I had the pleasure of meeting Jim Deakins at the Ann Arbor New Tech meetup event where he demoed his creation, Lyfe.net. I was pretty impressed by the technology so I asked Jim some questions to learn more about his service and he was kind enough to participate. His responses are below. Enjoy!

Tell us about your company (your elevator pitch).

Lyfe.net is an extensible media center-point with an API more powerful than Godzilla.  The goal of the project is to create a platform in which people can send images from any device, and then have instant access to those images via the API or notification system (including server callbacks for developers).  Lyfe.net has a group system in which multiple people can images to one central location.  We currently have built-in support for images to be auto-posted to twitter and/or facebook accounts.

Lyfe.net solves multiple problems which people have seemed to overlook.  Currently, there are a few choices offered to send images to your twitter account, however none of them support the API features and callback functions that Lyfe.net does.  If you wanted to display the images you have sent from your cellphone on your own website, you need to poll other services for this information (some services dont even offer this ability).  With Lyfe.net, you can set up triggers, so that when you send an image to the service (or anyone sends an image to one of your groups) our servers alert yours via a callback URL of your choice.  This way you have the ability to extend our system to yours, and do whatever you want with your media in real time.  Oh, and its 100% free to non-commercial users. Another problem Lyfe.net seems to cure is the inscalability of what I can only describe as hyper-communication which has plagued our social networks.  The inherent problem with "one to many" text messaging is that once your account reaches a critical mass of hundreds of followers, there is no way to read each and every message that trickles in.  At this point, most "mega" social accounts enter a state of output only which means the users do not read the information that comes in, and therefor are no longer an active participant of the network.  They are merely a massive endpoint that stifles connectivity, yet dumps updates to hundreds of people online.  Eventually, as more and more people approach this state of hyper-communication, our once thriving network will become a dead series of communications being sent to an empty terminal screen.  Picture messaging however is completely different.  It takes the average user 5 seconds to read a written message.  In contrast, the common user can look over a page of 30 images in the same amount of time.  Also, in order to make images unique, yet eye catching, the user must put a lot more work into creating the content. This makes creating a mass messaging engine extremely difficult to accomplish.

Our project is currently in a pre-beta stage, but is available to the public.  A great deal of the functionality is only available by request, as there is no user interface for it (for testing reasons).  We are currently looking for artists to moxie up our project.  I am always interested in meeting with people who wish to talk about the functionality and theory of social networking, and what is to come in the future.

Currently, Lyfe.net is only a project, and we do not consider ourselves to have any "employees", however we do have 3 people on the project.  I (Jim Deakins) am the only active member as i put in about 10 hours of development time into the project per week.  Brad Boegler handles our servers, and Jeff Slutter built the back-end message parsing system.

Our biggest challenge is time.  I have a great many ideas that have yet to manifest due to my lack of time.  We would really like a few artists to send us their resumes so we could get the site looking pretty asap.  I just dont have the time to build the layout myself.

Dont take it too seriously.  Ideas have a tendency to fail.  If you find yourself losing sleep over your project (which i did 4 years ago when lyfe.net was born), then its time for a vacation my friend.  On the opposite side of the spectrum; dont give up, and get help if you need it.  A very influential person in my life once told me: "Business isnt hard.  You either do it or you dont." - David Shayman, aka Disco D

I have another electronics R&D startup that will be coming into view this summer.  We are currently putting a presentation for the Ann Arbor Ignite event and the ArbFest summer camp event later this summer.