photo-sharing

Photobucket stats show Democrats like to search more

One of my favorite things to get in my e-mail each week is the data report from News Corp-owned Photobucket. Think of it like the Google Zeitgeist, but for people's searches on the popular photo hosting site. While the report doesn't offer up every statistic, the creators pick a few interesting or pertinent things that make good reading. This week's tidbit? Politics.

The Democratic and the Republican presidential nominees (Edwards now obviously excluded from that list) are represented with several thousand search hits each. So what do the numbers show?

Democrats: 1. Hillary Clinton (25,400) 2. Barack Obama (24,736) 3. John Edwards (1,829) Republicans: 1. Ron Paul (10,589) 2. Mike Huckabee (2,064) 3. John McCain (1,986) 4. Mitt Romney (1,785)

Clearly the Dems like to search. Despite getting more love from the media, Huckabee, McCain, and Romney combined don't come close in searches to Ron Paul. Take that for what it's worth. However, it could mean that people are trying to figure out what the guy looks like.

I would like to see other popular social sites release weekly or even daily stats. The very nature of site stats are similar to Digg, Delicious, and others, in providing entertainment and a window into the habits of other users.

The rest of the report is posted after the break.

Photobucket goes mobile, launches pocket-friendly site

Photobucket is launching a mobile version of its service today and can be found at m.Photobucket.com. Users with any browser-enabled handset will be able to search and browse both public and privately uploaded photos at up to five at a time using keypad shortcuts. Additionally Photobucket is pushing user uploads of both photos and videos from their phones as a new feature, although this functionality has been around since late 2006 using the slightly less glamorous MMS and e-mail route as opposed to coding an app for phones on the Windows Mobile or Symbian platforms.

Photobucket's internal … Read more

Power Downloader finds a new online photo browser

With 2008 under way, Power Downloader knew it was time to get back to work. His first order of business would be to sift through e-mails that had piled up over the holidays. After scanning through the messages from various contacts around the world, Power came upon an e-mail from Francois Foto, one of Power's most trusted contacts from France.

After wishing Power Downloader a happy new year, Francois Foto mentioned that one of his new year's resolutions was to use his vast photo library in a some sort of project. One idea he thought of was to … Read more

Smugmug adapts for large, small screens

Correction: I updated the blog to correct a misspelling of Don MacAskill's name.

SmugMug, a site popular among photography aficionados, has been retooled with a more adaptable interface and overhauled video-sharing technology.

The new interface, which the Mountain View, Calif.-based company calls SmugMungous, automatically displays one of nine different sizes of a photo on the screen, with a patch of thumbnails of related images to the left side. The reason for the SmugMungous name: the largest of these images is 1600x1200 pixels, enough to fill up very large monitors.

In addition, the new site comes with an iTunes … Read more

Photobucket, Picasa bring photo-sharing to TiVo

Apparently, fast-forwarding through commercials just isn't enough. TiVo announced on Monday that users of select photo-sharing services are now able to access their image collections through its set-top boxes.

The digital video recorder manufacturer has partnered with two photo-sharing services--the Google-owned Picasa Web Albums and Fox Interactive Media-owned Photobucket--in order to enable users to surf through their photo albums as well as their friends' and family members', provided that their TiVo boxes are broadband-connected.

A release from the company emphasized the fact that photos are viewable in the highest resolution possible, which on the TiVo Series 3 and … Read more

Flickr: 10 things we love and hate

Over Thanksgiving break I got to field a lot of strange tech questions from friends and family. One of the most frequent was what photo services were worth using and why. Nearly everyone has a digital camera now, and there's no limit to the number of places designed to share your shots online. It's no secret I'm an unabashed Flickr user, and despite writing a newbies' guide on the service, even I'm a little hesitant of using it for honest to goodness photo backup (more on that later). Like any critic, I'm peeved by some aspects of the service--especially some of the perks that even a pro membership can't offer. I've put together of five things I love about the service, and five I loathe.

Love

Clear Creative Commons licensing tools. Savvy uploaders can set Creative Commons licensing restrictions on any of their shots, both individually and in batches. By default, you can also choose what kind of licensing you want any of your shots to have, which makes it easy if you're a professional photographer to limit what people can do with them. In addition to giving you tools to tweak photo licensing, Flickr also provides fairly simple explanations of each license type, along with links to learn more. Also, photos that have been given more restrictive licensing can't be downloaded, making it easier to keep control of your intellectual property.

Easy uploading tools. Flickr's latest effort to make photos easier to upload to the Web is a big step up from their previous iteration. We took a look at the new version in August and came away impressed. Well, it's still worth using one of the software plug-ins to get right-click mousing access for contextual uploading on any photos from your desktop, the new Web uploader is really great for updating a ton of shots all at once while away from your home machine.

The API. Flickr's API has allowed for a ton of third party applications and services for both personal and communal use of photos. From business cards to coffee mugs, a hosted photo is more useful when you can do more with it than a quick glance.

At NYC Flickr party, you're always on candid camera

As a member of the press, I'm accustomed to being the token partygoer taking awkward photographs of the room. Not so much at Flickr's "24 Hours of Flickr" party in New York on Thursday night, where there were so many cameras being whipped out that you'd think it were Times Square.

"I'm stuffing my face with cake, and then I look up and someone's taking a picture of me with chocolate all over my mouth," one mildly uncomfortable attendee told me.

The event, held in a cavernous studio space in Manhattan'… Read more

Fastest Flickr uploading tool

Photo sharing sites like Flickr, Webshots (a CNET affiliate), Zoomr, SmugMug, and others provide a cheap (usually free) and easy way for users to share their digital pics with friends, family, or the site communities at large. There's always a slight delay, however, between downloading pictures from your camera or cell phone and actually getting them published to those sites. If you're a Flickr user, you can eliminate that delay completely with Foldr Monitr, a free utility that automatically uploads images from specified folders on your hard drive to your Flickr account.

Foldr Monitr works nearly as simply and effectively as its description promises. After installing and running the app, you'll need to "authenticate" Foldr Monitr with your Flickr account. Clicking the "Authenticate" button in the Foldr Monitr interface will load the Flickr authorization page, launching your default Web browser if it's not already running. After authenticating Foldr Monitr on the Flickr Web site, you're not finished. Click the "Finish Authentication" button in the Foldr Monitr interface to complete your login.… Read more

MyFamily.com brings families together

MyFamily.com lets families create private Web sites where members can post news, share photos, and host live chats, among other things. It's a great way to centralize all your family communication--my own large extended family has had a MyFamily.com space for a few years--but the site's circa-1998 interface always left me wondering why we didn't start a simple Yahoo group, which has the same functionality.

Recently I got word that MyFamily.com was getting an overhaul (in fact, the link above leads directly to the beta of MyFamily.com 2.0) and logged on to check it out. Gone are the previous version's tightly spaced lists of text links, which have been replaced with plenty of white space and a row of nine tabs across the top of the page that help you navigate the site's features. The Videos, Files, and Members tabs are self-explanatory. Events leads to a calendar of events, where family members can not only list birthdays and anniversaries but also create invitations for parties or other gatherings; Gifts takes you to a MyFamily.com area on Qoop, where you can order family photo books and tchotchkes.

The four remaining tabs--What's New, News, Photos, and Stories--are where members are likely to spend the most time.… Read more

Fotolog acquired for $90 million

A correction was made to this post: Fotolog's projected revenue is $2.3 million, not $2.3 billion. Dr. Evil would be proud.

Fotolog, a photo-sharing social network founded by Meetup co-founder and CEO Scott Heiferman, has been acquired. After several days of rumors that the company was up for sale, the French company Hi-Media Group announced on Monday that it had acquired Fotolog for $90 million in cash and stock.

As the Silicon Alley Insider notes, most of the New York-based Fotolog's 10 million-plus members are in Europe and Latin America. The company's 2007 projected revenue … Read more