DailyBooth is described on its website as “one big conversation about your life, through pictures.” It is a photoblogging site that allows its users to upload a photo, every day or multiple times a day, with a caption. Signing up is completely free. The goal is to allow people to document and share their lives with others. The DailyBooth slogan is “your life in pictures.” It has often been compared to Twitter and other social networking sites that allow users to follow and be followed in real time. My friend refers to DailyBooth as “face Twitter.” This is because the majority of users post images of themselves photo booth-style sitting at their computers (hence the name of the site) (Siegler). Users of both DailyBooth and Twitter are able to post links on the other’s page, so Twitter actually increases traffic on the DailyBooth site (Martinez). DailyBooth separates itself from Twitter by accentuating its unique feature: the fact that people exclusively share pictures instead of text. This tends to foster a greater sense of community and connection in a more immediately accessible way than other text blogging sites. DailyBooth is also becoming increasingly popular. It has a growth rate of about 35% a month (Siegler). Site creator Jon Wheatley has been quoted as saying that “people find pictures a much more engaging medium than just text” (Martinez).
Whenever a user first accesses the DailyBooth site, they are immediately confronted with the option to sign up. They have their description (“one big conversation about your life through pictures”) as the first thing you see and they promise “you’ll make some new friends real fast.” You can take a picture with your webcam and sign up right then. You can also see the “live feed” at the bottom of the screen. Once you get an account, you are directed to your home page. Once there, you will see several tags at the top labeled “everything” (which is your home page), “booths” (the pictures you’ve taken), “comments,” “likes,” and “follows.” There are also buttons to take or upload a picture onto your page.
The textual literacy on DailyBooth requires users to know how to write and read in shorthand text lingo. Not everyone uses it, but the majority of people do some type of textual abbreviation in their “posts.” Since the main focus of the site is on the photos, it is expected that people write very little to accompany their pictures. Some people choose to write longer posts, but they never go more than a few short paragraphs. The generally accepted amount of text is about a line to two lines, but a short paragraph is not going to result in accusations of spamming the screen. Because it is a photoblogging site, it is also important to be picture/image literate. This means that the user must know how to take and upload digital photos to the site or take a photo from a webcam. They also need to know how to “read” photos and respond to them. Because all you usually get when looking at the Live Feed is a picture someone posts of themselves or something they find interesting, users have to know how to analyze what that photo says about the person. They also have to know how to respond in a way that will facilitate further interaction with the other user if they want to try to build a relationship. You can't just say something insulting about their picture and expect them to respond to you positively.
To participate in the site, all users need to do is snap a pic and wait for someone to comment. Because of the live feed, any user might be likely to comment on your picture rather than people you know. There is not a “friend” feature on DailyBooth, but you can “like” or “follow” other users’ Booths. You can also comment on their photos they post by following the live feed or checking in on Booths you are following. DailyBooth is also synchronous: users are constantly uploading pics to the world. As a result, when you are viewing the “live feed,” there is actually a “pause” button so you can catch up with the ones you missed if they were posting too quickly. The instant a user takes or uploads a picture, it’s on the site. However, there is no way to access all the past archives of the live feed. The fleeting nature of the live feed mirrors the users’ desire to have a quick, in-the-moment experience. There is a search bar at the top of the site that will bring up Booths that contain the keywords, but there is no comprehensive database of past Booth’s except on the individual profiles.
DailyBooth users are also (for the most part) reflections of their real world selves. However, users of DailyBooth are much more likely to edit or alter their appearance because it is a site based a lot on looks. You are much more likely to see someone posing in an “attractive” way than making a silly face. Girls especially always make sure their hair looks nice, they have on a cute outfit, and their makeup is done well. DailyBooth affords users with the chance to tweak and perfect their appearance before they put a representation of themselves out into the world, unlike in real life. Quite a few of the Booths posted daily are superficial and tend to be posted by high schoolers. The deeper ones that are artistic, comedic, etc. are posted by older users. The site allows for the continuation of real world friendships onto the site, but the set-up is really more designed to get strangers to interact. Viewing the live feed, you see almost multiple new people per second, and any one of those have the potential to become a new friend.
DailyBooth users tend to only meet up in life if they already knew each other before the site. It takes such a long time to become friends (enough to actually meet what is basically a stranger you met on the Internet) through the little interactions DailyBooth provides that most people never follow up on it. It’s easy to “like” or comment on someone’s Booth, but talking to them and getting to know them is not easily facilitated on the site. The kind of friendship DailyBooth fosters is not the kind of friendship where people meet up in real life, but it does still result in real friendship.
The goal seems to be to have the biggest number of people following you. The people who have the most followers are not outwardly different from other Daily Booth users. The social hierarchy seems to be based on “coolness,” or everyone on the site’s agreed-upon definition of coolness. This usually means the users present themselves as outgoing in some way (whether it manifests itself in their Booths or their text blurbs). The users with the most followers take normal pictures of themselves (although they may have more skill with a camera, i.e they aren’t just using their computer’s webcam). The users with the most followers basically have the power to define what/who is considered “cool” on the site because people look to them for social cues. The people who are constantly campaigning to get followers never have very many at all. I put in an example here of one user's "steps to popularity" on DailyBooth.
There are so many people using DailyBooth that it is a daunting task to try and categorize them. People from many different countries access the site, so there are many different cultures manifesting themselves on the site in addition to the uniqueness of each individual. However, you always have your celebrities (movies/TV or Internet), your high schoolers, and your “average Joe.” DailyBooth is home to many unique people, but these are the three groups I’m going to focus on.
Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher are both on DailyBooth. They are fairly active on the site (and they definitely follow the “rules” of the site, meaning they post Booths of themselves doing average daily activities, not on the red carpet or anything) and obviously have a ton of followers. On her page, Demi Moore describes herself as female from the United States as well as “Wife Mother Woman I am always learning exploring and discovering the silly the absurd the profound. I try to love and give more than I receive. I am dedicated to the fight against modern slavery and human trafficking especially the sexual exploitation of children.” She has taken about 200 Booths, the last one posted last night. Ashton Kutcher is less active, checking in with the site every month or so. He describes himself as a 33-year-old from somewhere in the universe and states that, “I feel I'm on to something here.”
Another type of user that frequents DailyBooth is the high schooler. Chantal Fraser is a good example. She describes herself as a 16-year-old female from Canada and has no “about” section on her profile. She uploads pictures daily and tends to upload pictures that involve her either “looking pretty” or “looking cool” by herself or being goofy with other people. From what I can tell from the site, she is a bright and bubbly girl. Another example of a high schooler is William, a 17-year-old from somewhere in the universe. He always takes these sad pictures that make him look like a little boy with very depressing accompanying text. William is a textbook “angsty teenager,” and everything about his DailyBooth supports that.
Finally, there is the user on this site that is neither a celebrity of any kind or a self-absorbed high schooler. This Boother just uploads pictures on to the site that describe their lives and tend not to be in their teens. “mememeee” is a good example of this type of user. He is a 20-year-old male from Germany, does not have many followers, and has been using the site for a relatively short amount of time. He posts his pictures, a couple of people comment, and he moves on. He doesn’t post a Booth every day, more like every two or three weeks.
On this site, a lot of people steal other people’s pictures. The implications of this on identity are really intriguing: because that’s essentially how identity is manifested on the site (there is an option to add where you’re from and an “info about you” section on your profile, but most people don’t fill it out), stealing someone’s picture is like stealing their identity. This is definitely looked down upon on the site, and people get pretty angry when they find out someone has stolen a picture of theirs. Stealing other people’s pictures on DailyBooth is a great way to instantly lose credibility.
The purpose of the DailyBooth site is pretty clearly stated in all of the site’s literature. The idea is for the user to upload pictures of themselves that describe their life in some way, that way you know everything a user posts is really relevant to them and any comment you make is really going to be taken to heart. DailyBooth’s goal is to get its users talking and participating in the site all at once, so everyone is connected. It does this pretty effectively thanks to the Live Feed. Spending 10 minutes on it can have you interacting with people you’ve never even seen before just because you liked their Booth.
DailyBooth is tailored to our current time. Blogs are a thing of the past when you can type out your feelings in 140 characters or less. DailyBooth follows this trend with an idea that is exactly the in-the-moment type of experience that most users desire today. Lots of blogging sites are starting to charge instead of being offered for free, which also suggests a shift in user preference. DailyBooth already has funding from a number of wealthy investors with others looking into it all the time. It clearly has an effective model (for the time being, anyway).
Another way in which DailyBooth trumps blogging sites is that a lot of people today (especially younger ones) just don’t want to sit down and slog through writing an entire journal entry. These people are used to writing a status for Facebook or Tweeting. Blogging is now way more effort than a large number of young people are willing to expend. They want something they can do right now and be done with it. The constant updating and large number of users afford this in addition to the creative user experience. There is always something new happening on the live feed.
You can go anywhere to find a social networking site that will fit to your needs, so it says a lot that DailyBooth is still growing so quickly. People have really caught on to this idea of tracking themselves day by day through pictures. There are even movie stars using the site. It really seems like DailyBooth is going to usher in a new era in social networking sites. Things are going to move further away from the blogging format and into the more fleeting and in-the-moment style of sites like DailyBooth or Twitter because that’s the amount of time people want to spend on them.
DailyBooth. Web. Feb. 2011. http://dailybooth.com.
Martinez, Jennifer. "Why Is Photo Startup DailyBooth So Hot?: Tech News and Analysis ."
GigaOM – Technology News, Analysis and Trends. 18 Sept. 2009. Web. 9 Feb. 2011.
Siegler, M. G. "140 Characters? That's A Lot Of Writing. Just Post A Picture On DailyBooth."
TechCrunch. 18 Aug. 2009. Web. 12 Feb. 2011.
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