Last weekend I’ve posted my 20.000th Mobypicture posting (see below). That makes me a Moby addict. An addict for sharing life.
It doesn’t feel like that many, but that’s something all addicts probably say.

 Ironically I made that 20.000th Moby at FOAM, the Photography Museum in Amsterdam. Erik Kessels and three other guest curators were asked to envision their ideas about the  future of photography exhibitions . 

 My Moby adventure started in 2003. 

I registered the domain on februari 23rd in the afternoon. I’ve been brainstorming with a business partner on names and finally came up with Mobypicture. It phonetically referenced the mobile revolution and picture sharing, but also famous the Herman Melville novel Moby Dick.

That novel describes the life long hunt of Captain Ahab for the vicious white whale Moby Dick who bit off his leg. That hunt for me is synonym for the hunt for adventures and challenges we stumble upon in our daily lives. This weekend I received a beautiful book by Matt Kish from my girlfriend. Matt made an illustration for every single page in the Moby Dick novel (552 illustrations).

In the foreword he had the best description which I’ll be quoting every time from now on when people ask me about the company name:

The 20.000th Moby milestone is not really important, but numbers make you think and look back at what happened. The good thing about Moby of course is that all your adventures are preserved. So I was checking some nice highlight in my life since Moby started helping me share it.

My first Moby:
May 3, 2004

The two neighbouring cats were lying in the sun on the deck of the MobyBoat. I used a Sony Cybershot and attached a cable (yes kids, a cable) to my computer to first download the photo from the camera before uploading it using the webupload.
To my surprise the Moby has 575 views (and counting) and we only started counting the views in 2009! I didn’t like cats at all, but these cats grew on me and a few years later I got two of my own.

Our first design:
May 5, 2004

Okay, don’t laugh. Mobypicture was not live yet, but this was the design proposal by Robert Kerssing. We were really happy with it!

The day my nephew Max was born:
August 14, 2004

Moby was there! Max weighted 4.000 grams. Now he has his own Moby account.

Realtime internationally teasing people about the weather.
January 4, 2005

I was stoked this also worked from somewhere deep in the Egyptian desert in January 2005.

Capturing my kayaking moments
July 26, 2005

Here sending a live picture to my grandpa. He died not long after that.

Realtime sharing the first time I ever saw my little girl

January 18, 2006

3 months before she was born.

3 months later

April 24, 2006

There she was! Moby was there as well.

Her first time on the beach

August 17, 2007

Twitter

August 10, 2007
Up to now, I used Mobypicture as a mobile blog. A journal to capture and share moments in my life. I started using Twitter on june 1st 2007. This enabled other people to easily follow my thoughts and adventures. Sharing pictures on Twitter was not possible yet and I decided to hook my small mobile blogging platform to the Twitter API. We launched a beta today. Mashable wrote about it a few days later after we also added Flickr as a destination. The user base started to grow.

Here came the revolution

September 21, 2007

The iPhone Hack Battle. Boris from TNW brought 20 iPhones from the US months before it came out in The Netherlands. We had to follow on line tutorials to jailbreak the phones. The Apple camp was battling the Windows camp for the first jailbroken phone. We won.
The launch of the iPhone brought momentum for Mobypicture.

Taking pictures and later video and sharing this easily in simple intuitive ways was revolutionised by the introduction of this Phone and its Operating System.

Picnic
September 26, 2007

We sort of launched the new ‘company’ at Picnic, where the hardcore Dutch Twitter clan was using Mobypicture to share the event experience with its followers. I stumbled into @biz  who was amazed by the growth of their API and smart usage of the possibilities. He had not foreseen the possibilities.

(Biz stone BTW was user number 2135 on Mobypicture but has never tried the service although he   has 100 followers   there   ) 



Mika
November 20, 2007

My son was born, and Moby was there ( http://moby.to/mika ) 



Four days later
November 24, 2007

Mika got ill, he had a hard time breathing and had to stay in the hospital for over a week. Sharing these frightening moments with Moby really helped me feel connected and supported and was priceless. 

He came out strong

January 7, 2008

I can of course go on and on about the adventures with which Moby accompanied me…

…indeed covering all aspects of life. God, Love, Hate, Identity, Race, Sex, Obsession, History, Work. Capitalism. I could go on and on.