flickr

Yahoo showing signs of life, albeit too late

Earlier last week, we broke news of the thaw in merger negotiations between Yahoo and Microsoft. If two sides ultimately decide to tie the knot, get ready for months--maybe years--of furious debate about the wisdom of this deal. But the latest rumblings concerning Flickr speaks volumes about the problems Microsoft may be about to inherit.

My partner-in-crime Dan Farber was clubbing with assorted Yahoos Saturday night at a celebration of Flickr's fourth anniversary. That's where he got word that a Flickr video beta will debut next month. (Here's more from TechCrunch. )

Fantastic idea. Makes all the sense … Read more

Flickr Video beta due in April

In early February, in the midst of Microsoft's surprise bid to acquire Yahoo, I wrote about Yahoo's Flickr Video coming soon. It's been a long time coming. I first asked Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake about a Flickr video service in December 2005.

After spending a few hours at the Flickr fourth anniversary party in San Francisco on Saturday night, the "coming soon" line was uttered by various Yahoo people, including Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield. Upon further investigation, it appears that "coming soon" means that Flickr Video will debut in beta next month.

Flickr, … Read more

CellSpin mobile blogging and media platform welcomes Symbian

Up until today, only Windows Mobile 5 and 6 and BlackBerry users could take CellSpin's mobile blogging and media-sharing platform for, well, a spin. On Thursday the San Jose, Calif. company announced a big addition to the family: phones on the Symbian platform.

Adding Symbian cell phones, many of them high-end, brings CellSpin's free beta service to over 300 handsets and over 30 carriers worldwide.

CellSpinners can quickly share photos, video, text, and audio to Blogger, eBay, Facebook, YouTube, Picasa, LiveJournal, Flickr, and Windows Live Spaces, with more partnerships on the way. Of course, there are a few … Read more

Flickr puts hold on PhotoShelter tool

Earlier today I wrote about a new tool that PhotoShelter announced to let its customers migrate images from Flickr accounts to their PhotoShelter Personal Archives. Since then, Flickr has disabled the tool. A company spokesperson for Flickr said, "Photoshelter did not follow the guidelines outlined by Flickr around API usage. We are currently working with them to correct the issue."

My contact at PhotoShelter said that the company is working on the problem and a message on the new tool's page notes that, "Flickr has temporarily disabled this feature. We are working to address it and … Read more

Flickr giving away 10K pro memberships (to nonprofits)

Yahoo-owned photo community Flickr has launched a new program today called Flickr for Good. The site will be a place for nonprofits or other photojournalists to pool together their photography. In order to get the ball rolling Flickr has teamed up with non-profit organizer TechSoup to donate 10,000 one-year Flickr Pro memberships (which normally cost $25 a pop) to nonprofits and public libraries to let them upload as many shots as they want to the popular photo hosting community.

Each nonprofit can grab up to five memberships to distribute among its staff. Details on how the groups are supposed … Read more

Google's photo and bookmarking missteps

For all the company's overall success, some of its individual entrants sometimes seem not just lagging and wanting, but sometimes just plain... off.

I'm not so much talking here about sites like Orkut and Google Video that were more-or-less representative of and competitive with social media and video sharing sites (respectively) at the time they came on the scene. They simply didn't rise to the top of the pile for complicated and somewhat elusive reasons that would make for another long discussion.

However, other examples from Google just seem oddly out of tune.

Take Google Browser Sync … Read more

Onesens does explosive magnetic poetry for Web media

Onesens is a really peculiar annotation tool for shared media on the Web. It lets you add a variety of words like magnetic poetry to a photos, videos, and music tracks. When another user sees your creation the words are scattered about, but there are buttons to reorder, or simply "explode" them once again. Users can also reorganize them as they would fridge magnets to create new expressions, although these can't be shared with other users or the creator of the original message.

While the creators of Onesens claim the application "will change the way you … Read more

Now with ads: Picnik photo-editing site

Picnik, an online photo-editing site, has altered course.

In a change announced Wednesday in the Picnik blog, the Seattle company said those with free accounts now will be able to use editing tools previously reserved for those who've paid for premium subscriptions--but they'll also see ads.

Premium subscribers won't get the ads, though, and will get a handful of other perks, including fonts from FontShop, better connections to social networks, and early access to new features. Subscriptions cost $24.95 per year.

"Our goal is to make Picnik the best photo editing experience available, regardless of … Read more

Step back in time with the Flickr time capsule

Share a lot of photos online but find yourself only going back to reminisce on rare occasions? If you're a Flickr user check out photag newsletter service Photojojo's time capsule tool.

The service will send you a new message twice a month filled with photos from a year ago during the same time period. They're not just any old pictures either, time capsule will only pick the ones with the most interestingness. Each one gets links to share or view the original.

To get it set up, simply link up your Flickr account, and give it an … Read more