Posted on September 5, 2010 - by Eric

Help shape a picture-sharing platform – PicLyf.com

Around two years ago, me and Shikishiji started Cavalcade Interactive to create stuff that will make people happy – games. I was a freelance web designer and he was a PHP developer, and in our city, there were virtually no one in the game development space so we had a long way to go learning all kinds of stuff. So after about a year and a half with over 5 web games and a couple of iOS games released, we looked back and saw a few salient points that made an impression in our foray into game development;

1. Games in general ride more on word-of-mouth more than any other product in media.
2. Review sites are not available for most games sized well below a XBLA or DS projects (i.e facebook, flash, or mobile games), the few available are too inundated and doesn’t scale.
3. The only places where game developers can effectively market are in forums, social networks and game portals.
4. But these channels tend to be populated with the same type of people (gamers, geeks and teens) making it only suitable for certain types of games.
5. Social networks also feels inadequate or unnatural to show/market visual products like games. Youtube is the exception.

With these points in mind and the fortuitous reading of the book – Founders at work. We thought of creating a solution to this problem.

Fast forward, seven months, we are now ready to start letting users of all kinds try our solution. The solution is called PicLyf. And its a picture based content publishing platform. What makes it unique is its philosophy of strictly having images or pictures the social object in its center.

PicLyf is designed to be used in freeform style. A few of our early beta testers (300+) have used it in the following manners;

1. a picture diary.
2. an art portfolio
3. a repository of interesting pictures.
4. a photo contest platform
5. stream of visual memories of friends and families

But one of its facets, and its a significant one, is its very marketer friendly especially for indie people like us. Anyone with a product, whether it be games, their art, portfolio or anything, has a lot of ways to shine in PicLyf. Namely;

1. Hook up your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and a bunch of other social networks to spread you photo
2. Pics can be put under Topics such as these… http://piclyf.com/tag/flash or http://piclyf.com/tag/flash or http://piclyf.com/tag/food . members can soon follow topics so anyone interested in pic updates in these can be updated right away.
3. Pics are displayed at 820px width and unlimited height… http://piclyf.com/jehzlau/pics/1556/googles-appetite-
4. each pic can be easily shared on the usual social networks.
5. Clickable tags can be layered on top of pictures to provide more context.
6. Quest and badges will be opened up to 3rd party within the year so anyone can easily create picture based activities on the site.

PicLyf is now open and anyone can register. I hope you can see the potential of what we are doing and support us by using the site to post work in progress screenshots of your games. We are closely listening to our users and letting them guide us on what to do first. Our hope is to have a healthy mix of regular folks, bloggers, photographers, designers, game developers, brand owners, etc. using the site soon. Thanks and Follow us on PicLyf at http://piclyf.com/cavalcade