flickr

Wondering who that mysterious new Flickr contact is with all the slick product photos? Maybe it's a viral marketer.

That's what happened to Illuminata analyst and CNET blogger Gordon Haff earlier this week when Scion xB RS 6.0 added him as a Flickr contact. I thought it might be a marketing move, given that the Detroit auto show was under way, and indeed a little digging showed that to be the case.

"We are promoting the new Scion xB Release Series 6.0 vehicle online through a variety of social media avenues," said Kat Kirsch … Read more

At Tuesday's Macworld keynote speech, Apple announced a handful of upgrades to existing software. Of the changes, one of the biggest is the budding online integration found inside two of its software suites: iLife and iWork. The "2009" versions of both of these software packages show a more balanced approach by Apple in integrating third-party services alongside pushing users toward its own online efforts.

In the case of iWork, is a tight integration with a brand new online component called iWork.com. The site, which launches later this month in conjunction with the software release, lets users … Read more

Browser add-on Flickr Gallery Plus adds extended functionality to Flickr's set view, allowing users to click through to see full versions of each shot without having to reload the page. Once installed it will go out and pre-fetch the larger sized version of each shot, making big sets a cinch to speed through. This includes the addition of keyboard shortcuts (something you can't get in Flickr without a Greasemonkey script) which lets you go back and forth between shots using your arrow keys.

In addition to its thumbnail optimizer, the add-on includes a simple slideshow viewer that doesn'… Read more

The iPhone is the mobile device of choice these days for doing most things that need a network. So it shouldn't be a surprise that the phone has carved out a prominent place on Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr.

The Flickr Camera Finder, Yahoo's statistical counter of camera use among its members, shows that since the arrival of the iPhone 3G model earlier this year, the phone has vaulted not only over all other camera phones, trouncing the Nokia N95 in second place, but also almost all ordinary cameras.

That's a notable accomplishment. I've been watching the Flickr Camera Finder for two years, … Read more

Yahoo's belt-tightening has led the company to shut down new uploads to its Jumpcut service for sharing and combining videos, steering people instead to its Flickr service.

"We're sorry to announce that we are no longer accepting uploads to Jumpcut," a note on the site said Wednesday. "It was a difficult decision that we wish we didn't have to make, but it was necessary in order to focus resources on other Yahoo sites."

Jumpcut now steers users to Yahoo's photo-sharing site Flickr, which got video abilities earlier this year. Jumpcut won't … Read more

Zannel, a media-rich microblogging service that launched in late 2007, has a new and free iPhone application that puts many of its features on to the popular portable device.

Called CityWatch, the app takes a similar approach to Loopt and Whrrl in allowing you to see and interact with what's going on in your general proximity. It does this by taking each item that's been posted to Zannel and overlaying it onto a map using its geo tag. This also includes items from other networks, like Twitter, Flickr, and eventually any other service that has an open API.… Read more

Flickr rolled out a big update to its inter-network content manager on Thursday afternoon. It now lets you sort by contact type, total number of photos, when you added them as a contact, and when their last upload was. This last option might be one of the most useful, since it can tell you who signed up for the service then abandoned it completely, making it easy to clear out some space.

The one thing that hasn't changed is the option to see more than a few contacts per page. The current cap is just 15 to a page, … Read more

The Guardian is reporting that George Oates, along with two others on the Flickr team have been let go as a part of this week's Yahoo layoffs. Oates was one of the first employees at Flickr before its acquisition by Yahoo in 2005, and more notably its former chief designer.

Flickr, along with its Yahoo sister site Delicious, are well known for having a minimal, and angular user interface. Oates was a big part of that. After her stint as Flickr's chief designer, Oates moved on to become a senior program manager where she headed up Flickr's Commons project.… Read more

Twitter may be the leader in the micro-blogging space, but it's missing key features--features its competitors offer. Will Twitter pick up on these omissions? We know groups are coming to Twitter, but we're not so sure about some of these other useful features...

Friendfeed: Twitter++

Although some say Friendfeed isn't a direct competitor to Twitter, I think it is. Twitter has one way to deliver content to the service--you type a thought in 140 characters or fewer and post it--but consider the fact that Friendfeed can do that in a flash, as well as import your blog, … Read more