SmugMug is a rad photo service which offer NO free accounts—its all paid. They’re profitable, have 19 employees and are earning over $10 million annually.
The key change is the complete re-writing of the photo viewing interface from HTML (with some Ajax components bolted on) to dynamic javascript. Clicking among pictures no longer requires a page refresh at all, speeding site navigation significantly and not bringing people back up to the top of the page after clicking on a new photo.
Some recent additions the site mentioned on Techcrunch include:
And like Yahoo Maps, SmugMug has gone through the painstaking process of updating URLs as people navigate the site. This is a problem that plagues Rich Internet Applications. Without a page refresh when navigating a Flash or Ajax application, the URL doesn’t update. SmugMug has solved that problem, even for Safari (which Yahoo still hasn’t solved). SmugMug has also moved user comments to the same page as the photo (saving a click), and moved most of the metadata and photo options from the display area into a fly-out drawer. The effect is to highlight the photo content, but not clutter the page with lots of data and links.
