Inspired by a tweet from First Round Capital VC Charlie O’Donnell (“Can someone hack a Foursquare app that cc’s my checkin photos to Flickr?”), developer Benny Wong has created Flicksquare, an app that takes advantage of Foursquare’s recent enabling of photo check-in features, allowing you to also send your Foursquare photos to Flickr.
While Foursquare gave lip service to working on the Flickr and Facebook export capability a couple of weeks ago, Wong has beat it to the punch. → Read More
Back in June, we reported on the departure of Kellan Elliott-McCrea from Yahoo. While not hugely known outside the developer community, we had received several tips indicating just how important Elliott-McCrea was to the Flickr team, where his role as “Architect” was supposedly “vital” to the service. So who better to answer questions about Flickr than Elliott-McCrea (who is now the VP of Engineering for Etsy), right? And that’s exactly what he’s done on Quora.
Specifically, someone asked the question: Why did Flickr miss the mobile photo opportunity that Instagram and picplz are pursuing? The mobile photo space is red-hot right now with several players beyond the two mentioned vying to become a common app on smartphones. And one of them, Instagram, was able to gain over a million users in less than three months. So why wasn’t Flickr, with all the resources of Yahoo behind them, able to dominate this space first? → Read More
It has been fairly amazing to watch this Yahoo “sunsetting” news over the past 48 hours. It seemed to go from a bad leak, to huge backlash, to PR disaster, to confusion, to worse PR disaster. Now Yahoo, by way of Delicious (the most prominent service being “sunset”), has responded by lashing out at all the press for the coverage of the fiasco. Danny Sullivan just did a great job of ripping them a new one for this nonsense misdirection. But the issue actually goes much deeper.
Yahoo may not be killing Delicious, but they have killed something else: consumer confidence in them. → Read More
Given the success Apple has seen this year with the launch of the iPad, they decided to single out the device to give it its own “App of the Year” award. The winner? Flipboard. The social magazine app launched in July with some glowing reviews and since then, a few small updates have made it even better. But the update they’re releasing today makes it a lot better. So much so that if Flipboard was already the app of 2010, they’ve got to be the early frontrunners to be the iPad app of 2011 as well.
First of all, Flipboard has added both Flickr and Google Reader integration to bring more content into the system. Users of those services can easily link up their accounts to create new areas to browse on their Flipboard.
But the bigger news is what they’ve added to the content options that have existed on Flipboard since the beginning: Twitter and Facebook. Both of these areas on Flipboard now feature support for various sections of the services. So on Facebook, you can browse items shared in the News Feed, on your Wall, on the various Pages you follow, or filter items by the Friend Lists you have. You can also filter the stream to show just pictures or just links. With Twitter, you can now choose between your standard Timeline, just your Tweets, your Favorites, your @Replies, or any of your Lists. → Read More
Online analytics company Compete has just published its ranking of the top 50 websites for September 2010, giving some insights into current visitor trends (and not absolute numbers, as the company tends to undercount traffic for most websites).
Compete’s data compilation shows increasing traffic to Microsoft’s search engine Bing (up 11.7 percent for the month and 108.5 percent for the year) as well as Ask.com (up 8.7 percent for the month and 75.3 percent for the year). → Read More
According to Media Culpa a blog that apparently obsessively tracks these things, photo-sharing site Flickr has hit the 5 billionth photo milestone today with the above, uploaded by Flickr user yeoaaron. Media culpa blogger Hans Kullin also points out that Flickr has been growing at about 1 billion photos per year, over the past 3 years, eclipsed in market share by social giant Facebook which hit 15 billion photos uploaded in April of 2009.
As Facebook claims it was uploading over 2.5 billion photos a month in February of 2010, we’re loosely guestimating there are somewhere between 30 and 50 billion photo uploads on the site currently. I’ve contacted both Flickr and Facebook for more info and will update as soon as they respond. → Read More
We’re all pretty familiar with tagging people on sites like Facebook and Flickr. It’s a great way to let the people who are in the pictures know you’ve uploaded shots of them, and it’s also a good way for others to see who the persons are in the photos they’re looking at.
But what if you’d rather steer clear of the walled gardens of the Web and upload photos to your own website or blog? Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to tag those, too?
Enter Stipple, a recently launched startup that lets you tag images across the entire Web (see example on BritneySpears.com). The company is today launching People Dots, a feature that allows users to build a bridge between Stipple and their Twitter and/or Facebook accounts. → Read More
Yesterday, Facebook held a developer’s garage event at their headquarters in Palo Alto. To kick things off, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage to talk a bit about the history of Facebook. Notably, he focused on Facebook Photos as being a key catalyst that led to everything the social network is today.
He noted that when they launched the product, they didn’t have all of the features that their competitors did. For example, they didn’t have high-resolution photos and you couldn’t print them. But one thing they did have was the social element — and this changed everything.
“Those features by themselves were more important than anything else combined,” Zuckerberg said of the social elements of Facebook Photos. He then dropped the competitor bomb. “The photo product that we have is maybe five or six times more used than every other product on the web — combined,” Zuckerberg stated. → Read More
One thing you can say about the Flickr team – there’s some fight in ‘em. They apparently were not super pleased with our coverage of their annual (and unofficial) Grant-Pattishall Award given each year to the Yahoo engineer who “who breaks Flickr in the most spectacular way.” I’m not sure why, I think the award is fun.
So now they have a new award, called the Bogan-Martin Award: “The Bogan-Martin Award is given yearly to the Flickr staff member who inadvertently generates the most spectacular media overreaction to a personal comment or inside joke.” → Read More
I have to say that before today I’d never heard of the Grant-Pattishall Award given each year to the Yahoo engineer who “who breaks Flickr in the most spectacular way.” But today they awarded it to Daniel Bogan, and he has been added to the list.
What did Bogan do to break Flickr? We’re hoping to find out soon enough. Comments and tips with more information are appreciated. → Read More
Snapfish, the photo sharing and printing site from Hewlett Packard, announced today that they’ve acquired the Motionbox video platform, allowing Snapfish to expand its video offering. Current Motionbox users will have their content migrated to their new Snapfish account, and the current Motionbox site will remain online until August. In related news, Posterous is wooing Flickr users as the latest salvo in their Switch To Posterous campaign. → Read More
As many Yahoo properties continue to stumble (or worse), one that remains very dear to my heart is Flickr, the massive photo-sharing service. With over 4 billion photos and videos (and about 3 million new ones uploaded each day), it’s one Yahoo service that won’t be going away anytime soon. And luckily the company realizes that — as today they’re previewing an overhaul of the entire photo-viewing and sharing experience. The result is great.
The changes Flickr is making involve the photo pages themselves. The biggest difference that you’ll notice right off the bat is that the actual picture on these pages is larger — 30 percent larger, actually. This makes it very clear what your eye should be focusing on. And that’s important because Flickr has added a number of other new features on the page to enrich the experience. → Read More
As one of the most popular social sites on the planet, Flickr is also undoubtedly one of the most popular misspelled domains. Pronounced “Flicker,” Flickr decided to be all Web 2.0-cutesy with its name back in the day. That’s fine, except when someone else owns the Flicker.com domain. Yahoo, which bought Flickr in 2005, has finally done something about that — obtaining Flicker.com.
As we noted a year ago, Flicker.com put itself on sale in a very visible way. Anyone who visited the page was greeted by a logo and statistics about how much traffic the site receives. So how much traffic was Flicker.com getting? 3.6 million unique visitors a year, according to them. Almost all of those hits were direct (95%) undoubtedly because people would misspell Flickr.com as Flicker.com. → Read More
Death. Taxes. Talented people leaving Yahoo. The certainties in life these days.
Today, yet another key employee announced he is leaving the company. Kellan Elliott-McCrea had actually been with Yahoo for over 4 years, working on Flickr the entire time. His role was officially “Flickr Architect,” but don’t let the vague title fool you. From what we hear, he was “vital” to the service, and was one of the last people remaning who knows how the service scales. → Read More
As you’re probably well aware, there’s a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico right now. When BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and then sank last month, it began dumping thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf each day. By the time the oil stops leaking, it’s expected to be the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Yeah, it’s bad. It’s so bad, that BP and several other organizations working on the spill are apparently running out of ideas. And they’re turning to Twitter, according to gCaptain.
A group of a dozen or so organizations including BP, the EPA, the U.S. Department of Interior, the Department of Defense, and OSHA have set up Deepwater Horizon Response, a “Unified Command” established to “manage response operations.” Naturally, there’s a website for this effort, but there’s also a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a Flickr account, and a YouTube account. They’re covering all the social media bases (though no Foursquare account just yet). → Read More
As I’ve made abundantly clear over the past several days, just about every service that has anything to do with location is launching something at the SXSW festival which starts tomorrow in Austin, Texas. Don’t believe me, here’s a small sampling (Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Plancast, Brizzly, Twitter). So, how are you going to wrap your head around all this location data? SimpleGeo has an awesome way.
Vicarious.ly is a real-time location-based stream of information presented in a nice visual way. While the plan is to eventually launch one for many different cities around the U.S. and eventually the world, the first one is based around Austin, for SXSW. To make it, SimpleGeo partnered with BlockChalk, Brightkite, Bump Technologies, Flickr, Fwix, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter to pull all of their location data and place it both in a constantly-updating stream, and put data points on a Google Map at the top of the page. These data points are represented by the logos of the various companies, so it’s easy to follow visually. → Read More
Earlier today, in writing about Google buying the photo-editing service Picnik, we noted that the most interesting thing about the buy may be that Picnik is currently Flickr’s default photo editor. Upon hearing the news, we reached out to both Google and Yahoo (which owns Flickr) to see what it means for the future of the partnership. The responses were interesting.
Google, for its part, says that it will allow third-party sites (including Flickr) to continue to integrate with it. Here’s the statement they sent us: → Read More
Google has acquired online photo editing site Picnik, according to a blog post made by the photo editing startup today. Google also announced the acquisition on its blog. The entirety of Picnik’s blog post is embedded below.Terms of the deal were not disclosed in either posts.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed in the post. Picnik is one of the fastest growing photo sites on the web. Picnik is a powerful, cloud-based photo editor that is integrated directly into Flickr, SmugMug and other photo repositories. Interestingly, Picnik is Flickr’s default photo editor. I’m assuming that will discontinue with the acquisition. It would make sense that Google would fold Picnik’s technology into its photo sharing product and Flickr competitor Picasa, which has some basic editing offerings but doesn’t compare to Picnik’s vast editing technologies. → Read More
Google Trends is a great tool to get an overview on terms people are searching for with the largest search engine in the world. It also shows interesting trends. And something is definitely going on with searches for a few large social networks using Google.
At some point in mid January, a group of sites including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare saw a huge drop in number of searches for their domains. → Read More
Last night, the news started to come out about Glitch, the new massively multiplayer online game that a few of the key cogs that built Flickr had been developing in secret for much of last year. Today, I got to see a still relatively early build of the game. It is both beautiful and impressive.
I met up with Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr, so he could demo Glitch for me. Sitting in a hotel lobby on a WiFi connection being used by who knows how many other people, the game, which runs in the browser and is Flash-based, was incredibly smooth. Even more impressively, Butterfield was able to manipulate the game from the backend (using his “God” mode tools) to add new elements on the fly right in front of me. This is a key part of what will likely make or break Glitch. → Read More
