Flickr Archive

It’s interesting that everyday we hear how email is dead yet everyday I see someone using email in a new way. The benefit of using email is that it’s understood by nearly any Internet user as opposed to many of the new social networks that take time and investment to be able to effectively use.

Yesterday I spoke with YouTellYou founder Ruggero Domenichini to learn more about the service. YouTellYou is an easy way to create a photo magazine. The service can pull in photos from photo sharing services including Flickr, Smugmug, Facebook and you can also upload photos from your computer. The magazine can also include a Google Map so you can provide the location where the photos were taken.

Jolie O’Dell at RWW has a good review of the YouTellYou service from their launch back in January. She notes, “In about 10 minutes, we created this story about SxSW 2009. We were able to get access to all the needed Flickr photos through a simple interface. Pics were then organized into layouts of one or two photos per section with optional captions for most layouts.”
Continue reading “YouTellYou Helps You Create a Picture Magazine” »

The topic of paid social media is something I’ve been thinking about a lot of the past few months. When I met with Scott Monty of Ford, I mentioned the idea of assuming that all social media is paid. Perhaps you already do assume that what you read is already paid or sponsored although I’ve tried to think that what I read is genuine unless otherwise noted. For the purposes of this discussion, I am leaving the “is paid social media good or evil” on the side for another day.

Scott noted that the 100 paid reviewers of the Ford Fiesta will disclose that they are part of the “movement”. That’s great that there will be disclosure – it’s something that many of the paid reviews systems have moved to. And while I am using Ford as an example, they are by no means alone with regards to my question. Whether it’s Izea, Magpie, in-house ad sales, etc, the question continues to grow in importance. And I haven’t even mentioned pimping by investors, friends, family members, etc.

Disclosure is easy on a blog, but what about as the blog entry is pushed around. Does the disclosure travel with the blog entry? And more importantly, what about all of the social media services like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Plurk, etc.? How do we define disclosure on these networks?

Continue reading “Should We Assume All Social Media is Paid?” »

With Yahoo losing people left and right and nearly every media outfit calling them dead, I started to wonder about my data. The Flickr founders left earlier this week and tonight we’ve learned that delicious founder Joshua Schachter has also tendered his resignation (via Dave Sifry).

Now let me be clear that I don’t think Yahoo is closing shop by any stretch of the imagination but the question is a good one for any Web application or company to which we put data into. Certainly has made me think about the Web services I use from both big companies and startups and how often I need to backup the data. This is not about data portability, I am only discussing my data (photos, videos, text) not how other users interact with the data (comments, etc.).

There’s three main services I use on Yahoo: delicious, Flickr and Yahoo Mail. delicious offers an export function which I found easy to use. With regards to Flickr and Yahoo Mail, I was unable to find anyway to save out my entire collection of photos or mail. I’ve got nearly 3,700 photos on Flickr – no way I am saving these out one-by-one. And I was one of the first Yahoo Mail members and it’s still one of my primary email accounts even today. Please let me know if there are ways to export this data in batch form. 

If you are building a Web service, have you considered offering an export function from the beginning? If not, why?

I think today we’ve learned another great lesson. How many horror stories have we heard from people who lost an entire hard drive filled with data. We’ve learned to backup our hard drives to external drives for safety. Perhaps we need to do a better job of backing up our Web services for safety as well. One has no idea when a Web service might not be there the next time you attempt to access it.

First reported by Saki earlier this week, it appears Flickr has partnered with Capital One to allow credit card holders to create customized credit cards with Flickr images on the card. It’s about as personalized as you can get.

From what I can tell, most of the selected Flickr images have been rejected by Capital One with no explanation. Kinda sorta how they raise interest rates and/or add fees.

My guess is that the picture of your kid and a Coke can is out along with the picture of your family with Mickey Mouse.

Yahoo is announcing a partnership with T-Mobile this morning which will bring Yahoo’s mobile services to T-Mobile’s customers. The relationship will start in Europe with Yahoo oneSearch (Yahoo’s mobile search). Yahoo! oneSearch will become the exclusive mobile search service for T-Mobile customers beginning in March.

Yahoo says that eventually other services including Flickr, Messenger, Mail and Weather will be available as well. 

I ask the mobile experts reading this, would you rather be installed directly on the handset like Nokia is doing with Google or on the carrier as discussed here with Yahoo?

Photo-sharing site Flickr has announced a new project within the Flickr site called "The Commons". They describe this new project as, "There are two main aims to The Commons project, starting with the pilot: firstly, to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world, and secondly, to facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search."

Over 3,000 photos from the Library of Congress are featured as the first member of The Commons. Learn more about the project on the flickr blog. Check out the main The Commons section on Flickr. Flickr is looking for your help to accurately tag the photos to help others find them.

These types of deals for Flickr can only help push it further into the mainstream which could help it gain that all-important market share.

My friend Corsin pointed me to a new Flickr-based application called PhotoPhlow today. And after playing with it for a couple of hours, I will say that it might be the most fun and functional application I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s currently in private beta so you will need someone to invite you.

There’s a brief video which is worth watching about how the service works. Here’s the basic overview: tie PhotoPhlow into your flickr account and then you can create chat rooms which tie into flickr to pull photos from. So imagine IRC with the ability to find and share photos inside of the chat. Inside of the chat, certain words become links into flickr search. Once you find an image, you can share it with the chatroom.

You can also do most of the functions inside of flickr on PhotoPhlow including tagging, photo info (exif), comments, etc. When you select a photo, it appears on the right with all of the information about the photo on flickr (see screenshot below). They offer badges for your flickr page to draw people into your PhotoPhlow chatroom.

I could see using it to create a subway chat and then loading and image and others who are interested in subways can participate in the discussion.

As a bonus, it even ties into Twitter! You can message from the chatroom directly into twitter using IRC-like commands. And they recently added Tumbr functionality so if someone shares a photo within a chat, you can send it directly to your Tumblelog.

I’ve got to say that going in I wasn’t thinking that I would see this as something I could imagine using but after playing with it, it’s hot. Outside of personal use, agencies could use this to share design work and chat about it in real-time. The designer loads an image, and then the team can chat about it and also find other images within Flickr to discuss. It *could* have educational possibilities as well.

The only part I’m not crazy about is having to give them access to my flickr account to become a member. Perhaps I want to participate in the conversation and I am not a flickr member. It shouldn’t be a requirement for an account.

ConceptShare should look at this functionality as part of their service – would be hot to import Flickr photos into CS for annotation and team sharing.