Hyperglobal adventure capitalists Joi Ito and Esther Dyson met by coincidence at London Heathrow's just-opened Terminal 5, and raced to post photos of each other to Flickr. Before Yahoo bought the photo site, Dyson was an investor in Flickr. Suggest a caption in the comments. (Photos by Esther Dyson and Joi Ito)
The long-anticipated addition of video to photo sharing site Flickr got a positive review from Michael Arrington, but users aren't necessarily happy — 12,063 people have already signed up to the We Say NO to Videos on Flickr group less than 24 hours after the new feature launched. Whereas only 26 people have joined the Video! Video! Video! group set up by staffers. Australian photographer Steve Hudson is capitalizing on the trend with the domain no-video-on-flickr.com redirecting to a page covered in AdSense ads. Will any of them stop using Flickr? I doubt it.
Photo sharing site and Yahoo subsidiary Flickr released a new friend finder feature yesterday that will search your email contact lists, much like many other social networking sites have done over the past few years. The difference is that rather than giving Flickr your email and password to access your account, you're taken to a page from your email provider, providing an extra layer of security and winning some kudos from the data portability crowd. However, Flickr users about to be deluged by friend requests from anyone they've ever traded emails with probably won't be so amused. In a completely unrelated development, original Ludicorp project Game Neverending is now back online, complete with a fake announcement from Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.
Former Uncov guy and Persai CEO Kyle Shank, at center, recovers from an unsolicited cupcake smearing by Pownce's Leah Culver. The attack, likely motivated by Uncov accomplice Ted Dziuba's frequent gibes directed at Culver, took place at Flickr's fourth birthday party. Flickr's Cal Henderson, right, is said to have served as Culver's accomplice. Speaking of, can anyone confirm whether Henderson and Culver are dating? The two were inseparable at SXSW. If so, snaps to Culver: We hear Henderson's website is highly scalable. (Photo by magerleagues)
Almost every digital camera captures both pictures and movies. This reality has seemed lost on Flickr for four years. Cofounder Stewart Butterfield reportedly told attendees at a fourth-birthday party last night that Flickr, now owned by Yahoo, will introduce video uploads next month. At this point, Yahoo might as well launch the service on April 1 — the delay has become that much of a joke. Yahoo Video has already relaunched, with its own movie-upload features. So why bother?
Do not want fail? Why then, can has win, say the folks behind the curtains at Flickr, Digg, Media Temple, and StumbleUpon. Six of them showed up at a panel organized by Kevin Rose to explain how to make websites that stay online, more or less. Being a not very clever gossip, I just listened in for the quips. Oh, and the drama. Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg almost didn't make it. Check out how his fellow panelists updated the lineup right before he showed up.
Yahoo Video has soft-launched a new website, in a move which speaks to both the potential of Yahoo and the company's utter disorganization. It has all the necessaries in the age of YouTube and Hulu: clips created by amateurs and professionals, playlists, and "exclusive" content. The latter, if true, is refreshing: Thanks to syndication deals which allow the endless regurgitation of video from site to site, most of the Hollywood-born clips on the Web are numbingly similar. The site also has a tantalizing promise: Video on Flickr.
Pop quiz: What's the most popular way to store photos in the world? If your answer was Flickr, you're wrong. It's Microsoft Windows, duh. Commentards are cracking jokes about "Microsoft Flickr 2011 Home Premium Edition." Well, let's talk about Flickr. Flickr has a hardcore base of users prone to complain about anything and everything, and the Microsoft deal is no exception. But Flickr's biggest competitor isn't Shutterfly or Smugmug or Snapfish; it's indifference. Most photos lie unseen and unloved on PC hard drives, if the shooter has even bothered to upload them. Think about Flickr being built into the next version of Windows. That would actually be a reason to upgrade. (Photo by dr_lopbot)
Caring is sharing, people, especially when it comes to your personal data. Leading developers from important social-network sites joining a "data-portability" advocacy group doesn't represent history in the making. It's a marketing campaign to make everyone feel sickly sweet, knowing that these websites are so concerned about our information. Like the Care Bears, by signing on to the DataPortability Working Group, top coders like Brad Fitzpatrick, Dave Recordon, and Ben Ling have joined forces to form a group which we can only call by one name. Presenting: The Share Bears!
Apple announced today that while the MacBook Air has started shipping, the Apple TV 2.0 update, which was promised "in about two weeks," will be available "in another week or two." Apple didn't say what the holdup was, but it could be related to Flickr integration issues (Steve Jobs's Flickr demonstration failed during his keynote), other quality control problems, or, quite possibly, due to last-minute wrangling with the movie studios.
So we dinged Yahoo for not updating 8 of their 26 official blogs in the last month. Apparently word got around. In the image to the left, find the reply from Yahoo's Digital Home Blog. Click to expand it. It's either as fine a demonstration of snark you'll find or a snapshot of a very sad reality. Either way, the message is clear: At Yahoo, somebody forced somebody to start these pointless blogs and nobody likes writing them. So leave us alone. (Snark only goes so far: The blog post, ostensibly about the launch of Flickr photos on Apple TV, does not mention that the demo of this feature during Steve Jobs's Macworld keynote completely failed.) Here's a note, more to the point, from the Yahoo! Research Berkeley bloggers.
Jeremy Johnstone, a Yahoo engineer, has taken a break from hanging out with iJustine to object to our mention of one of his images — a screenshot of Flickr, a Yahoo website, displaying a failure message. He responded by replacing the image with a vulgarity. Good to know he has so much time to spend doing anything but writing code. You see, that screenshot is not the only Flickr pic he's taken down recently. The last one went offline under even less happy circumstances.
The Library of Congress has teamed with Flickr to make its vast catalog of images available on the Web, starting with 3,000 photographs with no known copyright holders. The goal of the project is to provide exposure to these rarely seen images and to harness the Flickr community to compile missing data — like the photographer, subject, and copyright holder — for free. As far as partnerships go, Flickr seems to be the winner. They gain access to thousands of beautiful and historic photographs. Having the Library of Congress on board may even encourage other public institutions to follow suit and join their tagging project, "The Commons." The Library of Congress will likely get what they paid for: inane comments and simplistic tags rather than the useful metadata they seek.
Coined by R. Stevens in his webcomic Diesel Sweeties, "social nerdwanking" means lording your social-network superiority over others, which is secretly the only reason you bother with Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Orkut, and every other social network. Except your legitimate if fruitless use of Adult FriendFinder.
Flickr, as planned, has partnered with Picnik to bring online editing of photos to its users. Interesting that Yahoo went for a partnership than purchasing the company outright or developing its own editing program. Flickr's George Oates says, "Rather than Flickr diverting from our speciality to enter a realm we had no (particular) expertise in, the thought of a partnership seemed much more sensible." Which would make sense if Yahoo didn't own Jumpcut, a site which provides online video-editing tools. [Flickr Blog]
