This isn’t a new innovation — it’s been around for a good few months. I signed up for My Gallery
when it came out to give it a go, see what it was like. I’ve used it a
few times. It’s simple to use: You just text your image to shortcode
3333 and it’s written to your My Gallery moblog. My biggest problem was
that it’s standalone and doesn’t ‘do’ anything other than exist. It
doesn’t interface with blogger, typepad or flickr. Or anything else.
However I thought it would be interesting to see if Alfie could give an opinion. (Alfie Dennen of www.moblog.co.uk certainly knows what he’s talking about when it comes to MMS, moblogging and community).
Is My Gallery any good? Is it a worthy offering from a dynamic mobile operator pushing the boundaries?
Here’s Alfie’s perspective:
Even reading the text in the intro you know the problem? It’s marketing speak,
plain and simple, rather than letting the product speak for itself by just *being
there*, being open.
You cant even go in and have a poke around unless you join!
The other really crazy thing, a lesson yet to be learned by MNO’s I think, is
that you should not be charging your users over and above the already steep
messaging odds just to share their content online.
3 mygallery charges 3 TIMES
the standard messaging rate! And even then only gives you 10mb free
storage.
My final gripe, and boy I do seem to love to gripe 🙂 is; what does
one 3 user have in common with another? What is their communal bond? Bugger all,
MNO’s should build these things and keep them open IMO, and in that way reach
other networks users and have a better chance of tempting them over to their
network.
By keeping it open and letting it grow, without overcharging users, and letting
a community grow organically, they will end up with something of real
value, a community, rather than trying to derive its’ value from direct and
immediate revenue. It’s the old "the power of a network derives from it’s nodes"
net adage.
Do these operators just not get it. They should be hiring people and
companies like Alfie to help them grow their traffic (and by default,
revenue) through the likes of moblogs.
Now a few screenshots of the My Gallery service:
This is the frontpage when you’ve logged in. It’s reasonably
user-friendly if you’re serious about using it. If you’re a casual
user, I’m not too sure if you’d be feeling very comfortable. It’s not
blogger-simple.
Now we’re having a look at ‘my website’. This is my view of my own My
Gallery site and how it looks. Here you can see I’ve only uploaded a
few images. You have a little calendar and the image thumbnails are
displayed accordingly.
You can view my "My Gallery" moblog at this address: