Michael Arrington has the first announcement that C/Net will introduce later today, a significantly revamped Webshots in the form of CollegeLive. I am consulting the C/Net Communities group and am involved with this nifty new student service, but can take no credit. I just started a couple of weeks ago and those guys have been working on this for a very long time.
You may have forgotten about Webshots, but users have not. There are 40 million of them and they have uploaded 300 million photos so far, making them among the largest online photo communities--all this before today's completion of a most significant upgrade/
To figure out what to put in to the new Webshots, the C/Net guys went out and talked extensively with students, asking them what they wanted to see in the significantly updated service. They used a conversational mechanism more effective, but less scalable than blogging --face to face meetings.
The result is a community-based service that is ideal for planning and remembering events among friends. It is much more individualized and customizable than Facebook, it's closest competitor. This is just the start. CollegeLive will have a whole mess of useful and cool functionality coming out over the next few months.
