DailyBooth

DailyBooth was a photoblogging social network where users took a daily photo of themselves with a caption to document their lives. Founded in February 2009 by Jon Wheatley and Ryan Amos, the platform was backed by the accelerator Y Combinator. It gained significant traction after being adopted by celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, which helped it grow to over 3 million unique monthly visitors by August 2009. The user base primarily consisted of teenagers and young adults under 24.

The service functioned similarly to Twitter but with photos as the primary medium. Users could follow others to see a real-time feed of their photo updates and leave comments. Features included a "Live Feed" showing all public activity and integrations to auto-post updates to Twitter. The company raised over $7 million in funding, including a $6 million Series A round in 2011 led by Ignition Partners, with participation from Sequoia Capital and prominent angel investors. This funding was intended to expand the team and capitalize on the rise of front-facing cameras on mobile devices.

Despite its initial growth, the platform's rigid concept of daily posting struggled to retain long-term user interest compared to more flexible photo-sharing apps like Instagram. In July 2012, Airbnb acquired the DailyBooth team, including CEO Brian Pokorny, in an "acqui-hire" to bolster its mobile development talent. The deal did not include DailyBooth's technology or apps, and development on the platform ceased. The site officially stopped accepting new content on November 14, 2012, and was permanently shut down on December 31, 2012.

Keywords: photoblogging, social network, daily photos, photo sharing, visual journal, Y Combinator, online community, Ashton Kutcher, Jon Wheatley, Ryan Amos, Brian Pokorny, acqui-hire, Airbnb, defunct, social media, photo diary, teen demographic, user-generated content, web application, mobile photo