Dropbox buys social photo aggregation service Snapjoy
updated 04:51 pm EST, Wed December 19, 2012
Second Dropbox acquisition in two-week period
Cloud-storage service Dropbox has acquired Snapjoy, a photograph aggregation site. Snapjoy collects together images captured on a camera or phone, as well as those posted on social sites such as Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr, and allowed users to view their entire collection through an app for iOS or the service's website.
Financial details were not confirmed to TechCrunch, but it was claimed that other companies were trying to pick up Snapjoy. Michael Dwan, co-founder of Snapjoy, said that the user experience they had created was "limited by our development capacity and the economics of scale," and that Dropbox had not only the scale but also the development talent to help the company grow. A message on the Snapjoy company blog states that the service will not be accepting new users, but existing users can continue to use the service, and will be contacted with further information in the next few weeks.
Currently, Dropbox does act as an automatic photo backup system, with mobile apps offering the option to upload images to Dropbox servers shortly after photographs are taken, which makes the purchase of Snapjoy a good fit for the company. The purchase of Snapjoy is the second acquisition by Dropbox in as many weeks, which when combined with the purchase of Audiogalaxy, a music streaming service, suggests Dropbox could be aiming towards being the central hub of a user's cloud-based life, as not only a central storage location for files, but also for music and photos.
