I know, right? MySpace is back. I just got my invitation to join the new MySpace and decided to go and check it out. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m not too optimistic – though the younger crowd that’s into music and music vids may appreciate it. I’m hopeful it will be a useful way to discover new music – but so far it’s mainly just been a place where you can listen to 30-second snippets of anything moderately popular, and full-length versions of everything else. You can catch the latest music videos and follow celebrity buzz. Yawn. Maybe for some people. The “friending” mechanism is more like Twitter, and less like Facebook – you can “connect” with anyone you want, and they can either choose to connect with you or not. Look me up if you decide to check it out – I’m only connected to a couple of people. And neither of them is “Tom”.
But then the bad news came – Adobe sent me an email that Photoshop.com will no longer function as a photo sharing site. Which is a bummer, because not only do they have an attractive interface, but you can also do quite a bit of photo editing online. You can choose to share some or all of your photos publicly on a customized page, with a user ID, share to other social media sites and Flickr, as well as share links to photos and to slideshows, and get the embed code for slideshows. So it’s handy for blogging, or for sharing with a large group of friends on Facebook, without actually uploading the photos to Facebook itself (and giving Facebook the rights to use your photos for whatever they want).
But I guess Adobe wants to transition over to Adobe Revel, which apparently was briefly called Carousel. It’s a platform optimized for mobile devices and/or Macs, which allows you (via an app) to access your pictures across mobile devices. You can also seamlessly share with social media, or use the app to email photos, as well as some photo editing, but I don’t think it’s as slick as the (online) photoshop software is/was. Longtime Photoshop.com users will have the option of transferring their photos (JPEG only!) over to Revel, or can opt out and download everything (which is pretty easy) to their computer. To smooth the transition, Adobe is giving one year of Premium (i.e. unlimited uploads) access and a free Photoshop Elements 11 upgrade, but after that you either pay $5.99 a month or 60 bucks a year to be able to upload more than 50 photos per month. Which is actually a reasonable amount if you are just uploading your best pics. In mid-June, if you haven’t taken action, all your files will go poof!
*sigh*. I guess I was one of relatively few people who used and liked photoshop.com’s photo storage setup. The new app doesn’t really offer anything that isn’t already offered by other photo sharing sites and apps, especially the redesigned Flickr app. I’m thinking next year this time, both MySpace and Revel will be doing roughly the same. But I wish them luck.
Meanwhile, if you want, you can check out my Photoshop site while it’s still around. At some point I’ll need to go back and see how many blog embeds get messed up as a result of this change.
