flickr

Flickr has made significant efforts at improving its mobile interface over the last year, and has just put out a useful update for iPhone and Android users which builds on that. Through the wonders of the latest iPhone firmware update, the built-in Safari browser can finally acquire the user's location information and pass it off to sites that request it. Google's Android platform has had this as well, but with both operating systems now supporting it, Flickr has gone ahead and added a pocket-sized version of its nearby photo viewer.

Now, whenever visiting the site you can view … Read more

After watching other photo hosts create simple tools for Twitter users to post pictures, Flickr has finally wised up and pushed out its own solution. By divining the popular photo service with access to your Twitter stream, you can now post individual shots there right from Flickr, complete with a fancy Flic.kr shortened URL.

Instead of adding a new button to do this, Flickr users simply set up Twitter as if they were adding another blog to post photos to. Clicking the "blog this" button takes you to a page where you can type in the remaining … Read more

Dear readers: I want you. And I want you to stay.

For each of the past three summers, I've spent some time on the road, driving around different regions of the United States, reporting on some of the most interesting destinations I could find, and road-testing some of the coolest gear around. The CNET Road Trip has taken me through 17 states (and one Canadian province) in the Pacific Northwest (2006), the Southwest (2007), and the Southeast (2008).

The trips have been hits, but I have struggled to organically build an audience throughout each journey. Rather, it seems most … Read more

Twitter and self-promotion go together like peanut butter and jelly, but without the right tools it takes work. I've recently begun using a handy service called Autopostr that takes most of that work out of the equation, by posting whichever of my Flickr photos I want straight to Twitter with a minimal amount of effort.

On any photo or photos you wish to share with your Twitter buddies you simply add a hash (#) in the title or "autopostr" as a photo tag. The service scans your Flickr account every five minutes, and takes any of those tagged … Read more

"All your networks are belong to us." That could be the tagline for Zensify, a new iPhone app that lets you view, update, and share content from multiple social networks.

In other words, Zensify aims to take the place of standalone apps for the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr--or at least to save you the time of bopping from one to another just to read and post updates.

In addition to those three popular networks, Zensify can connect you with 12seconds, Delicious, Digg, Photobucket, and YouTube. (Support for more services is in the works, according to the … Read more

Without any big fuss, a face-recognition feature has been added to Flickr.

The new feature was launched recently by Swedish start-up Polar Rose. It lets users import all their photos from a Flickr account to an account on Polar Rose, where the images are then automatically assembled into groups dedicated to various individuals.

As with similar features in Google Picasa and Apple iPhoto, names eventually show up next to faces in the photos once the user has identified the faces. The labels then get sent back to the Flickr account. Polar Rose, founded by Swedish mathematician Jan Erik Solem in 2004, intends to license its technology to numerous Web sites.

"No other company wants to offer its face-recognition technology to all other sites," said Solem, now CTO of the company.

Polar Rose is also ready to import photos from Facebook accounts, but there's a snag.

"Facebook has a rule that downloaded data cannot be stored more than 24 hours," Solem said.

And since thumbnails are stored in the user's Polar Rose account, the start-up won't immediately be applying the feature to Facebook photos.

Already in place, though, is the authentication function Facebook Connect, which lets users log in with their credentials from Facebook. A friends list can also be imported from Facebook and can be used when identifying faces in photos from Flickr.

Solem won't say whether there's a commercial deal afoot with Flickr. "Of course we talk with them," he said.

Flickr, for its part, has kept a low profile on the subject.

"Flickr has the second most popular API on the Web," said a representative for Yahoo, which owns Flickr. "Polar Rose is one of the many third-party developers using the Flickr API to innovate and present public Flickr data in new and unique ways." … Read more

In December, Yahoo all but killed its Jumpcut online video site by disabling new uploads and telling users to head to Flickr. Now the company said it's closing the site altogether in two months.

"After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009," a note on the site says. "This was a difficult decision to make, but it's part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo."

The closure is no surprise. Yahoo, with its own financial issues compounded by the recession, is under pressure to cut expenses. … Read more

What do you do when you can use the Internet to data-mine a collection of billions of photos?

Find out whether cats are more popular than dogs, of course. Or whether good outdoes evil. Or the Yankees beat the Mets.

The FlickrTrends application takes advantage first of the API (application programming interface) at Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr, which can show how many photos have been tagged with a particular word over a period of time. Second, it uses Google App Engine to present the relative popularity of two tags in chart form to show what's waxing and waning. … Read more