Webware

Yfrog, ImageShack's image- and video-hosting site for Twitter, has a new trick up its sleeve. It can now cross-post whatever you've just uploaded over to both MySpace and Facebook.

Users will see the new option to post to one or both of these services if they're uploading directly through Yfrog.com. Once you've given either service authorization, Yfrog will then cross-post whatever you've uploaded, from anywhere--be it a desktop or mobile app.

The system worked well enough in my testing. Though, out of the three social networks, it's the hardest to find your photo back on MySpace, as it shows up as a rather nondescript link wherever your status updates are set to appear. Another small quibble is that if you're uploading from a third-party Yfrog publishing app, it will automatically post the photo to these services--that is, once you've authorized them through Yfrog.com. The only way to make sure an image you're uploading won't show up in these other places is to upload it directly through Yfrog. Hopefully an API update can change that.

Those who are serious about cross-posting something from one social network to another should check out a service like Ping.fm, Updating.me, or Tarpipe. All of these can be set to watch one feed and transmit them elsewhere. This can be a huge help if you don't feel like fiddling with options on each specific network.

Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET

Sharing alert on YFrog

I live on the Net. I turn to a browser when a question needs answering, the Web houses my e-mail and photos, and my news and entertainment arrive via broadband.

So it wasn't until the third online Web site failed me that it dawned on me: maybe software running natively on a computer might do better when it comes to printing this year's photo calendar. After iPhoto got the job done, I ended up spending $198.27 for nine calendars through Apple--but even the company that arguably pays more attention than any other to a smooth user experience still made me grind my teeth a couple times. Does it really need to be this hard?

There are times when service at phone companies, insurance companies, and car mechanics frustrates me, but their interests--extracting as much of my money as possible--are often poorly aligned with my own. In the case of ordering up some calendars for family members, the roles seemed reversed: I was happy to pay real money, but it seemed like the online companies didn't want to take it.

This was by no means an exhaustive test of publishing sites. I didn't try Shutterfly, WebShots, or any other rivals, and I haven't even judged the output yet. But since the promise of Internet-based business for more than a decade now has been low-friction commerce, I thought I'd share my experience with the world that indicates there's still work to be done. Here's the route my journey took:

First stop: Qoop
In 2009, I ordered my calendars through Qoop, so they had incumbent status this year. I fired up the site, picked an 8.5 x 11-inch calendar, cropped my photos accordingly, and started uploading.

The first problem arrived when about half the images wouldn't upload. I tried again, but had the same problem. A third try with somewhat lower-resolution images seemed to do the trick, but there wasn't any feedback from the site. Each time I clicked through the somewhat cryptic error messages, I saw only my selection of last year's photos at the site.

... Read More

Twitter-centric photo sharing service Yfrog released its top 10 searches of 2009 on Monday, and the results are not all that shocking; It appears most of its users are hunting for tween-heartthrob vampires, and/or famous singers. Below is the full list. I've linked each query with a search on Yfrog:

1. New Moon / Twilight
2. Jonas Brothers
3. Tiger Woods
4. Michael Jackson
5. Halloween / costume
6. iPhone
7. Adam Lambert
8. Kanye West / RIP Kanye West
9. Iran election
10. Miley Cyrus

To put this in perspective, Yfrog's list shares only the terms "new moon" and "Michael Jackson" with Google image's top 10 results of 2009, at least according to the recently-released zeitgeist. Also worth noting, is that Imageshack launched Yfrog in late February of 2009, meaning this list is more like the top 10 search results during the last 10 months.

Honestly, I'm just happy that image searches for the Iran elections beat out those for Miley Cyrus.

Previously: Yfrog gets Webcam recording for photos and video

Once again, Google has embedded new features into its free desktop photo management app for Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7), Picasa, after first launching said features on the online Picasa Web Albums.

This time around Google is offering collaborative Web albums. Since August, you've been able to let friends upload photos into your Picasa Web Album, and vice versa. The way you grant permission on the Web is with a subtle icon next to the name of the person with whom you've already shared the album. Your friends can then quickly add their own photos to the online mix without having to first send them to you. They'll also be able to edit photos in the album. We immediately see the appeal for those who are working together on a project, like creating a family reunion album.

On Tuesday, Google baked this album-building tool into Picasa's upload process. When you upload photos from Picasa 3.6 to a Picasa Web album, you'll be able to grant those with whom you share the album dispensation to work with your shots. After choosing the pictures you'd like to upload, you'll choose a group you want to share with and check that box to let them contribute to your work. You can also click the "Share" button in an album on Picasa for the desktop to type in e-mail addresses for individuals.

The benefit? Assigning collaborative rights on the desktop as part of the upload process keeps you from having to log into Picasa online to grant permissions for albums and photos you've already shared.

Similarly, if others have given you the green light to meddle in their albums, you can also upload photos from Picasa 3.6 directly into albums under their control.

Picasa 3.6 can now also suggest contact names in the "People" tab for the app's name-tagging feature, which helps you speedily put namea to the faces in your entire photo collection. There's also more control over which photos get scanned in the Tools menu. Other additions include being able to save custom crop sizes and an option to keep a JPG photo's compression metrics when uploading to Picasa Web Albums.

Image identification company PicScout is expanding its efforts to help people identify the rights holders of images they find online.

On Tuesday the company is set to add microstock site Dreamstime's more than 7 million images to its Image Exchange catalog. What this means is that users who have the company's Image Exchange Firefox add-on installed will be able to identify when one of those images (or the other 40 million or so that are in the catalog) winds up on Web sites and in places like Google's image search.

The add-on, which was introduced in October and remains in private beta, displays a little blue "i" on top of images that are within PicScout's image catalog, and that can be linked back to the rights holder or stock image site. This includes images from Flickr, as long as they've been marked by their uploader with a Creative Commons, attribution-only and noncommercial license.

Either way the end user will see whose image it is without having to do the legwork. PicScout goes one step further to link people directly to where they can then buy it, or get in contact with the image owner to secure the rights to reuse it.

The company says it plans to expand to Internet Explorer next, but chose Firefox first since it offered cross-compatibility with both PC and Mac users. The two platforms will offer identical functionality since they'll be working off the same master index.

Along with the addition of Dreamstime, PicScout is also announcing that it has picked up Joichi Ito as one of its advisers. Among some of his other gigs, Ito sits on the board of the Mozilla Foundation, is the founder and CEO of venture capital firm Neoteny, and is also the CEO of Creative Commons.

Previously: PicApp offers ad-sponsored stock photos (Note: this company has since been spun out by PicScout.)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google's first search engine let people search by typing text onto a Web page. Next came queries spoken over the phone. On Monday, Google announced the ability to perform an Internet search by submitting a photograph.

The experimental search-by-sight feature, called Google Goggles, has a database of billions of images that informs its analysis of what's been uploaded, said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering. It can recognize books, album covers, artwork, landmarks, places, logos, and more.

"It is our goal to be able to identify any image," he said. "It represents our earliest efforts in the field of computer vision. You can take a picture of an item, use that picture of whatever you take as the query."

However, the feature is still in Google Labs to deal with the "nascent nature of computer vision" and with the service's present shortcomings. "Google Goggles works well on certain types of objects in certain categories," he said.

Google Goggles was one of the big announcements at an event at the Computer History Museum here to tout the future of Google search. The company also showed off real-time search results and translation of a spoken phrase from English to Spanish using a mobile phone.

"It could be we are really at the cusp of an entirely new computing era," Gundotra said, with "devices that can understand our own speech, help us understand others, and augment our own sight by helping us see further."

Offering one real-world example of the service in action, Gundotra said that when a guest came by for dinner, he snapped a photo of a wine bottle she gave him to assess its merits. The result--"hints of apricot and hibiscus blossom"--went far beyond his expertise, but that didn't stop him from sharing the opinion over dinner.

He also demonstrated Google Goggles to take a photo of the Itsukushima Shrine in Japan, a landmark tourists may recognize even if they can't read Japanese. The uploaded photo returned a description of the shrine on his mobile phone.

Although the service can recognize faces, since faces are among the billions of images in the database, it doesn't right now, Gundotra said.

"For this product, we made the decision not to do facial recognition," Gundotra said. "We still want to work on the issues of user opt-in and control. We have the technology to do the underlying face recognition, but we decided to delay that until safeguards are in place."

Google's search is a near-constant work in progress as the company strives to grow beyond supplying search results in the form of 10 hyperlinks to various Web pages.

"It's not just about 10 blue links," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user experience. "It's about the best answers."

"In the past 67 days, we launched 33 different search innovations," she boasted. "That's one innovation every two days."

Three more in the pipeline came to light on Monday. First, the mobile version of Google's search service to suggest completions to search queries now is geographically smart. That means, for example, a person in Boston typing "re" in a search box will see "Red Sox" as a suggested completion but a person in San Francisco will see "REI."

Second, a "near me now" service due to launch in coming weeks can tell users of iPhones and Android devices what's near them at a particular moment. Third, location supplied by the mobile phone can adjust product search results to show nearby stores that have a particular item in stock.

Sci-fi vision
Google isn't afraid of raising expectations of the service to the sci-fi level, where concepts such as augmented reality--an overlay of computer data that supplements what people see in the real world--have flourished for years.

Eventually, Google wants a system that lets people point to an object and retrieve information on it, Gundotra said--turning a person's finger into a real-world mouse pointer. "Today marks the beginning of that visual search journey," Gundotra said.

Google's system, like its Picasa face recognition software for photo management and face blurring in Google Maps' Street View, employs technology stemming from Google's 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision, a start-up focusing on face and object recognition. Founder Hartmut Neven, still a Google employee, was at Monday's event.

Neven expressed pride for one aspect of the system: the fact that much of its background work happens with no human interaction through a process he called "unsupervised learning."

"The algorithms build models for visual recognition are unsupervised," Neven said. "Based on the photos we find, models--for example, the Empire State building--will emerge."

Live translation
Speaking of science fiction, Google also showed off technology that could turn mobile phones into a computerized translation system. It wasn't quite the babelfish of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," but it did translate Gundotra's question about where the nearest hospital is located into Spanish.

The technology works using a new communications conduit to Google servers. The raw utterance recorded by the mobile phone is sent to Google's servers, which first interpret it as English. It's then translated into Spanish, and the text is sent back to the mobile phone. A text-to-speech synthesizer on the phone--for the demonstration, a Droid model running Google's Android operating system--reads out the Spanish.

The service is set to launch in the first quarter of 2010, Gundotra said.

Google already offers the ability to search by voice--notably with applications for the iPhone and Android phones that today work in English and Mandarin Chinese.

Gundotra said Japanese now has joined the other options for the applications, and that more will come. "In 2010, you will see us dramatically expand our efforts and support more languages," he said.

Language is key to Google's mission and operations, and the company touted its progress in the area. Mayer said Google now can translate words from any of 51 languages into any other. In 2008, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said the company expects to increase that to 100 languages.

"We are working to break down the language barrier," Mayer said. "That focus is what unlocks the Web."

Immediately following the Friday night broadcast of MTVU's alternative-music awards show, the Woodie Awards, viewers will be able to watch a 360-degree video of it online.

The Immersive Media technology supporting the online video, scheduled for online availability at 8 p.m. PST, is designed to enable users to freely navigate around a video, 360 degrees, letting them explore angles and shots that they wouldn't normally have been able to see.

While I haven't seen the Woodie feed yet, I did have a chance to play around with the technology on some test videos. The video experience seems perfectly suited for a concert format. It's certainly something worth checking out, even if you don't particularly care for the music, which is scheduled to include performances by Death Cab for Cutie, The Dead Weather, Matt and Kim, and Passion Pit.

This is the first big event for the IM Live technology, so it should be interesting to see how the experience of the fully produced show on TV compares to the IM Live video experience, in which site visitors essentially become their own producers. If you end up making your own comparisons, let us know what you think.

Coca-Cola on Thursday launched a facial-matching Facebook application called the Coke Zero Facial Profiler.

As long as users have at least three photos of themselves in their Facebook profile, the application searches across other pictures from Facebook users that have used the app to find someone whose face matches theirs most accurately. Those that don't have three images can either upload a picture into the app from their desktop or capture a picture from their Webcam.

I had a chance to use the app this afternoon. After it is added to your profile, you can immediately direct it to find pictures in your profile. That process takes a little longer than I would have liked, but it wasn't so bad that I wanted to move on.

To match up my face to someone else's, I took a picture with my Web cam. After I chose the picture I wanted to use, the app asked me to drag my image to match the shadowed outline of a head. I also needed to move markers over my eyes to ensure that the application was reading my image correctly.

My only issue with Coca-Cola's facial-matching app is that it took too long to find a match. I realize that it's searching through several faces to find the right person, but the experience left me wishing that it would end sooner than it did.

After finding a match (the app said it was a 60 percent fit), I was given the option of connecting with the person I matched up with. It was a nice option, but I was unsure how that conversation would go--"So, you don't know me, but our faces are about 60 percent alike. Wanna be friends?"--so I opted against it.

Overall, Coca-Cola's app is worth trying out once or twice, even if just for a laugh. But until more people try it out, and their images are added to the database, I'm just not sure that it has the kind of lasting power so many other apps on the social network have. I would come back to it in a month or two to see if the matching can improve, though.

After a trial release in July, Face.com on Wednesday launched Photo Tagger to the public. Photo Tagger is a free third-party application for Facebook that uses facial recognition technology to automatically tag photos of people.

Facebook users can use Photo Tagger to automatically tag their photos, it uses facial recognition software to tag all of the photos in an album. After selecting an album photo Tagger scans the photos, then batches them into groups by subject and suggests tags for them. When tags are confirmed, they are pushed live to Facebook, within the users privacy settings.

Photo Tagger also features its Face Alerts system that continuously scans newly uploaded photos automatically and alerts the user when it detects their photo, or their friends, image whether tagged or untagged.

"Face.com recognizes the ever-expanding scope of Facebook and takes it one step further--making photo sharing better, faster and more fun. Photo Tagger connects names to faces and you to your friends." said Gil Hersch, CEO, Face.com.