Look at only a few MySpace pages and it’s obvious that photo slideshows are popular with users. Slideshow creators can take photos from different sources and put them into a flash-based widget which flips, slides, scrolls, or fades through your favorite pics. There are many free slideshow creators out there, most web-based. We looked at which ones are the most popular with MySpace users.
Methodology
We randomly sampled 1,201,651 valid MySpace pages evenly distributed according to MySpace friendIDs in the range of 1 to 118,500,000. A valid page is an account which has not been canceled or deactivated. Accounts set to private were not included.
In this round-up we looked for which external slideshow creators users were using. If a user’s page had multiple slideshows then that page was counted for each slideshow creator. Multiple slideshows from the same source were counted only once. Slideshows embedded in comments were eliminated because it’s a common target for spam.
Results
PictureTrail boasts the “Biggest slideshow selection on the web”. I didn’t count but they do have a large selection. Building the slideshows was no fun, though, with a wizard-style interface which makes you move through several pages. Along the same irritating lines was the way SlideRoll runs in a separate popup window which gets blocked of course.
FilmLoop is a bit different because it’s not web-based; it’s a downloadable product you install on your PC. Since my desktop already has too much stuff installed I didn’t try it out, but the latest version has been reviewed on Mashable. PhotoShow also has a downloadable deluxe-version product along with a web-based version. The web version is still beta but has nice features and a good selection of styles. It was very slow the two times I dropped by and maybe due to being beta.