For the second time in about two weeks I accidentally found a link to a one-page web site called Polaroize. This time I explored it, and (although I am not sure how useful it actually is) it seems like an interesting one-trick pony.

The idea is simple. You upload an image to the site and it gives you back the same image, re-rendered to look like a view of a polaroid image. I wrote a piece about the week of the Eurovision Song Contest in Helsinki early this month, and included a photograph of a street acrobat. I uploaded a resized version of that image and you can see the result here.

It looks fine, and it is certainly an easy way to take an image and have this effect imposed on it. My initial question remains though: how useful is it?

I suppose that it could become a standard effect on the web – a simple way of making dull snapshots look “nice”, and if that is the case then I suppose that the site could become profitable by selling small ads. On the other hand persistent rumours suggest that Adobe is likely to respond to the current fad for SaaS, and prevent Google and Yahoo colonising a new market that might severely impact their current businesses, by launching a free online version of Photoshop. If they do that then I would imagine that this is exactly the kind of service they will be offering.

The main difference between Polaroize and the coming-real-soon Adobe site is that the latter will presumably have to offer a large suite of these and other effects, as well as layering and compositing tools – at which point this site becomes pointless.

This, though, is not my problem, and perhaps I should just get on with using it while it is sitting there. And perhaps I will continue to use it when it has been purchased by Google or Yahoo as part of their response to Adobe launching an online Photoshop.

Which might mean, of course, that the creator of this site (which does one thing very well) is in a no-lose position, and that the site is acting as a job application that cannot be ignored.