One of the biggest problems with photo sharing apps so far is that they all tend to only allow you to share one photo at a time. While this keeps the quality of photos shared high, it creates some problems.

It’s a painful process if you want to share multiple photos from an event, as part of a theme, or just to get photos off your phone and put them in a place they can be shared without the painful process of downloading them to a computer and then uploading them somewhere.

Tonight Mike Arrington broke the news that the team at self-photo taking startup DailyBooth recently launched a photo sharing app called Batch for the iPhone.

I downloaded Batch and immediately loved it for the following reasons:

• The design is beautiful. I love the handwritten instructions that overlay the screen in certain areas, and it walks you through how to use the application really well.
• Uploading photos in a batch is great. The first time I got to touch multiple photos and have them uploaded at once I saw the value in the speed and simplicity of sharing the photos in a batch.
• Automatic friend connection via Facebook makes it nice to not have to worry about building up my social graph. As friends join Batch, we’ll just get connected. Simple. This has some downsides in that you can’t customize who you follow or don’t follow yet, but I prefer it over having to start from scratch and manually choose everything and hope my friends find me.
• You can see the future potential if batches from one event or location are grouped automatically and viewable together. It could nicely fulfill the promise of Color that never came to be.

If you have an iPhone and share photos, give Batch a try in the app store.

While this process is okay, it’s far from ideal. There are some issues with this such as:

• The time it takes to manually select people every time on each service.
• The fact that I often want a different social graph on a particular service. I may want to follow different people in a music application than in a sports application. However, there are some people who I like to connect with on any service no matter what it’s about.
• The differences in how you friend or invite people between services can lead to mistakes or cause me to do things I didn’t mean to like posting an invite to someone’s Facebook wall when I didn’t intend it.
• Some services make it so easy to friend others that I find myself following too many people which can lead to a negative experience in the application. Others have spoke of this problem, and I think I’m currently experiencing this on Quora. The quality of my feed has gone down as I’ve followed people that I don’t really know and can’t remember why I followed them in the first place.

Anytime something like connecting to others is occurring on every service it is an opportunity to improve and streamline that process.

It seems as if there is an opportunity for a company to create a portable social contact platform. This would basically be a place where I could store contacts that I connect with on various social services. I’d like to specify a core group that I want to automatically connect to regardless of the service. This also would make it easier on startups who have to build this following process themselves. If there was a nice plugin or API that allowed people to follow and invite others easily it would save time.

There’s also some new ideas such as Color which try and connect you to others implicitly based on your activity opposed to who you specify. This is a really cool approach, but I already have seen flaws in the model thus far with Color although it’s still really early in that area.

Some will probably say that Facebook or Twitter already serves as this central repository of contacts that they like to connect with on social services. This is partially true for me, but there are people I follow on Twitter who I’m not friends with on Facebook, and people on Facebook who aren’t on Twitter.

Another way to approach this would to use people’s mobile phone contact list as that core group of people. While this is likely to include people’s true tightest social circle, I know in my case that this circle would be too tight.

These issues are why I concluded that I don’t think this should be leveraging something that already exists like my Facebook social graph or my phone contact list. Those things were built for specific purposes, and none of those purposes were “these are the people I want to connect with on social web and mobile applications”.

Is anyone working on such a thing?

A lot of that was due the fact that they raised $41M prelaunch, have a well-known team, and the mobile photo-sharing space is really hot.

The other reason it was so talked about was because, for a $41M application, the product itself was really ineffective as a first-time user experience. Tech blogger Robert Scoble famously ranted about it, and many others tweeted or blogged about how confused they were by the user interface and the lack of social interaction.

Blowing the first-time user experience is never good, and I also felt like my first usage of Color was not fun or interesting.

However, due to the hype I fortunately knew enough to know that Color was designed for group experiences, so I didn’t write it off immediately and decided to try and use it with others.

I started using Color at a restaurant with GuideMe lead developer Joe Garstka, and later we added a couple of other users at my house.

The pictures and videos we were taking were automatically popping up in our applications and creating group albums based on time and location without us having to create and specify anything. Less work from the user is always good.

There is amazing potential behind implicit social networks and the automatic grouping of people based on location for an application. Also, creating a history of photos and videos at a specific location holds a lot of potential, and made it more likely that I would take a picture to leave it for future people to see when they were near that spot.

I think the key thing though that may make Color work, is that I found myself telling other people to try it with me. For the application to work, I needed others to participate. This is one of the key growth engines for successful network applications, and Color has that going for it.

On the flip side, it means early adopters without early adopter friends probably won’t use Color. People who are living in areas that are sparsely populated will also have a hard time getting that much value out of the application.

That might be okay though if Color can do various things to improve that first-time use while also letting the network effects happen.

There’s also a big opportunity here for Color, or other companies, to do the same type of creation of implicit location-based networks for other applications like gaming, chat, and more.

Color has a bright future, and enough cash in the bank to get over their initial rough launch.

Keeping things simple is considered an overused idea these days in the web application world. I’d attribute some of this to the success 37Signals has had with their applications, blogs, ebooks, and seminars that push this philosophy.

However, I still think our natural tendency is to add more features to everything we build. There is always more to do, people who would use additional features, and we just think more is better in our society.

A company I’d cite that’s done a great job of keeping things simple and staying focused on their core mission is LinkedIn. The recent news that they’re potentially raising money at a $1 billion valuation based on revenues of $100 million in 2008 is a testament to their success thus far.

Probably a year or so ago while the social networking idea may have been at it’s hottest point, there were numerous bloggers who suggested that LinkedIn should move beyond focusing on the professional market and add more social networking features and functionality to their site.

Common sense would say this is a great idea. Myspace was hot, Facebook was hot, and LinkedIn already had a strong user base so why not expand the functionality to increase usage of their site, and attract new users? I believe I even personally posted once that I wished there was more “to do” on LinkedIn besides connect with others professionally.

Boy was I wrong. I actually treasure LinkedIn now for the fact that it is so focused. The people I’m connected to there are all business contacts. I’m not getting superpoked, or landing on pages with loud music, or seeing someone’s weekend photos. Don’t get me wrong, I do use Facebook for personal reasons and to see people’s photos, but I’m in a different state of mind.

Many have said that Facebook can take LinkedIn’s market for business connections, and while I think some of that occurs on Facebook, it’s just not built in the same way or as focused in functionality as LinkedIn.

These reasons actually help LinkedIn sell advertising at a very high CPM. I think the $75 CPM being claimed is the upper limit opposed to the average, you can sure bet that LinkedIn commands a much higher CPM than Facebook. I’d guess offhand it’s somewhere between 10-20x Facebook’s average CPM. Which also means to make the same amount of revenue they can have 10-20x less traffic than Facebook.

I commend LinkedIn for staying focused as I think it’s a key to their success. I hope now and in the future I can fight the urge to build anything and everything when it comes to web applications and businesses.

(Photo by jnhkrawczyk at Flickr.)

It also seems to be in a pretty early state as there isn’t a ton of functionality. However, that’s also what I’m liking about it. I’m pretty burned out on the complexity of the top social networks these days, so something that’s much simpler and easier to understand is a nice change of pace.

It’s also addressing one of the problems I’ve had with LinkedIn which is that LinkedIn isn’t quite enough of a social network as it doesn’t have profile pictures and other information about people beyond work/school. It looks like Kickstart is setting itself up to fit that need. Can it succeed though with LinkedIn having years of a head start?

I don’t know, but here’s my profile if you’d like to connect.

But until they prove they can monetize their audience in a very powerful manner, how is a $10-$15 billion valuation justified even in these bubbly times?

While it wouldn’t surprise me, it’d really shock me if Facebook doesn’t take $500 million for 5% of their company. That is a sizable war chest that will give them a long time and a lot of money to play with to really see if someone can really figure out how to monetize a social network, or for Facebook to grow beyond what it is until really being the next Yahoo! or Google which people seem to think it can become. I’m still not sure we know yet whether Facebook can become a real internet superpower or not.

This is absolutely the right move, and is the prime example why I think Facebook ends up being bigger than Myspace in the long run.

Traffic is up according to Alexa, so one might think they made the right move and are worth more today than they were in 2006. And what’s not to think that traffic won’t keep going up as there are more college students every year, and now that Facebook is open to non-college students they can stick around after graduating.

However, what good is that traffic if you can’t monetize it well? Robert Young’s piece reports that Facebook isn’t having a ton of luck in this area. If this is true, I see two things happening over 2007. First, they’ll prove that it’s hard to monetize their traffic extremely well, as has really been the case with social networking traffic thus far. And second, social networking won’t be as hot as it was in 2006 when it was really the new and exciting kid on the block. Once those two things happen, will those huge buyout offers still exist? Probably not.

Of course, there are a lot of companies and people working on monetizing social network traffic better, so it’s quite possible that strides are made there. And if Facebook continues to grow and dominate their space, then maybe. But the numbers being thrown around in 2006 were pretty high, so I think they may regret not taking one of those deals when it’s all said and done.

You can see his forum thread post about it here, but essentially Myspace is suing these networks for violating the CAN Spam Act for spamming people through the Myspace bulletin feature.

Jon points out that Myspace is seeking for two types of damages:

Myspace’s lawsuit against the networks are to ban them, and their owners from visiting the myspace.com site.

Myspace is seeking punitive damages from $20 million to $75 million PER network.

Apparently the total is over $500 million as 14-17 networks are targeted. He goes on to add:

The list of networks being sued reads like a shopping list, because they all, at some point or another drafted known Myspace spammers and phishers into their programs to promote their offers, even AFTER cease and desist letters were issued to them by Myspace.

What does this all mean? Apparently affiliate networks have been openly recruiting known spammers and phishers to promote their offers through spamming Myspace users. Many of you have probably been asked to be friends with “hot girl” profiles who then proceed to send you bulletins for all types of things. If Myspace sent them cease and desist letters and they continued to do this, you can’t blame Myspace for getting a bit upset here.

If Myspace is successful it will definitely put a major hurt on the networks being sued, potentially putting some of them out of business.

While it’s not known yet if the CAN Spam Act qualifies here, it will be interesting to see what sort of ruling occurs or if everyone settles out of court. Either way, Myspace is taking a big step here to say that spam is not okay regardless of whether it’s email or web bulletins on a social network.

Is this good? I’m sure that low of a number shocks some people, probably bloggers and other niche publishers who get really high CPM numbers from targeted advertising, Google Adsense, or Yahoo Publisher Network.

Social networks are a different animal though, as contextual advertising doesn’t work as well when there isn’t a strong context to grab from a page. In the cases of most social networks, display banner-style advertising generates higher rates. But is $0.04 good?

I know the data of some other social networks, and I can say that this isn’t THAT shocking, but I definitely think there is room for improvement. I have some ideas on how I’d improve Friendster’s advertising revenue, but first I’d like to see if any of you out there have any suggestions. Speak up!