Unpretentiously, it has built an essential service that didn't need to shout out for attention, the way MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, or other related sites have. Yet it's built an audience of 38 million members, a figure now growing more than 80,000 per day. That's up from just 50,000 members at the end of 2003.

Photobucket knows what's on its site. It employs 80 people who scrutinize images to prohibit porn or illegal commercial content. While they're looking, they also add so-called "tags" to the images to identify them. That will enable users to search for things by category, something that so far is very difficult elsewhere, even at Google. Photobucket plans to start pushing image search in the near future.

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