Don't be frightened, but evil and frustration lurks in your web browser. Yeah, that same seemingly benign and ultra flexible tool that you're using to read these words has a dark side. Something you probably don't think about much, because you're numb to it. It's hidden in plain sight, so hard to see because it's everywhere, filling your day on the web with a nameless angst. Lest you write me off as a nutty zealot, I cease my babble and reveal the little bugger:
Looks innocent, doesn't he? Melodrama aside, it's really a terrible experience using browse boxes to upload 20 pictures. My pictures are usually named IMG_4087.JPG or something equally descriptive, and furthermore they're usually tucked away in one or more places that I'm not used to browsing -- but often I can click over to them pretty fast. It's even worse when they stack these guys 10 deep and expect us to spend more time finding the photos than it takes to upload them!
About a week ago Yahoo! proposed a solution to this mess. The PhotoDrop application lets you upload pictures to Flickr by dragging and dropping them into your web browser. You can drag any number of pictures at once, and without any delays you get a preview of the pictures you've selected. Furthermore you can rotate, scale, crop, and apply filters to these pictures all right on your desktop without talking to any servers or watching a spinning beachball (or rotating hourglass, if you're so inclined).
This solution is based on a new technology released by Yahoo! called BrowserPlus™. The cool thing about the technology is that it will soon be open for anyone to use, so that regardless of where you spend your time on the net, the folks who build the websites that you use will be able to make your uploads faster, and let you do a whole lot more right there in your browser.
Finally, BrowserPlus is a piece of software that you have to download and install, and a lot of us are weary about installing plug-ins. That's the bad news. The good news is that you only have to install it once. Having done so any number of sites that use it can run without interrupting your browsing. We're focused on making this first time install as painless as possible, and at the same time keeping BrowserPlus lightweight and secure. So check out the prototype and let us know what you think! till the next, lloyd
Popularity: 42% [?]
Almost two and a half years after it was released, the ZoneTag prototype from the group formerly known as Y!RB is still out there. ZoneTag remains some people's favorite application for geotagging photos and uploading to Flickr (owners of Nokia phones, feel free to try). Interestingly, since launch, ZoneTag had been used on numerous cross-country trips - at least one done on motorbike, and one with a truck - yeah, that one was me.
However, there's a new outstanding achievement in the ZoneTagging-coast-to-coast category. Joe Rehana, aka Joe Trek, has been ZoneTagging his way from San Francisco to Maryland on his bicycle inline skates. No "motor" there. We've been following him since the start of the trek as we noticed (thanks, Rahul) his photos in the ZoneTag stream. Now, Joe is still in California (see his picture map), but at this pace, he's likely to make it to Maryland long before the Democratic primaries are over beginning of the fall semester.
Yes, the future of travel photos is almost here. This is just what Scott Adams wishes for, complete with easy annotation of the photo's content based on your location (click on Joe Trek's photo below to see the tags). The nature of consumer capture and sharing of media is changing these very days. One on hand, the Nokia N95 and other high-end cameraphones and location-enabled cameras now merge high-quality imaging (and video), location awareness, text-input capabilities, and, most importantly, network connectivity (did anyway say Eye Fi?) in a device that's in the hands of millions of, you know, regular people. On the other hand, Flickr and other services offer APIs for posting and adding metadata to photos that help disseminate as well as archive all this content. At the end of his trip, or even during, Joe Trek will have the set of photos geotagged, annotated, explained, and archived till the end of time on the Flickr servers. This should be the experience of every vacationer out there. Why wouldn't it?
p.s. Joe, if you're reading, may I suggest using Fire Eagle to have your location automatically updated on your blog?
[updated: Joe is not biking, he's inline skating with his gear in a baby jogger - holy @$%*!]
Popularity: 43% [?]
PhotoSoup is a visual word puzzle generator built with tag-photo pairs from Flickr. This prototype uses public, Creative-Commons-licensed photos and Flickr's open APIs. The object of the game is to find all the tags hidden (up, down, across, and diagonal) in the puzzle square. The photos around the perimeter of the puzzle are the clues -- the player views a series of photos and tries to discover the associated tag-words. The player's objective is to find all the tags hidden in the puzzle before time runs out.
PhotoSoup began as a hack for Yahoo! Europe's internal hack day back in October 2007. When our puzzle hack won the "Coolest Hack" prize, we were inspired to finish what we'd started, and share the fun with the rest of the world.
To create and play a new puzzle, the player enters a topic (or tag), such as "zoo" or "landscape" or "food." Or, you can enter your own Flickr screen name to generate a puzzle built with images from your photostream. Of course, you can also try this with public photos from your friends and contacts, by entering their screen names.
Who built it
How do I get it
Finally, it's worth mentioning that it is also possible to embed a PhotoSoup puzzle on your homepage, or in a blog. Simply follow the link to embed the puzzle, and we will generate the code that you should include.
Popularity: 15% [?]
PhotoSoup started as a hack for an internal Yahoo! Europe Hack Day this past fall. Despite an approaching deadline for participation at the upcoming 2008 WWW conference, we could no longer resist the challenge, and had to participate. Over lunch in Barcelona, we started collecting and discussing ideas we could implement in 24 hours, that would have some potential to win.
We came up with PhotoSoup, a visual word puzzle generator that allows players to create word search puzzles with tag-photo pairs taken from Flickr. The tag is hidden in the puzzle, and the photo is shown as a clue. The objective is to find all hidden tags in the puzzle before you run out of time. The jury loved it, and we won the prize for "coolest hack."
Most of us on the PhotoSoup team work at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona, Spain. The Barcelona lab is one of Yahoo!'s three international research laboratories outside the U.S., and has a truly international character. We currently speak 14 different languages and represent an equal number of nationalities. The Barcelona lab is young -- just recently we celebrated our second anniversary. Our work is focused on topics related to Web retrieval, mining, natural language processing (NLP), and multimedia.
The photo above shows the PhotoSoup team members. Simon Overell is missing from this photo. At the time of our hack, he was an intern at Yahoo! Research, but now he's now back in London on a mission to finish his PhD at Imperial College. Lluis Garcia (Yahoo! Spain) is our man with Flash running through his veins. Lluis single-handedly developed the PhotoSoup front-end in Flex and connected all the back-end components produced by the other team members.
Saludos desde España,
Roelof
Popularity: 12% [?]
Roelof van Zwol, January 25th, 2008 on 1:30 pm
Last week I discovered photophlow, a web app that some are describing as the reincarnation of Flickr Live. Photophlow launched quietly over the holidays and is still in invite-only beta, built by a startup worth watching called Oortle.
Photophlow lets you share your Flickr photos in real time and interact with photographers and their photos in a dynamic chat room environment that feels at times like a virtual world. The application embraces a collection of powerful APIs from a variety of popular services - Flickr (obviously), Twitter, Tumblr - and connects to the instant messaging client of your choice. Even the venerable Yahoo! Search term extractor manages to contribute to the playful ambiance.
Photophlow wires the social and the semantic together to create delightful, unexpected interactions between pholks and their photos. Encounters take place in the present tense, but are preserved and reflected back into the Flickr photostream of the participants as new metadata -- comments, contacts, collaborations. The phph experience amplifies the power of Flickr as an open platform: this app finds new ways to unlock walled gardens of sociability (you know the profile pages I'm talking about) and cultivates an environment where truly original media-sharing activity can flourish. Talk about hybrid vigor: it's now possible to tweet a photo. Or use a Flickr machine tag such as phlow:emote=doh to express an emotion. Or get an IM notification when something happens in your photophlow room.
Photophlow was created by a handful of people, led by Neil Berkman, a veteran software developer who's been building inventive social apps and thinking about "real-time media sharing" since the days of web 1.0; when social media buzzwords were a rare commodity, an open API was hard to find, and the social graph was barely a twinkle in Dave McClure's eye.
A bit of history (from Eric Costello, who was there making it): The original Flickr evolved from a web-based massively multiplayer game called Game Neverending. (If you're a Flickr user and student of URLs, as I am, you've probably wondered about the .gne file ending you sometimes see on your travels through Flickr. Now you know.). Along the way to becoming the world-class photosharing site it is today, Flickr was a flash app that let you chat about shared photos in real time. Back then, none of this interaction was preserved asynchronously. As Flickr evolved in response to feedback from the lively community it attracted, the Flash app was retired indefinitely, and "Flickr Live" as it was called, lived on only in the dreams and schemes of a few active and inventive early members.
Neil had the good fortune to hook up with one of these passionate ringleaders -- Bryan "striatic" Partington, one of the early flickrati and a longtime advocate for real-time Flickr. Striatic proved to be the perfect co-conspirator -- an antic photo poet in a bowler hat, a skilled UI designer, and natural born storyteller. They collaborated on photophlow for over a year before meeting face to face. This past fall, at the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit, they showed their project to Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield and he gave it his blessing. Photophlow the phenom has just begun.
There's also a photophlow group on Flickr to explore.
NOTE: Here at next.yahoo we have a dozen a few photophlow invites left to share. Leave a comment and let us know if you want one.
Popularity: 16% [?]
havi hoffman, January 17th, 2008 on 1:30 am
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