MyPhotoAlbum

» see myphotoalbum.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

MyPhotoAlbum was a photo and video sharing site with a print shop bolted onto it. You uploaded, you personalized an album from a few hundred designs, you shared it with privacy settings, and then the site tried to sell you the photos back as prints, books, cards, calendars, mugs, canvases or a DVD. The last capture of the working homepage, taken on 1 May 2011, leads with "Wow em with Stunning Albums" and carries a shopping cart in the corner.

It launched in 2004 and the domain's own history shows the transition clearly. Captures from 2003 are a keyword-stuffed doorway page reading "Information and resources for my photo album", and from mid-2004 onward there is an actual product behind the address, growing steadily from three kilobytes to around ten as it accumulated a storefront.

The interesting part is who was running it. MyPhotoAlbum was built by FortuneCity.com Inc., the company behind FortuneCity, one of the big free-homepage hosts of the GeoCities era. The photo service grew while the homepage business did not: revenue from photos rose 179% in 2006 and another 92% in 2007, reaching roughly 40% of what the company took in.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the rename ~

In June 2008 the board acted on those numbers. FortuneCity.com Inc. sold the FortuneCity personal homepage service and changed the company's name to MyPhotoAlbum Inc., stating that the point was to concentrate its assets on the online photo business. The listed company kept trading in Frankfurt under a ticker that still carried the old initials.

In February 2009 the newly renamed company bought the assets of dotPhoto.com from Exclaim Inc., which gave it a second photo brand with its own customers and its own print pipeline. There was also a partnership announced with Kodak. For about two years the plan looked like consolidation: a free-hosting company had successfully turned itself into a photo company by acquisition.

~ the last notice ~

On 3 May 2011 the homepage was replaced by a short notice, blunter than most corporate goodbyes get. "MyPhotoAlbum.com is closed as of Tuesday May 3rd, 2011. All accounts, photos and videos will remain available until Tuesday May 31, 2011 at which time they will be deleted forever. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience but we simply cannot afford to continue to provide this service."

Two exits were offered. You could register at dotPhoto and upload everything again, and club members who did got $10 of store credit plus the remainder of their membership honored. Or you could buy an archive DVD of your own photographs. The company was pointing its users at the brand it had bought two years earlier, which is the tidiest possible version of this failure and still required every user to do the work of moving.

The archive confirms the dates without ambiguity. The homepage is a full ten kilobytes on 1 May 2011 and 1,673 bytes on 1 June, a drop of more than 80% in four weeks, and it holds at roughly that size through August while the notice stays on screen.

~ what the name was worth ~

There is something bleak in the sequence. A company spent the late nineties hosting millions of free personal homepages, decided in 2008 that its future was photographs, renamed its entire corporate self after the photo site, and switched that site off thirty-five months later because it could not pay for the storage. The corporate name stayed MyPhotoAlbum Inc. afterward, attached to a product that no longer existed.

FortuneCity is the half of this I recognize from Turkey. Free hosting was how anybody here got a page online before broadband, and FortuneCity sat in the same mental category as GeoCities and Tripod. MyPhotoAlbum was the American storefront that the same company became, aimed at families ordering prints, and it never meant anything in my part of the internet. Its ending is the one that reaches across: a company that had stored other people's memories for a living, announcing that it could no longer afford to.

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