Doggysnaps.com wins Yahoo Social Site of the Year
So it looks like Doggysnaps won Yahoo’s Best Social Website of the Year!
This is the sort of good news you want to hear on a gloomy January day.
First up, congratulations to all the people that worked on DoggySnaps back at Interesource - to name a few: Simon I’Anson, Sophia Vader, Matt Hotstone, Kevin Potgieter, Sara Howlett thank you all.
Looking back into the recent mists of time, back to those old Interesource days, I can’t help but think about my biggest client while I was there - Dogs Trust. Sure, I managed Virgin Digital with Stuart Toller as well as Mirror Blogs, to name a couple, but the constant was always those guys. DoggySnaps was Dogs Trust’s big leap into the unknown, and when we first started it was seriously exciting - there were no other animal centric sites out there - with the exception of Dogster, which was a for profit organisation. Since then a huge number of animal sites have cropped up - the similarly designed ‘pets get slim’ by the RSPCA, Worldwide Fido, blah blah as well as dogbook on Facebook and a number of sites in between. The thing that was really exciting was the concept of turning a social community on its head and allowing users to express their love and enthusiasm for their dog by writing on behalf of them.
Originally, the first release of the beta (before we updated the user’s kennel functionality) site had nowhere for people to put any information about themselves, which was really mental, but very funny. You don’t realise how crazy people are about their dogs, until you see them pretending to be them. The point about setting up Doggysnaps was three-fold - to connect people and create a support network between dog lovers, to increase exposure for Dogs Trust and increase donations to help Dogs Trust to fulfill their charitable aims, and to collate the best photographs to use as an image library for Dogs Trust and for other organisations to use. I believe they are no longer keeping the image rights for photos, which I think is a real shame, as it could have been a win win for Dogs Trust, and the proud dog owner.
The real shame is that before Interesource went into administration, we were literally one day away from launching ‘DoggySnaps Print Shop’ - we had a deal with a fulfilment house, and had some really nice drag and drop functionality for the kennel photos in a sliding gallery (a little like the mashup between flickr and moo). It will be interesting to see what Global Beach do with this ‘Golden Bone’ in the future - I hope they do them proud.
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