There are lots and lots of photo sharing sites and the clear winner in that is Flickr with a great community around it however that didn’t stop Andrea D’Ottavio from coming up with CiaoBelli. CiaoBelli is an Italian startup aiming at creating a community who loves sharing photos of parties, events or holidays with friends and others.
Well, we can all say that why and what’s the use of another service which is focusing on sharing photos. Well, there are few reasons here and one of them is that most of the photo sharing sites are focused on all type of photos but CiaoBelli concentrates more on sharing photos of parties, events and holidays.
Another reason is what I found out while talking to Andrea is that they are focusing on providing a better service and which is not crippled by various limits.
CiaoBelli offers unlimited photo uploads and doesn’t stop you from creating multiple albums, you can put notes on the pictures (they call it mapping the photo) and if you write the name of the person then it automatically links to the profile of the person if they are on CiaoBelli too.
What impressed me most is the user interface of CiaoBelli, each and every feature of the service is available under couple of clicks and this way you don’t have to go through multiple links to reach to your desired page. The most interesting part of the interface was the iPhone like Menu system. The menu is dynamic in nature and changes according to the page you are currently on.
Andrea told me that the service is getting good response even in the beta phase and currently has more than 8000 active users. And here are some of the future plans which he shared with us :
- API for developers.
- Partnering with various print services, however still keeping the option of allowing you to print the images or even allowing the local print services to make use of the service. That’s I meant with No Crippled Service!
- Localization of the service. Currently it’s only in English and Italian.
Just by going the looks and usability of the service, CiaoBelli looks pretty attractive however it’s really the features which they are offering makes it stand far ahead of various other services. Flickr is owned by Yahoo and now that Yahoo photos has been merged in Flickr, it gets the added benefit of the existing user base, however, I think that it really shouldn’t stop CiaoBelli as it has got lot better features to offer.
What CiaoBelli can work on is that they can start providing the widgets so that people can display the photos in various social networks or blogs. Slide & RockYou are perfect example of how they gained huge user base with the help of various social networks.
Note : Currently CiaoBelli is Invite based only. I’ve got few invites with me, so who so ever wants to test drive the service can leave a comment or ping me and I’ll be happy to share the invites.
