Photobucket, is making a significant change aimed to weave the widely used photo-sharing site more tightly into the Web 2.0 fabric.
The company is releasing an application programming interface (API) for its site, said Chief Executive Alex Welch. That means that ordinary developers will be able to build more sophisticated services around the Photobucket services and content.
Photobucket CEO Alex Welch
(Credit: Photobucket)Photobucket already made its API available to commercial partners, but now ordinary coders will be able to get access by signing up on the Web site, Welch said. The company is announcing the news in conjunction with the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
"What's happened in the developer community is that we have a ton of developers writing applications for OpenSocial and Facebook. There's a huge appetite for writing against these APIs," Welch said, and now it's time for Photobucket to take the plunge.
Ultimately, Welch believes the move will mean more Web site traffic for PhotoBucket and potentially lucrative advertising and sponsorship deals. Toyota, for example, sponsored a Photobucket partnership with an online image-editing tool, FotoFlexer.
Missing from Welch's peer-pressure list is Flickr, a Yahoo photo site that rivals Photobucket in scale. But Walsh wasn't afraid to give his competitor some props. "I think it's a fairly well done API," Welch said. "It's been interesting to watch and learn from."
The API will let developers write applications that can be used to log in to accounts, upload photos and videos, search public content, access and change metadata such as titles and tags, and share content through e-mail, Photobucket said.
Following Flickr
For an illustration of what an open API can get you, look no farther than Photophlow, a site that builds a lively photo-sharing and chat room interface atop Flickr. With it, users can post photos into a chat room for discussion, add comments directly onto the Flickr site, and flag pictures as favorites in their own Flickr account. It was put together without formal help from Flickr.
The API makes Photophlow on Photobucket possible, said Photophlow co-founder Neil Berkman. "We're interested in enabling real-time media sharing in a variety of contexts, and since Photobucket is one of the largest hosts of photos and video, we'd certainly consider building on top of their API," he said. "Their audience is a bit different from Flickr's, so this would likely be a separate application, taking advantage of the same technical core we've built Photophlow on," he added.
Web 2.0 loosely refers to the gradual rebuilding of the Internet as a more interactive domain, with users supplying their own content, information from one Web site being embedded into services from another, and bloggers avidly commenting on all the developments. APIs are the mechanism by which much of those interconnections are made, and without them, a Web site risks being an island unto itself.
Photobucket got its start as a no-frills site that could store photos, but hardly as an island. It's widely used to host pictures that actually appear on Web sites such as MySpace, eBay, or Facebook. And after Photobucket's 2007 acquisition, it's a part of News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media division, along with MySpace. And it's gradually become more fully featured.
Programmers who want to use Photobucket's API can sign up for a free key online, Welch said, and they're free to try to profit from the resulting work. "For the small developer, we're not concerned if they're monetizing it in some way," Welch said.
Some developer limitations
Well, not concerned up to a point. The developer API will let Photobucket throttle Web site traffic to prevent abuse, but the company will watch for busy applications that could be new business opportunities, he added.
"If we see a noncommercial application that's doing something clearly in our commercial terms of service or doing something very creative, it's our responsibility to go out and figure a way to partner," Welch said.
Current partners using Photobucket's commercial API include FotoFlexer and TiVo, which can present slideshows on TVs drawn from Photobucket members' accounts and let people search Photobucket content.
The company will announce several new partnerships Tuesday, too:
• Intercasting is working on technology that could let mobile phone users upload their pictures taken with camera phones to Photobucket accounts.
• Snapvine is integrating Photobucket into its Web-based audio commentary and blogging technology.
• Time Warner's AOL will launch an application called BlueString that will let people browse Photobucket and other content.
Photobucket's move is just the latest in a long line of companies to woo programmers; that courtship has moved online as the Web has grown to house rich, sophisticated applications.
Even if many impressive but unprofitable Web sites fall by the wayside, those with the programming skills will likely stay gainfully employed. A Monday report by analyst firm Forrester says corporations will spend a lot of money to use Web 2.0 technologies within their walls. In the report, the firm predicts growth from $764 million in spending in 2008 to $4.65 billion in 2013.
A vintage picture of yours truly from back in the moustache era and given the Warholizer treatment.
(Credit: Warholizer)Chances are you're not going to match the influence over the art world that Andy Warhol did with his pop-art pictures of Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, but at least you can have some of the fun.
BigHugeLabs has added a "Warholizer" tool that lets you upload a photo or modify one hosted at Flickr or Photobucket so it becomes a tribute to Warhol's bright, posterized art.
BigHugeLabs already offers a large collection of entertaining photo-effect tools. Along with the Warholizer, my favorites include the mock motivational poster maker, the ID badge maker, the palette generator (is there a way to feed this into Adobe Systems' Kuler?), and the picture cube creator.
Photoshop Express offers users a selection of different options from which to select as an easier alternative to adjustment sliders.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)MONTEREY, Calif.--Adobe Systems has committed to shipping a beta version of its online image-editing tool, Photoshop Express, this year, and said it will be complete in 2008.
"By late this year, we anticipate having a beta version," said John Loiacono, senior vice president for Adobe Creative Solutions, speaking at the 6sight digital imaging conference here. And next year, the online service will be "available to anyone," he said.
Loiacono showed Photoshop Express running on an Adobe server connected over the Internet, he said. But when the average person experiences the software, it likely will be through partners such as Shutterfly or Photobucket, he said.
Unsurprisingly, Loiacono left unmentioned Flickr, which said in October it will use Picnik's online photo-editing tools.
Photoshop Express is a profoundly important project, and Adobe's schedule indicates that its repercussions are near-term and not academic.
For Adobe, the project is the spearhead of a transformation from a seller of boxed software to a provider of services in an increasingly rich Internet experience. And for the industry overall, it signals that Internet technology is maturing enough that companies are willing risk extending the brand of respected PC software to the network.
Photoshop Express, as its name suggests, isn't a full-fledged version of Photoshop proper or even of its hobbyist-oriented sibling, Photoshop Elements. The intent is to reach a much larger audience than the company currently reaches with its higher-end boxed software products.
This sports car used to be red.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)
A look at Photoshop Express
Loiacono demonstrated several features of Photoshop Express, hampered only fleetingly by a couple Flash error messages. He selected photos to edit from a group, removed red-eye, cropped, adjusted color tones, used a healing brush to erase a skin blemish, and replaced the color of a red sports car with various other hues.
The demonstration showed the relatively limited set of features available in Photoshop Express. There were three top-level menu options: quick fix, tuning, and fun.
"Fun" options include replace color, which Loiacono showed to change a red sports car into blue, purple and green. Other options are huge, black-and-white, distort, sketch, and tint.
"Quick fix" options were crop and rotate, blemish removal, red-eye removal, auto correct, and sharpen. Tuning options were white balance, exposure, highlight, fill light, saturation, and soft focus.
Photoshop Express offers a blemish-fixing tool similar to full-fledged Photoshop's healing brush.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)If you want another look, my comrade Martin LaMonica--who had the online Photoshop scoop in February--last month posted a video of an earlier Photoshop Express demonstration.
Computational photography
Loiacono also offered a glimpse into what Adobe and others call computational photography--the achieving through the combination of photography and computers what can't be achieved with either alone.
With digital cameras, some computation already happens in cameras themselves, but Loiacono predicted more.
For example, today people can combine two photos that are exposed differently--one for a subject in the foreground illuminated by a flash and another with natural light in the background. Merging those two photos could happen earlier in the process so people don't have to futz with processing the photos afterward, he said.
"What we're moving to is an environment when your camera will be able to take two shots, process them in the camera, and give you the desirable output," Loiacono said.
He also demonstrated a video variation of stitching still images together into a single panorama. A video taken panning across a view of an African waterfall was converted into a wide panoramic pan of the same waterfall, with the water flowing across the full scene even though it was taken from different frames of the video.
He also showed a view of Adobe's light-field camera work, which processes multiple images taken simultaneously so the computer can effectively construct a three-dimensional model of the scene.
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