[jamesrcole]

Why isn't photo sharing a real problem? Why isn't it hard? I think it's easy to be dismissive of things like this, especially from a purely technical viewpoint.

I'd like to see the other pics people take at get-togethers or on camping trips, but the effort of uploading them to something like facebook doesn't seem worth the effort for many (most?) people (that i know, at least), and there's no way easy way to collate the pics taken by diff people.

[neutronicus]

I thought "hard" was meant in a purely technical sense.

But anyways - three smart guys in a garage can build a minimum viable photo sharing application using knowledge and technology obtained from the internet.

You can say "oh, it's hard to do photo sharing right, it's a hard problem", but the fact is there are technological problems out there that are hard to do at all, that are completely beyond the reach of three smart guys in a garage using only knowledge available on the internet.

[jamesrcole]

If we're talking about the article, I don't think they were implying anything about technical difficulty (it doesn't even use the word 'hard'), but more about importance (the significance of the consequences). edit: removed typo.