Jonathan Deamer

Apple's Photobooth application that ships with Mac OS

I know that title might sound like a PhD thesis, but stick with me; a few more posts and I think I’ll have the grand unified social meeja theory of everything…

Perhaps not, but there are of course a number of ideas I seem to notice throughout various online services, and TechCrunch’s piece today on a service called DailyBooth made me think of one of them. The TC post says “it’s a Twitter-like quick message service, only the main form of communication is pictures. You can send pictures of anything you want, though most users tend to send images of themselves, photo booth-style, and attach messages to them”. That’s sort of it, but I’d hold off on comparing to Twitter too much – TechCrunch (and most blogs) are well aware that lazy name drops of the Big T generate lots in interest in their posts.

What’s more accurate is a comment on the article that says “Wait what? This looks like they just slapped a new front end on 4chan. How is this news?”, referring of course to a cult message board that (arguably) gave birth to LOLcats, Rick Rolling and hundreds of other memes – it’s the grass roots (or cesspool?!) of web culture. There is a remarkable similarity, and undoubted influence (whether known to DailyBooth’s creators or not). 4chan wasn’t an original idea though – it’s just an imageboard, a type of message board popular in Japan.  And looking at these imageboards, it’s clear that’s really all DailyBooth is, but with some real-time Web 2.0 buzzword magic thrown in.

So, if DailyBooth is just a community based around a bog-standard imageboard, why is it news that warrants a write-up on TechCrunch? One word:

Context.

And here’s my point: so many people get bogged down in what a site/service/app does from a technical or functional point of view (“but it’s just a 4chan/Twitter/Myspace clone!”), that they forget about what really makes these things what they are: their users, their design, the way they’re marketed, the attitude of their founders and so on. The context they’re placed in. (Not groundbreaking of course, but something it’s good to be reminded of).

No-one argues that LinkedIn is just a poor man’s Facebook. It’d be pretty difficult to argue that the former’s functionality is better – it’s actually pretty simplistic – but it’s the way LinkedIn is positioned as a “serious” social network that makes it popular with a certain type of user.

Similarly, Yammer is essentially a Twitter clone. But it’s aimed at businesses for use internally, which venture capitalists think makes it worth at least a $5million investment.

So by positioning itself as a “microblogging tool” (rather than a message board) at a time when such things are en vogue, DailyBooth has been able to get some mileage out of an old concept.  Its changed the way people use this concept by guiding behavioural norms in the site’s community (eg. “post pics of yourself not random stuff you find online”). DailyBooth is transparent about its owners and terms of use, compared to the somewhat arcane shroud around 4chan. Most importantly, it seems to have a friendly community, rather than a cryptic network of in-jokes.

Admittedly, DailyBooth is not yet Myspace. But by changing the context of a simple imageboard, it’s overtaken a stalwart of internet culture (oops, incorrect stats – see comments) picked up a large number of users, got people talking and potentially begun to move the idea towards the mainstream, seemingly capturing the elusive teen audience along the way. So how many other simple, old ideas could become cool new web businesses by changing their context?

And next time someone says to you “that’s been done before!” or “that’s only 10 lines of code!“, just remember: context.