A picture is worth a thousand words, but Piccsy will have none of that. The self-proclaimed “Canada’s answer to Pinterest” left the safe town of beta-mode this week and entered the World Wide Web with beautiful, tattooed arms. Coined as a curator for the Everybody, Piccsy is less about product and social dialogue than it is about image discovery. Read: less cake and conversation, more ‘Casso.
Both products launched in beta around the same time, and for a brief period Piccsy held the lead, but where Pinterest exceeded in generating user interest, Piccsy’s team of now five lagged behind to refine and perfect its platform. Piccsy landed a six-month incubation opportunity in Chili after receiving $40,000 to develop the product, but the team left after five months to return to Toronto and build the rest from home.
As it stands right now, the two look and work rather similar, begging the question: Is Piccsy the Google+ to Pinterest’s Facebook? No, not if they’re smart about it. Piccsy is pushing the realm with their in-house engineering team to develop more advanced image technologies.
“We’ll be rolling out new features over the next six months that improve the image discovery experience,” says Piccsy founder and serial entrepreneur Daniel Eckler, who prior to Piccsy founded or co-founded and sold companies Vizualize.me, Moxy Creative and Everyguyed, the latter of which he’s bootstrapping the profits from to fund Piccsy until they approach investors later this year.
Three important developments are currently underway and these are going to be the features that lift Piccsy into its own territory. Without, it would be hard to compete with Pinterest’s enormous user base.
Colour Search — Colour search will be launching in the next month or two. The image recognition technology will be able to identify what the primary colours are in each image and provide relevant search results. This is designed to prevent mindless scrolling and instead narrow in on that blue-trimmed brown shoe you’ve always wanted.
Attribution — Piccsy’s engineers are developing technology that automatically traces the root location of all pic’d images back to the original location and attributes it to the creator. This won’t be out for a while yet, but the hope is it will eliminate potential copyright infringement issues while simultaneously serving creators with proper recognition for their work.
Flagging — In an effort to prevent issues faced by Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr, Piccsy engineers are developing a solution for flagging and moderating NSFW images and users – though as it stands, there is currently a ‘NSFW’ image category that lives up to its name rather diligently. It is anticipated the same filter will apply to other controversial images, such as the pro-ana and self-harm photos that raised red flags in the social sphere last month. Hopefully they’ll do a better job though, since disruptive content is still easy to find on any of those platforms. Even on Piccsy, there is already enough questionable material.
Eckler has had the entrepreneurial mindset since he was a boy, having founded a kids hockey team in fourth grade. “For a long time, I’ve planned on being successful with [entrepreneurship]. Karl Lagerfeld’s Twitter profile bio says, ‘A terrible underachiever.’ He’s enormously successful, yet that’s how he feels. I feel the same way. I think I’m very fortunate and I’ve done a great job, but I’m always looking ahead and trying to do better.”
Pinterest’s popularity does not faze Eckler. “They have a great product that validates what we’re doing. Anyone doing anything interesting with images and technology is going to benefit the direction we’re going,” he says.
So Piccsy is less about “potentially disruptive” commenting experiences and more a personal focus on what one finds beautiful and inspiring. Magazine creatives are using it for photo shoot and spread ideas, as well as a tool to showcase an internal side of the creative process. Creators are using it to promote original work, and online curators are using it to archive and organize visual content. There are 15,000 user uploads and thousands of additional Internet finds so far.
Piccsy has a slightly larger male user base than it does female. Could this be due to the number of nude photos on the site, many of which border on porn rather than art? There are indeed many elegant vaginas on Piccsy. This is disconcerting as there is no area to input one’s age making the explicit content openly available to all logged-in users. Piccsy, have you forgotten about the children?
It is clear Piccsy is riding Pinterest’s coattails to gather this early attention, but there are already so many image sharing platforms in existence. Assuming they come into fruition, it will be the in-development image technologies, namely the colour search and attribution techniques, that truly separate Piccsy from the pack.
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Sheena Lyonnais writes about tech for Toronto Standard. You can follow her on Twitter at @SheenaLyonnais.
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