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Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband-and-wife co-founders of the Flickr photo-sharing site Yahoo acquired in 2005, are leaving the Internet giant.

Fake's last day was June 13, and Butterfield's will be July 12, Yahoo spokeswoman Terrell Karlsten said. "Obviously Stewart and Caterina have made tremendous contributions to Yahoo. We appreciate all their work and wish them well," she said.

The pair join a small but notable parade of Yahoo departures. Among others in the last week are Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of the network division; Usama Fayyad, chief data officer; and Jeremy Zawodny, a top programmer and advocate of what's now become the Yahoo Open Strategy.

TechCrunch reported the departures Tuesday.

Flickr is one of the major "starting points" Yahoo is promoting as an effort to revitalize its Web site, moving to an approach that emphasizes top properties. Flickr is a major force on the Internet, housing not just vast numbers of photos but also active groups devoted to discussing subjects such as new camera technology and photography techniques and to rating each other's images.

Update 4:27 p.m. PDT: Yahoo said the departures weren't the result of a reorganization or other internal action. "People are making personal decisions," said spokeswoman Jennifer Stephens Acree.

Update 4:42 p.m. PDT: Kakul Srivastava, who has been general manager for about a month will continue in that role, Karlsten added.

Meanwhile, the Flickr community is discussing the change--at Flickr, naturally.

Yahoo is letting outside Web sites use information from its own catalog of geographic information, thus allowing programmers to employ the Yahoo data and services into their own applications.

The company now provides an interface to the data, said Dan Catt, an engineer and geotagging buff at Flickr, Yahoo's photo-sharing site. The catalog gives locations a numeric identifier--where on Earth IDs, or WOEIDs, to various locations.

"Yahoo have opened up their geo database," Catt said in a blog entry. One specific example: the Sydney Opera House has the WOEID of 28717584.

The service is part of what Yahoo calls the Yahoo Internet Location Platform, a service currently in beta testing that's designed to help developers build geographic features into the Internet.

Expect more news on this at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference, which begins in earnest on Tuesday in Burlingame, Calif. Yahoo will preview the location platform at the conference, according to the Yahoo Developer Network Web site. Catt is giving one of those speeches on Wednesday.

The service fits neatly into the Yahoo Open Services plan, aka YOS, under which the company is trying to make its Web site a foundation for other applications, either built directly on Yahoo properties or employing services over the network on outside sites.

The Yahoo Internet Location Platform provides programmers "with the vocabulary and grammar to describe the world's geography in an unequivocal, permanent, and language-neutral manner," the site said. "The Internet Location Platform is designed to facilitate spatial interoperability and geographic discovery; users can traverse the spatial hierarchy, identify the geography relevant to their users and their business, and in turn, unambiguously geotag, geotarget, and geolocate data across the Web."

According to documentation, there are about 6 million WOEIDs, including postal codes, cities, time zones, and suburbs. So far, though, natural features and bodies of water aren't included yet.

According to former Yahoo employee Simon Willison, Yahoo got the geographic data through its 2005 acquisition of WhereOnEarth.

The WOEID interface permits operations such as translating a place name from one language to another, looking up the WOEID for a landmark, and supplying a list of likely IDs that match a specific place.

It also can let programmers find the "parents" of a specific WOEID. For example, Hearst Castle's parent is the town of San Simeon, whose parent is San Luis Obispo County, whose parent is California, whose parent is the United States.

It also permits finding neighbors--for example, towns near other towns or countries near other countries. It doesn't assign WOEIDs down to the level of addresses, though.

(Via Read Write Web)

In a bid to broaden Flickr if not actually crush YouTube, Yahoo is adding videos to what has just been a photo-sharing site.

The change, which the company plans to launch publicly later Tuesday, is a modest but significant extension of Flickr's features. The videos, limited to 90 seconds and 150MB, will be shown as thumbnails alongside users' photos, and will inherit all the features of photos stored on the site: users can add comments, captions, comments, geotags, and privacy restrictions so only friends or family may view the videos, the company said.

Videos are shown on pages similar to photo pages, and videos can be embedded on other sites.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET Networks)

The company sees the videos in effect as "long photos," moving snapshots people take now that digital cameras (except SLRs) can record video as well as still images, said spokeswoman Terrell Karlsten Neilson. The hope is to populate the site with "authentic" videos, not clips from last night's TV shows, and Yahoo will police the site for violations of the terms of service, added Flickr product manager Shanan Delp..

The company wants to reproduce some of the success of Flickr's photo work not just as a repository of imagery, but also as a way for like-minded folk to form communities. Just as Flickr lets people share photos in groups devoted to One example appears to be emerging among beta testers: the fridget, a video taken from an inside-the-refrigerator perspective as somebody (or even a dog) opens the fridge and peers in.

Only those with "pro" subscriptions will be able to publish videos, but as with photos, those with free Flickr accounts and the public will be able to watch them. The site will support videos in AVI, MPEG, and MOV formats, showing them with a Flash player but storing the original, too. Existing upload tools will work with video, too.

I see Flickr's incremental evolution as likely to succeed, as long as "succeed" is defined relatively narrowly as making Flickr users more active, loyal, or engaged. And after all, Yahoo can reuse the technology it's put together for its Yahoo video site, so design and deployment expenses were likely minimized. It might even coax some folks to spend $25 a year on a pro account, which means revenue for Yahoo.

But as the non-award-winning director of several "authentic" videos of my child that last over 90 seconds, I suspect the 90-second cutoff could be a common problem.

A Flickr video is handled just like a photo, except that there are playback controls. Thumbnail images can play the videos in miniature.

(Credit: Flickr)

Yahoo says the company thought carefully about the issue. Most people shoot video clips less than a minute long, so 90 seconds should be "a really comfortable time," Neilson said.

Although Google's YouTube can handle longer clips--up to 10 minutes for regular users--Yahoo believes it doesn't compete. "People aren't using YouTube to share their personal short-form video clips," Neilson said. I beg to differ--take a look at a YouTube search for "daughter's first steps"--but she's probably right that YouTube has a much broader usage model.

A benefit of the time limit is that it should help curtail pirated TV content. "Ninety seconds helps us define that rebroadcasting commercial content is not what this site is for," said Neilson said.

Will Yahoo users and members be confused whether to head to video.yahoo.com or Flickr? Yahoo believes not.

"Video.yahoo.com is all about broadcast...Flickr is more about personal, authentic video clips," Nielson said. Think Barack Obama for video.yahoo.com and Flickr for the clip of your niece, she said.

Up until today, only Windows Mobile 5 and 6 and BlackBerry users could take CellSpin's mobile blogging and media-sharing platform for, well, a spin. On Thursday the San Jose, Calif. company announced a big addition to the family: phones on the Symbian platform.

Adding Symbian cell phones, many of them high-end, brings CellSpin's free beta service to over 300 handsets and over 30 carriers worldwide.

CellSpinners can quickly share photos, video, text, and audio to Blogger, eBay, Facebook, YouTube, Picasa, LiveJournal, Flickr, and Windows Live Spaces, with more partnerships on the way. Of course, there are a few limitations brought on by the partner sites. YouTube only accepts video submissions, for example, and photos are the only media that can be uploaded to Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook. The blogging sites and eBay accept all four media types.

Yahoo-owned photo community Flickr has launched a new program today called Flickr for Good. The site will be a place for nonprofits or other photojournalists to pool together their photography. In order to get the ball rolling Flickr has teamed up with non-profit organizer TechSoup to donate 10,000 one-year Flickr Pro memberships (which normally cost $25 a pop) to nonprofits and public libraries to let them upload as many shots as they want to the popular photo hosting community.

Each nonprofit can grab up to five memberships to distribute among its staff. Details on how the groups are supposed to use their Flickr memberships are a little nebulous, but in its blog post about the new site Flickr pointed to several high profile organizations like YWCA and Camera Rwanda have been using the photo host to create photo exposés.

If you're a nonprofit looking to get in on the action, you can do so on TechSoup's sign-up page.

Update: I should note the memberships are not entirely free. Participants must pay $6 for two one-year accounts or $15 for five one-accounts. The fees are administrative, and go towards running TechSoup. In comparison, purchasing either of the accounts from Flickr directly would cost $50 or $150 respectively.

Flickr Good will be a place for nonprofits and other organizations to show off their humanitarian efforts.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In the process of reviewing a client's Flickr account with my colleague and fellow Searchlight blogger Brian Brown, we noticed that Flickr has recently added nofollow tags to links placed within its Web site. Flickr has been one of the few social-media entities to continue to offer "link juice" from links placed with user-generated content (in this case photo descriptions), making it a viable entity for improving inbound links to a given site.

While it's understandable that Flickr implemented nofollow tags for the exact same reason other social-media sites have--misuse and spamming--it nonetheless marks another step toward the end of major social-media sites passing on PageRank.

It's not all bad news with Flickr, though...at least not so far. The nofollow tags have not been implemented throughout the whole site. While links embedded in individual photo descriptions are nofollowed, so far, links in Set and Collection descriptions continue to be free of them. Will this change? Only time will tell. SEOers everywhere are certainly hoping not.

I apparently ruffled some feathers among Flickerites (of which I'm one by the way), when I suggested last week that maybe it wouldn't be so terrible were someone else, even Microsoft, to take a shot at upgrading a service given that Yahoo has shown so little inclination to do so.

Now, I'm by no means convinced that Microsoft is the right company for this particular job. At the same time, I can't help but feel that Flickr has largely stagnated--even if that stagnation feels safe and comfortable to a lot of current users.

There's no doubt that Flickr has some good things going for it:

1. It's a "best seller" in a world where network effects are important. The reasons why it got here aren't especially important. What is important is that it's become the obvious go-to photo-sharing site for much of the world.
2. And, as the mail I've received confirms, it's not just a large community but an often passionate one. A lot of people like not so much Flickr itself, but the network of people who use Flickr to hang out with each other.
3. Flickr has a decent application program interface (API) that allows developers to extend the site in a variety of ways. For example, companies like Zazzle, QOOP, and MOO now offer to print photographs on Flickr using those APIs. Indeed, there's more variety from these third parties using Flickr than is available on many of the sites like Hewlett-Packard's Snapfish, whose main raison d'etre is printing.
4. The free membership option is fairly limited but it lets you try out everything on the site. And the price of the $25 per year "pro" membership is hard to beat when you consider that it doesn't come with either upload or storage limits.
5. Finally, it has some nice extras. CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland recently gave Flickr the best grades for its ability to "geotag" photos with location information. It also has hierarchical sets--that is, it lets you put sets within larger collections--a nice organizational aid as the number of photos you have online grows.

If it sounds like I'm generally positive on Flickr, that's because I am. But it does have some non-trivial shortcomings--especially for users who want greater control over the use of their photos.

1. Today, there are limited mechanisms (essentially one hard-to-find global setting) to control which resolutions of photos the general public, your friends, and your contacts can view and thereby download. This is a serious issue for photographers who are happy to put photos up on Flickr but want to control access to higher resolution versions.
2. No archiving of RAW/DNG originals. This is related to the item above. I see Flickr as serving an off-site archiving function in addition to a share-my-photos one. PhotoShelter is one site that provides this ability. It would even seem like a good incremental revenue opportunity for Flickr.
3. No integrated security watermarking. This continues on the protect-photo-use theme. There are workarounds using APIs external to Flickr but this is a common feature on sites that cater more explicitly to pros.
4. A largely "Web 1.0" look and feel. This is a general observation that Flickr hasn't changed much over the past few years. New settings get buried deep in tabs within tabs. And there's precious little of the sort of interactivity that characterizes many newer sites. (In other words, you largely have to click through to see anything rather than getting a preview when you mouseover a location, for example.)
5. You can't export most of your data. This is part of a much broader Web 2.0 problem that I won't deal with at length here. Suffice it to say that, although photos can be exported through APIs, nothing else (comments, descriptions that aren't part of the photo itself, contacts) can. It's a complicated issue. What data belongs to you? What does information like contacts mean outside of a Flickr context? Suffice it to say that Flickr may not have done less than others to resolve some of these issues but it hasn't done more.

I like Flickr. I do. But it could be much more than it is. Yes, the wrong kind of change could ruin it. But it also can't continue on in essentially a stasis field for the long term.

There are probably too many electrons already being spilt today on Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Yahoo. Rather than delving into the $45 billion aspects of the deal, I'm going to specifically discuss Flickr, Yahoo's popular photo sharing service.

Flickr hasn't been a big part of the general online buzzing about this proposed deal. In part, this is doubtless because it's a small part of Yahoo's financials. It's probably also because most people have at best a vague awareness that Flickr is even a part of Yahoo. Yahoo bought Flickr and has largely left it alone.

However, as Josh Gilbertson notes over on Wired, many Flickr users are "freaking out"--as indeed they also did when Yahoo acquired the company originally.

Josh goes on to write:

One the reasons for concern is that Microsoft's Web properties, while they have their share of adherents, are not exactly leading the pack in terms of UI design, functionality and ease of use, which form the cornerstones of Flickr's popularity.

Another interesting aspect of Microsoft's proposed deal is that Microsoft does not typically go after consumer services like Flickr, which creates a lot of uncertainty for Flickr's future should Yahoo shareholders agree to the acquisition offer.

If Microsoft does buy Yahoo, I suspect that the situation for Flickr will be different from their original acquisition by Yahoo. Under Yahoo, Flickr was largely left to go its own way. As photographer Dan Heller noted in a lengthy post about Flickr and Yahoo just a couple of days ago:

In any event, the conversation went pretty simply: Flickr is really regarded as a completely autonomous tech group with no orders or objectives to do anything other than be a fun place for people to come and socialize about their photos. They have no financial responsibilities back to the mother ship, and Stewart is free to do whatever he wants, with no long-term objectives. When I asked whether there (were) any plans to ever get into licensing or other forms of monetizing its content, he said that Stewart has thought about it, but they are enjoying what they're doing too much and such a move has dubious financial returns in a market already dominated by other very successful companies.

So what I think the various Flickerites are so upset about is that Microsoft might not leave them alone as Yahoo has done.

I think they're right. The question is whether that's such a bad thing.

Contra Josh Gilbertson above, I'm not inclined to give Flickr all that much credit for "UI design, functionality, and ease of use." For example, as CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland notes:

For a Web 2.0 powerhouse, Flickr feels awfully Web 1.0. At least that was my conclusion after spending a few hours in the chat rooms of Photophlow, a start-up that grafts a highly interactive experience on top of Yahoo's photo-sharing Web site.

Flickr has been equally plodding at integrating any number of commonplace features to selectively control access to high-resolution versions of photographs or to institute security watermarks in any form. The shortcomings (and strengths) of Flickr are matters for another post I've been meaning to write. But, suffice it to say, one shouldn't confuse the fact that Flickr is popular in large part because it built up a big community for largely historical reasons with the fact that Flickr is a platform that's objectively great.

(Much the same could be said in spades for del.icio.us--Yahoo's social bookmarking service.)

None of this is to say that Microsoft won't mess things up if they acquire Yahoo and Flickr. But Flickr needs work and Yahoo hasn't helped much either.

The big news out of Redmond today is that Microsoft is working on a Flickr competitor.

A job posting on the software giant's career site reveals that the Digital Memories Experience Team is trying to recruit a program manager to lead the project.

"This feature team is building a next-generation photo and video-sharing service that will compete with Flickr, SmugMug, and other photo Web solutions today," according to the posting. It's clear who the competition is.

Flickr has a really strong and popular product right now, so if Microsoft wants to be competitive in this space, it will have to put out a phenomenal product with enough incentive to pull users away from the Yahoo service.

One thing that, in my opinion, has hurt some of Microsoft's online efforts recently is the lack of an open platform and open data. Flickr's main strengths lie in that they make it very easy for users to download and upload photos through a variety of methods. Much of this is made possible through Flickr's developer application programming interface, or API, and also through first-party support.

I am happy to see Microsoft entering this space and creating more competition, but it really needs to focus on making sure that the service plays nicely with a variety of download and upload methods. This will be a welcome replacement to Microsoft's current photo-sharing solution in Windows Live Spaces, whose photo resolution could stand to be bumped up.

Via Long Zheng