in some much needed money. DailyBooth (as it wasn’t yet known) was one of a list of ideas that was churned out in that brainstorming session.
The following is a conversation between me and @josh on December 1st, 2007.
I’d like to note that the distinct lack of punctuation and the numerous spelling mistakes is probably can viagra cause restless leg syndrome down to my excitement about said idea.
@josh isn’t known for his enthusiasm so I didn’t let his lack of it put me off.
The next logical step seemed to be to find a domain for this currently nameless project.
So yeah. DailyBooth was almost called “plurg.com”. That was the last time I asked @josh for domain name suggestions.
Brilliant, so I had a rough idea for a website and a domain. I needed a sweet design and then we were really in business. I pitched the concept of the site to my designer and friend @julek. Within minutes he’d punted out a concept.
This is a conversation with @Josh on December 2nd, 2007.
At the time, @Josh (being the teenage entrepreneurial genius that he is) had recently completed a sale of his main project. He liked the design and concept so much he agreed to put up some angel funding to support me in my time of need.
Over the next few weeks the DailyBooth concept slowly evolved to be way more social. It was becoming less of a novelty web app and more and more like a fully functional social network.
During this *transitional period* @Julek came up with quite a few design new design concepts.
After much thought and deliberation, this was the design we eventually decided on using.
As you can see by the date in this design concept, it’s now mid February. By now I’ve moved out of my flat in Edinburgh. After hopping around on friends sofas for a while I temporarily moved back into my mums house in the south of England and setup office in a cupboard. This cupboard was to be my home for the next few months.
Progress with dailybooth was painfully slow. The more I pushed the developer the slower things seemed to go. Deadline after deadline was missed and on my blog the progress of dailybooth became something of a joke.
Eventually in May 2008 we had a working version of the site. At the time I recorded a short screencast of version 0.5 which you can see below.
I wasn’t overly happy with it. All we had to show for a few months of hard work was an amazingly buggy prototype that had slowly drifted away from my initial vision of a simple, clean, usable website (Think what myspace is to facebook. Nobody wants to be a “myspace”).
Then something completely unprecedented happened. The lead developers’ band got signed. He was (incredibly quickly) touring Europe with his band and could not continue working on dailybooth. Great, I thought.
I was now left with a dilemma. Find someone else to finish off the work that had been done or completely start again. At this point the site was 95% complete. I could have quite easily hired another developer to finish it off but seeing as I wasn’t happy with the direction the site was going in I decided, rightly or wrongly, to completely start again.
I was lucky because at the time it just so happened that my other startup (grabup) had been acquired so I had a bit of money to play with. Josh was happy with me buying him out so I went ahead and did that.
This time I was going to make sure everything was done right. First thing I did was get some logos designed by my buddy Dache.
This time before @julek embarked on designing the new version of dailybooth we setup a screen casting session on vyew.com so I could see what’s happening and we’d be in contact the entire time. I’d highly recommend doing this.
The first screen-casting-design-session was so fun and worked so well that when the time for the second screen-casting-design-session came around I tweeted the vyew.com room link. Shortly after that people from twitter started coming in and offering helpful suggestions to myself and @Julek.
This is what we came up with (make a note of the file name).
A few months and countless headaches later (with help from @RyanAmos & @Dice), DailyBooth is ready to go.
So there you have it. Over a year behind schedule (you know you’re behind schedule when you have to renew the domain and you haven’t launched yet). I couldn’t be happier with how everything has turned out. All of the late nights and stress have been completely worth it.
Thanks everyone who has been involved in any way in the sites development. I truly hope you enjoy using DailyBooth as much as I do.
Update: In what has become true dailybooth style, things have been complicated right up until the end. This series of photos depicts the expect launch date, each time being “for reals this time!”. Something always came up.
Seconds away from the 4th “for reals!” launch, the dailybooth developer @RyanAmos’ internet and then power drops out.
It goes to show that however sure you are, something could always crop up.
Update: We’ve totally launched. Friday 13th of Feb @ 1am GMT. Below is a qik video of the hilariously anticlimactic launch. Now the real work can begin.
I’m @jonwheatley on twitter & @jon on dailybooth. I look forward to hearing your comments. viagra etc
You have all been an absolutely massive help and DailyBooth wouldn’t be the same without you guys. I figured the least I could do is to make a blog post about how awesome each of you are.
Karli was probably the first person to ever mess about with DailyBooth v1.0 and her constant involvement and great suggestions have been completely invaluable.
Thanks Dan for letting Dave borrow your computer to take this shot. Unfortunately for all of Dave’s awesome design skills he still doesn’t own a webcam. You need to get on that, man.
Ryan is *the* man. He is the technical mind behind DailyBooth and coded it completely from the ground up in under 30 minutes. He tells me he wasn’t even trying. What a badass.
Mike runs a massive website so I don’t know where he finds the time to mess about beta testing dailybooth. Still, somehow he finds a way and for that, I love him.
