FlickrFan public demo
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At the public demo on the 17th, I will talk about the idea of the Networked Living Room built on RSS. Low-tech, open, all moving parts replaceable. Not just photos, that's step one.  Sign up on Upcoming. Still some space left.
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Yet another Web Operating System launches. This one is from Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com, Linspire, and SIPPhone.
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Will a nonprofit-driven browser tackle the behemoth from Redmond?
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Adobe late with Photoshop Elements for Mac...iStockphoto tightens model release requirements...Canon 5D Mark II rumor...PDF now an ISO standard
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Nikon leads SLR market in Japan...gaming the Creative Commons...new geotagging tech...30-minute Olympus E-3 video...Ubuntu Hardy Heron Alpha 3...Microsoft Popfly video humor
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Canon G9 review...Photophlow gives Flickr a new face...Mozilla's Weave project...People paparazzi...new SLR rumors...hardware hacking.
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Kevin Tofel explains how to use an iPhone as a portable handheld photo gallery using the beautiful AP wire photos and FlickrFan.   I did a Qik video demo using my Nokia N95. Lots of computers involved, the quality ain't great but the idea is pretty neat.
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A new website provides an innovative tool that expands and contracts images while minimizing  distortion.
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A new camera-finding feature at Flickr may find profits, too.
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Blog: The Web and the desktop are increasingly blurring, as Adobe's Apollo project demonstrates. Unfortunately, open-source licensing remains in beta while we're about to go into production.
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Photo-sharing Web sites are getting better at handling pictures based on where they were taken. My top pick is Flickr, with SmugMug and Google's Picasa tied for second.
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Flickr helps Yahoo! get ready for its close-up.
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Amazingly no one asked this question at the meetup, but it just came up in an email from a famous journalist who works at a gadget site you've heard of and probably read.  The question goes like this.  Now that Apple is reading Flickr feeds in AppleTV, maybe there's no point continuing to develop FlickrFan.  I always wonder what's behind this question. Does the person think that people who use FlickrFan will stop using it because AppleTV can read the RSS feeds that Flickr produces? How would that work? I don't understand. I bought an AppleTV, I tried fitting it into my lifestyle, but it didn't. Apple's vision of how the Internet connects to the living room is a very controlling one. They attain a certain ease of use, true -- but the trade-off is too great. I like all the special effects, but I like to be in control of my own experience. I want to be the programmer. And I despise DRM as much as my customers hated copy protected software in the 80s. It does nothing positive for me, as a user, and I don't think it works for the vendors, but then that isn't my problem, it's theirs. I much prefer the Mac Mini to AppleTV, and to everything else. But this question has always been the stinkbomb lurking over the whole Mac market. The reporters don't stand up for the vendors. What does this guy want me to do? Would he prefer if I stopped developing FlickrFan? Will he say I'm stupid if I do. Maybe I am. Hey, I don't ask for any money for it. Basically I do it because I want to help create a DRM-less environment for us to enjoy networked living rooms.  FlickrFan is one of the things I'm working on. Sure it's crazy to think that I could actually contribute a little to the Mac platform. Apple surely is going to crush me tomorrow, maybe they already have. But why do users care? Why do reporters? It seems to me that we all benefit from choice. When it's a single-party system things stagnate. When there's competition, new ideas can gain traction even if it doesn't fit into the Apple vision for its users. (Which is fairly limited, read this Doc Searls piece written in 1997, it's every bit as true today as it was then.) Hey if you think building on Flickr is crazy, think about this. My next product competes with iTunes as a podcatcher! I must be out of my mind, eh?  Finally, I could ask this guy, who I respect enormously and whose work I read practically every day, a similar question. Hey Apple writes about gadgets on apple.com. What does that say about YourGadgetSite? Got any plans for a new job? Perhaps a new career? Now that would be just rude, wouldn't?  How about some respect for developers?  Can't believe we're still having this discussion in 2008. Can't we get past this?
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New social networking site lets users share photos, videos, and more.
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Last summer, when I was exploring the edges of Twitter, and building a voicemail service that hooked into Twitter with BlogTalkRadio, and then hooking my digital camera up to Twitter through Flickr, it seemed inevitable that Twitter would eventually support "payloads" so that objects like pictures and MP3s could hitch a ride on a Twitter message without using up any of he 140 characters, and with a neat url-less display.  The idea just kind of sat there, we've been quietly using the services, accepting their awkwardness, but without direct support from Twitter, they probably won't become mainstream.  Along comes Twitxr, in a post by Mike Arrington on TechCrunch, and I go -- why? This doesn't seem right. Too many steps. I have it much easier, Twitter is hooked right up to my camera, I never have to get my desktop or laptop in the loop when I want to post a picture. To prove the point, I'll now take a picture of this post, and shoot it up to Twitter.  So now Twitxr basically says it's time to give up the wait for Twitter, and maybe they're right, but for this??? I don't really think this is what I want. If I have to use a whole new Twitter for photography, I probably want it to be Flickr, which I already use, whose API we've already mastered, whose scaling we trust, and even though Yahoo's future is in doubt, it's more certain than that of a startup. Choice #1, if the Twitter guys are listening, is to go ahead and help us, your developers, create something seamless out of what you already have. No matter what it's easier for users to stay with what they're already using. It really isn't, it seems to me, in your interest to have users switch?? Twitxr throws down a challenge to both Flickr and Twitter. To Twitter: Scale, scale, scale and add payloads to the API. To Flickr: Go ahead and do an event streamer for pictures.
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I've not made much of a secret of the fact that I've been working on a new product, and am getting close to offering it as a public pre-alpha thing for Mac users only.  It's fairly Flickr-centric, sucking photos down from Flickr in a variety of ways and pushing up photos in others. Like Radio 8 and Google Reader, it has the ability to maintain an output feed of stuff you want to pass on to friends and associates. As I was developing this I wished that Flickr had the ability to store simple text files, because I needed a place to put an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures on behalf of each user. Of course I used Amazon S3, but I had to implement my own lightweight identity system so that Juan couldn't accidentally or intentionally replace Alice's feed. If only every user had a place where they could store stuff that's net accessible so that once and for all we could stop inventing new places. I was inspired to write about this when I read an Uncov review of Pownce where they reminded me that they were reselling S3 storage at a big markup. What if the users had their own S3 storage that they paid for themselves?  Then it occurred to me to ask if people thought S3 could be an end-user thing. I'd like to find out, so if some non-technical users who have Amazon accounts would like to try setting up an S3 account, I'd be interested in hearing how it goes. Here's an idea of how you get started. 1. You must already have an Amazon account. Nothing special about it, if you buy shirts or books or stereo equipment from Amazon, you use the same account for S3 storage. Already that's pretty easy, millions of people have Amazon accounts, right? 2. Visit this page on Amazon, ignore all the stuff about objects and buckets. In the right margin is a big button that says "Sign up for this web service." Click the button. A very familiar page appears, asking you to sign into your Amazon account as if you were going to buy something (you are!). 3. From there, I'm not sure what you see, because I have already enabled my account. But the end result of signing up is that you get two strings with weird names: Your Access Key ID and Your Secret Access Key. Any software that would save a document in S3-space on your behalf would need these two strange strings. In return each document would have a URL just like any other document on the web. Nothing strange about that.  4. You could also use the space to store stuff using an FTP-like app that runs in Firefox called S3 Organizer. It's about as hard to use as the Mac Finder or the Windows Explorer, i.e. it's no challenge for a moderately geeky user. The cool thing about it is that you're able to share anything you upload into S3 space with anyone else. You can even use BitTorrent to access any file to save you bandwidth bills and distribute the load round the net. It's all very easy to do, imho. As a developer who has to pay for his users' storage needs I would very much like to see users learn how to use S3 to store their stuff, so I can focus on writing software and fixing bugs instead of paying to store your stuff.
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Copyrighting the pyramids...ActivePerl 5.10...4x6 prints for 9 cents...Sony Alpha A700 firmware...customers who appreciate lower-megapixel Fujifilm F30/31 cameras