the onda

I find myself taking either of my real digital cameras out less and less these days which is a little ironic, given where I've just come from. Actually, I still use my Nikon D70 in much the same way (episodically around events where I want to get a set of very permanent pictures), but my small Canon point-and-shoot rarely sees the light of day. It still takes much better pictures than the iPhone, and over the last week I've found myself wanting the zoom and low light shooting a couple of times, but overall, the combined needs just don't get me over the activation threshold (which is telling given how small these little cameras have become).

The other thing I've noticed is that I'm just not super excited about the category of the small, disconnected point-and-shoot camera anymore. It used to be that every 6-9 months I'd find something that would push me to upgrade to the latest and greatest model. Unfortunately, these little cameras have now gotten to Microsoft Office status, with all of their incremental improvements being about as exciting as new Word templates. Even the big reviewers are getting the message— this week, David Pogue reviews a low end Fuji camera that he claims is targeted at "Generation Z" because it has a number of features that prep photos for eBay, Blogger, etc. before they leave the camera. Overall, it seemed like a very ho-hum proposition, though he does mention one interesting feature: the Fujifilm Z10fd comes with an IR port to blast pictures Palm Pilot-style to other cameras similarly equipped. Though this seems like a fairly borked implementation, I'm sure that this is where cameras need to go in the consumer segment to become exciting again.

As he often does, Dave Winer hit the nail on the head a few weeks ago with his concept of the "social camera" where the whole point of the camera's design was to enable the sharing of pictures. I think he hits the nail right on the head in that I can not count the number of times that I've asked for/been asked for pictures tha somehow never make it out of the camera/PC of their owner. And unfortunately, just about all photo-sharing sites (Flickr being the one that comes closer to being the exception) are far too much of a band-aid solution, mostly because of how labor intensive the upload/tagging/sharing sequence is.

The right solution starts from a network connected camera; however, this is a necessary but hardly sufficient precondition. Having had a Nikon S7c, and having been a beta user of the wonderfully clever Eye-Fi wireless SD card, I can attest to the fact that poorly implemented network connectivity can hinder the experience in two key ways. First, if it is too hard to get associated with an wireless access point, and too manual to pick the photos one at a time to send to the cloud, it just won't happen (this is where the Nikon really fell down). And second, if the camera doesn't connect to and send the pictures to a very open cloud-based service with an extremely simple and well-documented API for extracting them for inclusion into other services, there won't be the opportunity for other people to write innovative applications around the photostream.

In fact, if I was a camera manufacturer, I would do two things: first, I'd look at the way that the iPhone works to get on and off of wi-fi networks to see if I could do the same. And if the processing power was just too much for the electronics in a camera, I'd get a Bluetooth module on board and piggyback off the fact that everyone carries a phone, and that increasingly, most of these phones will have Bluetooth and all-you-can-eat data plans. The second thing I would do is build a river-of-photos service backed by Amazon S3 for all of the photos taken by the camera to go to. The challenge would be handling privacy, but with a little thought and some smart defaults, I'm sure something could be worked out (or perhaps early implementations of the system could be just for "Generation Z" who doesn't care about sharing everything).

The closest I've seen anyone come to this is the Shozu series-60 application that would take all of the photos I would take on my Nokia e61i and upload them to Flickr in the background. When I retired my Nokia, Shozu was the thing I missed the most, if only because it hinted at the possibilities of managing my photos as one big feed, with all of the same tools and tricks that I have come to increasingly use with all of the other feeds in my life.

Are you listening camera vendors? I'm ready to buy if you're ready to make!