Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, who left the Yahoo-acquired company in June, has a new gig. She posted on her blog on Wednesday that she'll be joining a stealthy New York-based start-up, Hunch, as "Chief Product Officer, board member, and resident Facebook app skeptic."
So what is Hunch? That's under the radar, but we're hearing from a well-placed source that it's a recommendation engine that uses "collective crowd intelligence." That doesn't sound too original, but our source hinted that the technology behind it is pretty top-notch. It's still under development, but when Hunch is finished, it will presumably be able to provide recommendations on just about anything or everything. (Hence the name "Hunch.")
What Fake did say: that she won't be relocating to New York, but will spend a lot of time there; that her husband and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield isn't involved; that Hunch invites will start to go out in the fall; and that she still doesn't find much time to sleep.
Importing my Flickr feed into Facebook
(Credit: Facebook)This post was updated at 2:54 PM PT with comment from Facebook.
Facebook members now have the options to import their activity from a number of external social-media sites into the "Mini-Feeds" on their profiles, a post on the company blog explained on Tuesday.
Currently, this is limited to business reviews site Yelp, bookmarking site Delicious (owned by Yahoo), and photo-sharing sites Flickr (also owned by Yahoo) and Picasa (owned by Google). More are on the way, including Digg, the post by engineer Harry Huai Wang assured members.
With aggregation the hottest topic in social networking these days, plenty of sites from Pownce to Plaxo have opted to let members pull in feeds from external sites, and an entire genre of "lifestreaming" services like FriendFeed and SocialThing have sprung up for those social-media junkies who want to be able to track everything their friends do in one place.
But it's a bit curious on Facebook: most popular social-media sites already have applications built on Facebook's developer platform, and those can pull updates into the Mini-Feed--so at first glance, it seems slightly redudant.
Using the Mini-Feed import, however, requires no application to be installed on Facebook (read: it's easier), and is fully opt-in, unlike Facebook's controversial Beacon advertisements (of which Yelp is a partner). I originally speculated that perhaps Yelp, Picasa, Flickr, and Delicious were "partners" in a Mini-Feed import program, meaning that Facebook may have gotten some revenue out of the deals.
But a Facebook representative confirmed to me that there were no formal partnerships in place, meaning that it was more likely just an API integration--curious.
The scene at the studio space in West Chelsea.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks)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.
A table of Flickr stickers.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks)The event, held in a cavernous studio space in Manhattan's gallery-friendly West Chelsea neighborhood, was in celebration of the "24 Hours of Flickr" event that took place in May. The "24 Hours" initiative encouraged members of the Yahoo-owned photo sharing site to document their lives with their cameras for the entirety of May 5 and then upload them; lucky Flickrers would be featured in a commemorative book published by bookmaking start-up Blurb.com.
The compact white books were being distributed for free at the party, along with just about every kind of Flickr swag imaginable: T-shirts, stickers of multiple varieties, buttons, lens cleaners, and even desktop tripods. There was also extensive decoration in the characteristic Flickr pink-and-blue, from beach balls to balloons to projections on the wall. Flickr junkies are notoriously hardcore and have a close affinity to the site, so the swag table was well-attended.
I left after about half an hour. Sure, it was fun, but I was getting a little weirded out by the number of cameras getting poked in my face, and the fact that I'd have sounded really dumb amid all the conversation about SLRs and telephoto lenses.
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