Yallery Blog

Late last week, I sent our active membership an email notifying them that Michael and I were unable to continue working on Yallery.com full time and there would be a major change to the service.

Yallery is almost two years old and has been my and Michael’s full-time focus since it began. We had planned on attracting more developers and some funding to pursue the execution of our plans, but at this point it is still just Michael and I.

I can’t blame the investors I met with, who’s reactions to our plan were universally “it looks really cool, but I’m not sure there’s a large enough market to make an investment”. We don’t know the size of our market well enough to answer that question. We have a good idea, but there are a number of variables that make any attempts to guess meaningless while our service is hidden away from the world.

The Web 2.0 ethic has encouraged developers to “Release early and release often” — to get your product out the door and into the world as quickly as possible. Yallery was my first web-based service since the early 1990s, and it’s probably unfortunate that I was somewhat stuck on the Web 1.0 “Push it when it’s polished” approach.

We had hoped to have a certain amount of features and functionality implemented, tested and “polished” before we threw open our doors to the public. But, two years on and meagerly self-funded, we’re looking at diminishing returns if we continue to hide two years of work behind a sign-in screen.

Therefore, we’re removing the “Invite Wall” and will soon invite all artists, collectors and galleries to create a free, unlimited account on Yallery. With the removal of the Invite Wall, we will also be creating a new home page that will welcome all visitors to view and interact with the the art created, owned and sold by our members.

As bummed out as we should be right now, it’s a very encouraging and exciting time for us — we are about to introduce our two year old baby to the world. Quite a few of my friends have thought we were crazy for not opening it up earlier and hiding such a great site.

There will be problems — the fact that it doesn’t work right on IE is probably the largest right now (but it does work on FireFox and Safari). We also have a bunch of bugs identified and there are a lot of partially implemented features that we will resolve as time allows us — but we are not giving up.

Things may take a little longer to accomplish, but we still have a long, feature-filled roadmap for the site, but we need a change. We’re going to be working part-time until we can maybe return full-time some time in the future. In the meantime, we hope to find some people who like Yallery and feel at home enough to share their art with us.

“Socialize Your Art” is Yallery’s tagline.

I came up with the idea for Yallery while taking long airplane trips during my last consulting contract. I didn’t start the process of design until a March 2006 discussion about sharing my collection online with David Egan, an artist in Sydney AU.

I’ve always had some type of website for my art collection, where friends and family can visit their favorites and view new additions as they’re made. It’s always struck me as odd that there weren’t any post-acquisition web-based art sharing services for collectors. Wasn’t art originally created as a communication medium? Shouldn’t art be enjoyed and appreciated by more than just the person who happens to possess it? Yallery enables me to manage my art collection (object metadata, acquisition records, location information, insurance and appraisal information) privately, and share the artworks with the world.

Even the sites developed for artists limit the context of art exposure. Most “Virtual Galleries” restrict an artist to submitting only works currently available for sale. Most artist-owned portfolio sites highlight significant works created during their career or prominent commissions, in addition to current works available for sale. But there are no services focused on creating, managing and sharing Catalogues Raisonné with the world. As a collector, I wish I cound contextualize the art I have in my collection within the bodies of work created by their artists. Conversely, David and several other artists have mentioned how nifty it would be to be able to contextualize their works within the collections of their patrons. I believe Yallery is the service that will deliver this contextualization to collectors and artists.