Snapjoy

Snapjoy was a photo hosting and sharing service founded in May 2011. It was acquired by Dropbox in December 2012 and murdered in 2013.
==Acquisition==
December 19, 2012:
:We’re excited to announce that Snapjoy is joining Dropbox!
:We built Snapjoy because we wanted a better experience to enjoy our own photos -- we love the product and use it every day. The support we’ve received from people around the world is humbling.
:As a fellow Y Combinator company, we’ve always admired Dropbox and loved their product. From the moment we met the founders, it was clear we shared a common goal. By combining forces with their amazing team, we can leverage the technology and scale of their platform and focus on what matters -- delivering an incredible photo experience to over 100 million people.
:So what happens next? First and foremost, don’t worry -- your photos are safe! Though we won’t be accepting new signups, existing users can continue to use Snapjoy to share and enjoy photos just as you do now. We’ll be in touch with more information over the coming weeks.
:We'd like to thank everyone who trusted us and helped make Snapjoy what it is today. Stay tuned, the best is yet to come.
:-- Michael and JP
==Closure announcement==
June 22nd, 2013:
:After two years of building Snapjoy, the time has come for us to shut down the service. It's been a journey unlike anything we'd imagined, and we can't thank you enough for your support and input along the way.
:As of today, June 22nd, no more photos can be imported into Snapjoy and the Snapjoy iPhone app will no longer be available. Your photos will be available to download until July 24th from the website. After July 24th, all photos and data will be permanently deleted.
:To download your photos, follow the steps below:
:#Visit https://www.snapjoy.com/export from your computer.
:#Login using your Snapjoy account.
:#Download the zip files containing your photos.
:Thank you,
:The Snapjoy team
==Exploration==
Username exploration, and archiving in general, had a few problems:
# There were no incremental IDs anywhere that we found, with the exception of their on.snapjoy.com URL shortener; usernames were arbitrary text strings.
# There were no connections between users that we could exploit (friend/follower lists, favourites and the like).
# Every user's gallery was fundamentally identical as far as a non-Javascript-using browser was concerned; literally one or two lines of JavaScript were all that differed from user to user and the rest was all AJAX fuckery, right down to having identical page titles. This also meant there was little point trying to ingest any of this into the Wayback Machine; all of the URLs on the site were more-or-less "run some JavaScript to load all the shit on this page from api.snapjoy.com". We speculate this is part of why very little of Snapjoy was indexed by search engines (since every user's page looked a lot like duplicates of each other), which cut off one of our routes for username discovery; a Google search reported 261 results for all of *.snapjoy.com, including the blog and help pages (Bing returned 27). Hey there, "full stack code artist", you can have our free SEO lesson if you will please put the jquery.js down before you hurt someone.
Nonetheless, with some assorted tricks, we put together a list of usernames with the following tricks: 
* URLs brute-forced from the on.snapjoy.com URL shortener: raw URL list, list of user URLs, list of usernames
* *.snapjoy.com DNS names pulled from a DNS cache, many of which were users 
* 788 usernames that returned a valid address filtered from a list of @snapjoy's followers on Twitter. 
* Names brute-forced from 27,608 common names which returned a valid HTTP response
* 302 more valid usernames from dictionary words.
==Archives==
In the end, because of the very small number of users we found, and that many (maybe most) either had no stuff or had no public stuff (and we had no way of telling the difference between the two). we ended up saving about 5.3 gigabytes of photographs. We don't know if that means vast amounts of data has been lost, or if Snapjoy was just really really small (and that Dropbox was too cheap to pay the $5/month to continue hosting it). Here's what we got: 
* Images ordered by user/album_id/photo_id.jpg. The main tarball includes metadata for the albums; JSON metadata for individual photos is in a separate tarball.
* Snapjoy blog, feedback and help sites.
==Trivia==
Stuff we found out while exploring the site, kept here for historical reasons:
* https://USERNAME.snapjoy.com/ returned 404 when a user is not registered. Interface is available only with SSL. Usernames were tested for validity with this basic script.
* There appears to be some sort of json interface, visible from the main page's source, located at https://www.snapjoy.com/check_username.
* Website Twitter feed (rarely updated) has 2420 followers and its Facebook page has 935 Likes. Alexa rank 557,636. iOS app had 34 reviews and was ranked 462 in the US app store. 
* Website is hosted on AWS, with CloudFlare. Founded in May 2011. iOS app first posted Oct 14 2012.
* API was once under development; someone might still have active keys.
* Python script to download all the stuff from a user (not working now, obviously), and a Bash one-liner we used to grab all the JSON metadata for individual photos once the previous script had been run.
Category:Image hosting