The Social

Discount retailer Target has signed a deal with photo-sharing service Photobucket, adding it to the small collection of online partners for its in-store photo-printing service.

Through the partnership, members of Photobucket can directly order photos for pickup at most Target stores (presumably any Targets that don't have photo-printing stations would be the exception). Typically, the photos will be ready within an hour.

Photobucket, a unit of News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, is the third current partner for the retailer; Target already has partnerships in place with Shutterfly's and Kodak's online photo services.

Last week, Photobucket announced a partnership with start-up Scrapblog to make it easier for members to put their photos into online (and eventually print) scrapbooks.

Photobucket, the massive photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, has partnered with Scrapblog, a start-up that lets members create online scrapbooks.

Through the partnership, whose financial terms were not disclosed, Scrapblog's drag-and-drop application will be available within Photobucket so that users can work their Photobucket albums into scrapbooks and then share or embed them on the Web. Starting in September, printed versions of Scrapblog scrapbooks will be available for purchase.

"Scrapbooks have traditionally been an important part of how people have kept and shared memories offline for many years, and bringing that capability online to Photobucket gives users even more options for enhancing their lives and expressing themselves digitally," Photobucket president Alex Welch said in a release. "We are excited to partner with Scrapblog, and be the first photo and video Web site to integrate a digital-scrapbooking feature directly into the site, making it easy, convenient, and accessible to everyone."

Coral Gables, Fla.-based Scrapblog, founded in 2006, has created scrapbook-related marketing campaigns for brands ranging from Carnival Cruise Lines to the ABC television series Ugly Betty (parent company Disney is an investor). Longworth Venture Partners led Scrapblog's Series A venture round in March 2007.

Looks like some big-media deal-making went into this one.

Photobucket, the photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, has announced the launch of an iPhone application (download), just like everybody else.

Users can browse their Photobucket albums, as well as upload images from the iPhone to the service with a single click. The application costs $4.99.

But Photobucket had a more interesting announcement on Thursday, namely a multiyear partnership with Ask.com, the search engine owned by new-media conglomerate InterActiveCorp.

Through the deal, Photobucket will use exclusively Ask.com search for its photo, video, and Web searches, and some of Ask.com's text and display ads will be shown on Photobucket. No financial specifics were mentioned.

"Photobucket has one of the largest online audiences, and now Ask.com provides these consumers with the answers to the questions they ask every day," said Andrew Moers, general manager of partnerships for Ask, the No. 4 player in search. "This alliance furthers our strategy to bring Ask.com to consumers worldwide through a broad range of Internet access points."

Photobucket sister company MySpace, meanwhile, has its search (and many of its ads) handled by Google. But on that note, Google has provided ad technology to Ask.com since the dinosaur days of 2004.

Photobucket, the photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, is expected to launch a "group albums" feature on Wednesday.

"Group Albums are designed to offer a simple way for colleagues, friends, and families to collaborate on creating photos and video collections where the entire group can contribute, access, and enjoy them," Photobucket President Alex Welch explained in a statement Tuesday. Photobucket released its first developer application program interface (API) last month.

Basically, these are collaborative media-sharing albums much like the "groups" feature in Yahoo's Flickr. Photobucket's release suggests that they could be used to pool photos and videos of weddings, graduations, concerts, and the like. You could also create groups for pictures of dogs on skateboards, superhero-inspired Halloween costumes, or whatever else you might want, but keep in mind that Photobucket likes to keep things squeaky-clean.

Additional features of Photobucket's group albums, which have a 1GB storage limit, include the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of updates, create a slideshow, and if you're the group owner, get e-mail notifications when new photos or video are added.

Group administrators also can create their own easy-to-remember URLs, for example, photobucket.com/cuteboyswithnoshirts.

This post was updated at 10:34 a.m. PDT.

News Corp.-owned social-networking site MySpace has announced a new initiative called Data Availability, a way for members to share profile data with other social and community sites across the Web.

Co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe, Chief Operating Officer Amit Kapur, and vice president of technology Jim Benedetto announced the new development in a press call Thursday. DeWolfe called it "an innovative offering to empower the global MySpace community to share their public profile content and data to Web sites of choice throughout the Internet."

Inaugural partners in the project are Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket (also owned by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media), and Twitter. The program, available to MySpace's users worldwide, will be rolling out to a full version in the coming weeks.

"Historically, social destinations on the Internet have operated as independent, autonomous islands," DeWolfe said. "Today, MySpace no longer operates as an autonomous island on the Internet...We're hoping to create a significantly more social experience across the Web."

This is a huge deal.

When rival Facebook, then far smaller than MySpace, opened its platform to developers last year, the bigger social network started to fall from favor among the tech-savvy set. But Facebook has been reluctant to partner with other sites outside of allowing them to create developer applications, only recently allowing RSS feeds from partners like Digg and Yelp into its members' "news feeds." When popular blogger Robert Scoble tested a script that exported his Facebook contact information to a Plaxo address book, Facebook temporarily banned his account.

Facebook still hasn't caught up in user accounts--it has about 70 million, while MySpace is over 100 million--but MySpace was in need of some tech cred regardless. Signing on to "open Web" initiatives could be what keeps MySpace relevant, and it's clear that some engineers over there are tuned in. It was one of the biggest partners when Google announced the OpenSocial developer application standard last year, and one of the "founding partners" along with Google and Yahoo when OpenSocial was spun off into its own nonprofit organization.

"Socially dynamic Web destinations should be portable," DeWolfe said, "and should allow users to import and export aspects of their platform."

Amit Kapur said that Data Availability is "founded first and foremost on allowing users to have comprehensive control over their content and data." Partnerships with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter will give MySpace access to more than 150 million U.S. Internet users, he explained, with an 85 percent reach in the U.S. Web user market. Smaller sites, as well as other large social networks, are invited to join the program, too.

That public profile information consists of information like photos, videos, and profile content like favorite movies and music as well as friends' lists. Changing data on one profile automatically changes it on the partner sites as well, which users can opt into "connecting" to their MySpace profiles by clicking a button. "This is incredibly powerful and makes an entirely new social experience available to our users," Benedetto explained. MySpace will be rolling out a central control panel to handle it. "A user can update their profile on MySpace and dynamically share that information with the other sites they care about," Kapur said.

All authentication will be handled through OAuth (Open Authorization), and technology director Benedetto said the company is looking at other "open and nonproprietary standards." Currently, OpenID is not supported, but he said that MySpace is exploring the possibility.

MySpace is also officially joining the social-networking project known as the DataPortability Workgroup, which contains members from many other major social sites across the Web.

JavaScript and server-side controls will be released over the next few weeks for partner sites' administrators to have access to public MySpace data. Benedetto said that MySpace will be "aggressive" to make sure that profile data is not exploited by third parties.

The big question: Will Facebook want to be a part of it? "This project is open to any site out there that wants to work with us," DeWolfe said, "so we're happy to work with Facebook if they want to join up with us on this project."

Photobucket, the massive image-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp. last year, announced Tuesday the debut of its mobile Web site.

On the new site, now live at m.photobucket.com, members of the photo-sharing site can browse their own photos as well as public images, upload photos to the site from their mobile devices, and access a limited home page. In the future, the company has said, Photobucket Mobile will expand to allow video functionality as well as options to embed photos in social-networking profiles.

A statement from Photobucket cited that demand for mobile photo-sharing access is high. According to an internal survey by Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. division that runs Photobucket, 80 percent of users who responded to the survey own camera phones, 36 percent use the camera every day, and 52 percent access the mobile Web on their handsets.

Not to mention the fact that some other popular image-sharing sites, like the Yahoo-owned Flickr, already run mobile Web sites, as do social-networking sites like Facebook that have photo-sharing features; Photobucket needed to catch up with the competition.

And if cell phones are too small for your taste, Photobucket has a deal with TiVo so that you can access your online albums on your nice big HDTV.

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 TiVo HD devices means full high definition.

In addition, the TiVo interface makes it possible for users to search the overall database of public Picasa or Photobucket images by keyword.

The Photobucket search interface on TiVo

(Credit: Photobucket/TiVo)

It's yet another step in TiVo's quest to make its equipment more versatile than the standard DVR--and to make it an appealing choice in a market that remains tepid.

"At TiVo, we're focused on the entire entertainment experience, from movies to music, and in this case--memories," Jim Denney, TiVo's vice president of product marketing, said in the company's statement. "By working with these well-respected and popular photo-sharing partners, TiVo enables families to share their pictures in new, fun ways."

This fall, TiVo announced a deal with RealNetworks' Rhapsody to bring the subscription-based music service to its devices.