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Webshots is a free online photo sharing site, and is the largest and most popular photo sharing community. It started as a professional photo screensaver/wallpaper site, but expanded into photo sharing in 1999. Photos taken from users' digital cameras can be organized into dozens of different categories to narrow down specific searches and content. In November 2006, there were more than 441 million photos on the site. All members get a free homepage where they can share up to 1000 photos publicly with friends, family and anyone who comes across it. Webshots Premium allows for 5000 photos. There's an automatic notification feature that tells users when their favorite members have added new photos. Members also have the option to share their photos privately. Webshots is a large photo sharing community, and many of its active uploaders are either teenagers or young adults, typically of college age. Sexually suggestive photos have gradually increased in number and visibility on the site, appearing repeatedly in the "Most Popular" section. This has earned the site the nickname, "WebHots". Webshots has also made inadvertent celebrities out of certain individuals, particularly Amanda Wenk who became a minor Internet phenomenon in 2005 due to the popularity of her sexually suggestive photo galleries. Visits to her pages would often be in excess of 30,000 per day. Webshots is owned by CNET Networks.
Criticism The site is also criticized by a number of people who believe that young adults take advantage of the widespread popularity of Webshots to publish potentially reputation-damaging photos of their college or high school acquantances on a worldwide scale. While the constant flow of new tantalizing information on Webshots makes a long-term backlash against a particular group or individual unlikely, the immortalization of a person photographed in an undesired situation which circulates freely on the world wide web is often very upsetting to many people. Also, Webshots hasn't updated its client desktop pattern and screensaver software for almost a year for the Mac OS X platform, upsetting some Mac users, although the website itself runs on all platforms. Webshots provides alternative Mac solutions but they do not have functionality that the official client brings. See also | ||||||||
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