Whatever happened to Piclens
Piclens used to be a phenomenon. A minor phenomenon, but a phenomenon nonetheless.
I first realised this was the case when my telling one person in the office about it resulted in it spreading round the office like wildfire, until recommendations for me to try it out were coming at least thrice a day.
So what is (or was) Piclens.
In a nutshell, a Firefox extension that took any photo from a photostream/album on any of a number of popular sites (Flickr, Facebook, Google Images …), and added a hover-over link to it which, when clicked, blew the photo (and its accompanying album) up into a full-screen slideshow and whizzy browsing tool. Brilliant! Browsing through a large selection of photos was no longer a chore.
But these days a lot has changed.
Firstly, the name has changed to Cooliris. The basic functionality is still there, and you can still get to it after each install of an update by going to the options and changing a few settings, but the default view on clicking on a link on a photo you want to see is the picture on the right.
Not only does it not show you the photo you chose or the album it’s in, it shows you some random photos from the web in its new Discover mode. You think “How the hell do I see those photos I wanted”, so you try Favourites, but this just asks you to set up a user account, then you try clicking the welcome message, and eventually, in a desperate bid to get what you wanted in the first place, you click Shopping. But none of these result in anything remotely related to what you asked for,
Imagine if a website habitually sent you to completely the wrong place, pushing stuff you didn’t want at you every time you click a link. This is how I feel using Cooliris, and I’m probably going to uninstall it.
I think the moral of the story is that all web services eventually have to make a profit, and with all the free stuff floating around it’s easy to take for granted their unadulterated, not just user-friendly but money-unfriendly interfaces. But trying to boost your profits too aggressively, with too abrupt and too unsubtle a change to how the software works will just lead to people dumping you.
For something newer, that still doesn’t have to make a profit.
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Tags: cooliris, monetisation, piclens