Tag: flickr

Every once in a while it's good to take a look what alternatives to a service you use and like very much. So given the current Microsoft/Yahoo-dicussions, I thought it was once again time to look at some of the "alternative" photo communities out there: Smugmug, Zooomr, 23hq, Fotocommunity and ipernity. I didn't really try most of these services but just looked at their feature-set to see if they offered what I need. Also don't expect a complete comparison off these sites here, since this would probably easily fill a 20 pages article. I just want to point out a few things I've noticed.

So let's get started.

Yahoo just launched a new portal site dedicated to Flickr development on code.flickr.com. The site more or less aggregates content from the Flickr API group as well as a new developer blog. Besides that it also comes with a Trac installation (not all that completely set up yet, though) which I guess will be used for 1st party applications like the Uploadr.

Trac not yet really configured

Somehow the whole site looks remarkably unfinished considering that its already announced on the official mailing-list yesterday evening. For instance besides Trac just sitting there, there is also a really weird bug in the CSS when hovering a timeline item.

Don't hover links

But don't get me wrong: I like the idea of offering such a portal to the community, but I was a little bit surprised that it was announced that early. At least configuring Trac to have Uploadr as a component instead of the default "component1" and "component2" would have been nice

I'm also not quite sure yet, what the point is with logging in using your Flickr account ... from what I can tell, the login isn't integrated with the Trac installation and seems to be the only interactive part of the site ...

That said, I'm really curious what this site will be used for. Is perhaps Yahoo working on some more 1st party applications for Flickr?

A few days ago I learned via a post by Ted Leung about a new tool for all you Flickr fans out there. Think about Photophlow as a chat room, where everyone in the room can use a common search and then promote photos to be shown to everyone in the room.

According to TechCrunch Flickr is about to extend its feature list with support for video probably in order to be able to compete with services like YouTube ...

Thanks to Flickr's handling of the whole censorship issue (or lack thereof), many people are now asking for alternatives and quite often Zooomr get mentioned. Could anyone please explain to me, what's so great about it, because I don't get it. Yesterday I created a new account there just to see what this is all about.

On nearly Web2.0 site you see it. It's not the login field, it's not the advertising. It's the popular links where you get to a site that miraculously shows you the most popular item posted or referred to by the users of this particular site.

Well, one famous exception of this rule is a not completely unknown photo community called Flickr. You might have heard of it. Flickr has something different: They call it "interesting" ... interesting.

Ok, not subsets in the original sense but more a way to group a bunch of sets into a so-called "Collection". The coolest part of this IMO is, that it's also possible to create collections within a collection which finally makes at least some kind of nesting for sets possible

So Flickr has finally announced a deadline for their login-migration to the Yahoo!-ID system: 31st of March. While this announcement has definitely caused quite a lot of rumble in the Flickr community I fail to see why. First of all, the moment they got acquired by Yahoo! it was clear that something like this would happen (not could).

Seems like Flickr has added some new features. One of them is a way to share also private photos with other people who are not necessarily members of Flickr and therefor can't be added to your friendslist etc.

The whole beast is URL based, so whoever gets this URL has access to these private photos. But this isn't really a problem IMO since you can always expire those so-called "Guest Passes".

This feature could really come in handy for me every time there is some family party and people want to get the photos I made but are too lazy to register and account on Flickr

Florian Cervenka from yourep.com contacted me a couple of days ago and informed me about his new Flickr alternative. Since it is still in Alpha state or just getting Beta, it's really hard to compare it to long standing sites like Flickr or 23, so ... I simply will try not to compare them at all but but instead state what I like so far about yourep.com and what I don't like (sorry Florian, but you asked for that ).

Note: These comments are made after just browsing the page as a guest, so what I'm writing here might be incorrect. The time has come for me to stop registering at every Web2.0 app that might be interesting I simply grew tired of scanning each TOS and privacy guidelines for the world "soul".