The Black Stripe is a collaborative online photo sharing site based on real-life social networks.

This started out as a little personal project. I had all these pictures of my friends that I'd collected over the years, and I sat down one night trying to organize them. After a couple of weeks things got out of hand, and the scope of the project expanded into an effort to organize all of global human society.

What we're going for now is basically something that will take that burst of energy that you get when one of these new-fangled viral social networking sites expands to fully occupy the mindspace of the geekosphere for a few minutes... and then actually hold the attention with some kind of content. I loved the concept of sites like friendster and facebook, and even good old sixdegrees, but then I got really bored with them because for the most part they just sat there. Maybe I'm just cranky because I'm not in college any more, I don't know. But I feel like That Thing has still never really been done right. You need something to do once you get there.

So, the first step is the photo-pool gadget you see here. But that's just Phase One. We have some other irons in the fire, which we'll be pulling out as they ripen. More on that later.

Some notes about the photo pool feature, and what differentiates it from other photo sharing that may or may not be available in the marketplace to you, the consumer: Basically the goal is true photo networking, or "TPN". A site like flickr, say, is mostly about you, the photographer. Sure you have friends, but that's just basically a link from your stack of photos to their stack of photos. Black Stripe mixes up the stacks - when I upload a picture of George and tag it with 'George', it appears on George's page. So you can get every picture on the site with George in it from one place, no matter who it belongs to. (see cheesy illustration on right)

Then if you're in a photo, you have some ownership rights over that photo - you can edit the title, caption and so on. You can even take yourself back out of it, if you don't want it showing up on your page. Of course they can put you back in... we might eventually put a feature in to regulate that. In the meantime you might end up having to beat up your friends, but that's not our problem.

So, anyway. The big idea is, each friend group basically generates one big interconnected clubhouse full of photos. (And when you upload a photo of someone you can choose to automatically send them an email at the same time, so you know the people will see it.)

Then sooner or later we've got people in Uganda doing it, and world peace follows as a matter of course.

At any rate that's the basic idea, as of today. Basically I'm going to keep tweaking the site until I love it, and then bother my friends with it, like I always used to do with my own site; and if you want to use it too, feel free. No pressure.

(Note: None of this, by the way, is meant to suggest that you can't put up photos of sunsets, or flowers, or William F. Buckley. It's just that most of our effort has been focused on people-networking related features.)

The Black Stripe was created by Stewart King and Scott Rocher, mostly coded around LA.

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