Webware

SAN FRANCISCO--Flickr was originally designed for sharing photos, but Yahoo is trying to make life easier for those who want to print pictures and not just see them on a screen.

The Yahoo site is working on an upgrade to Flickr's Organize interface, which lets people select batches of photos, to make it easier to print multiple photos, said Kakul Srivastava, Flirk's director of product management. Today, each photo must be selected individually off its own Web page, which rapidly gets tiresome.

"It should be happening in the next week or so," she said in an interview here at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday. Flickr also announced plans to upgrade the site's ability to put geotagged photos to better use at the show.

The company also is trying to make printing "more interesting," expanding with new possibilities that arrived "since the world of Kodak 4x6 prints," she said. Those new options include photo cubes and photo books enabled through a partnership with Hewlett-Packard that the printer and computer maker announced at the Web 2.0 conference.

Flickr printing today feels to me like a grafted-on afterthought. And with hordes of users moving over from the shutdown of Yahoo Photos, which was more oriented toward printing than sharing, it's wise to pay attention to the feature.

Personally, I'd like to see some other printing-related features, too. Maybe you tagging gurus know a way to do this, but I tag photos when editing them on the computer, and I'd like to include a tag for the shots I'm likely to print so I can rapidly sift them out of the archive at an online site such as Flickr.

I'd also like the ability to show high-resolution versions of photos only to family and friends so they can print their favorites and I don't have to worry that somebody is going to snatch them for their own stock photo purposes. Right now I sometimes upload two versions of a photo, one private and high-resolution and one public and smaller.

If you're a Microsoft Outlook user at work, managing your in-box could be one of the most challenging things you have to wrestle with each day. Handling incoming e-mail and categorizing its importance is a skill, and a process people have to learn. There are several third-party apps to help you figure out what's important beyond the stock methods included with the Outlook (colored flagging, and urgency), but many are for the individual, rather than the entire company.

Likewise, as a sender, figuring out how to prioritize the e-mail you're sending to others is a balancing act, and without a real universal system besides writing "urgent," or noting deadlines, whoever's getting your mail might not know what your message is worth. To solve this, a new service called Attent has created a system for enterprise mail systems that assigns a level of importance on each message based on virtual currency. The company showed it off at this morning's Web 2.0 Summit pitch session.

That e-mail about the Denver account can now be given monetary value using Attent's virtual currency system.

(Credit: Seriosity, Inc.)

Each user has his own bank of money and can assign a denomination of a virtual currency called Serios. The company says it got the idea after watching users successfully manage accounts of virtual currency in some of the popular socialized gaming MMORPGs like Second Life and World of Warcraft. The fact that you have a limited amount means that users must ration out their outgoing e-mails, and balance out their spending with that of their colleagues.

The real interesting aspect of this system, beyond its money exchange network, is the back end, which lets employees and managers alike monitor their Serios usage, and each other. There are built-in metrics to help you track what days you're spending the most, who you're giving more money to, and how heavily you're using the system. Part of this is represented in "badges," which are special indicators similar to medals, or the gold star system frequently employed in kindergarten and elementary schools. Attent breaks these medals down into multiple categories, ranging from how long you've used the system, all the way to how long you work without having to check or send e-mails. The badges go on your intra-network profile, along with your name (once included as an e-mail recipient) so others can get an idea of how much experience you have before sending you a message.

Attent seems to want to tackle the problem of prioritizing your own e-mail by putting that responsibility in the hands of others, which could be problematic with that guy in the office who always has the importance on his messages set to high. The one saving grace is that he'll be the first to run out of money, which might help him figure out how to manage his daily allotment of funds. The system reminds me a little bit of Chore Wars (review) for its social nature, although a little bit less motivational. For personal use, there's also Xobni (coverage), which is less about organizing your in-box as much as helping you figure more about the importance of an e-mail based on your past history with the sender.

Dash Navigation is building the GPS gizmo that everyone in the CNET reviews department is waiting for. See this video from 2006. Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, the company is announcing more features for its delayed product.

Dash now plans to ship its GPS product for cars, the Dash Express, in early 2008. Its key differentiator from other GPS units is that it will always be connected to the Internet, which will enable cool features like peer-to-peer (with other Dash devices) traffic reporting, and the capability to program routes on to your device from your Web browser.

Dash Express

(Credit: Dash Navigation)

The new news is that the Dash will have an open platform, so people can build interesting apps for it. The Dash team will demo the platform with its own apps, including one that links into a Zillow API, presumably so you can drive down the street and see on your device just how much the houses you're passing by are worth (see also: Realius).

The product will also read in RSS and KML (Google's geo-markup language) data from the Web to do things like display events from Upcoming, open house data from Craigslist, and landmark and path data from all those geo mashups out there like Platial. For all I know it will also tie into crime databases and flash a warning when you drive into a dangerous neighborhood.

Dash claims its platform represents a "huge business opportunity" for companies that make geo-coded content. That will be true if Dash units become ubiquitous, but the company is competing with Garmin and other well-established consumer brands. Furthermore, future cars themselves will likely be Internet-addressable; Mercedes is already demoing this.

Dash needs to ship its cool gizmo soon.

Your Dash device will have its own dashboard in your computer's browser.

(Credit: Dash Navigation)

Nova Spivack thinks it's high time we make computers smart enough to manage the ocean of scattered information our digital lives create.

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Friday, Spivack will officially take Radar Networks, the start-up he co-founded, out of stealth mode and show off Twine, a Web service for managing information, using your social network and the Semantic Web.

With Twine, people collect different pieces of information in a single place and let other people add to that collection. People can e-mail items into Twine, bookmark Web pages, or upload documents. To add tags, people fill in a form.

The software is smart enough to create tags itself after mining through the content, which can be text, audio or video. It also taps into the collective knowledge of Wikipedia to categorize information.

Radar Networks' Twine service for managing Web info and collaborating.

Under the covers, Radar Network's server is using natural language processing and Semantic Web technology to get a better idea of the meaning of a person's collected information.

"This is the user experience side of the Semantic Web," said Spivack. "Our motto is 'people are lazy.' Who wants to spend their time being a librarian?...That's what we made computers for."

The idea behind the Semantic Web is that Web content has embedded data that allows applications to "talk" to each other. With that self-describing information, summed up in the RDF (Resource Description Framework) format, software agents can act on information, making life easier for Web users.

Spivack said that the Twine "knowledge networking" service really shines when used for collaboration. People can share information on a certain subject and get notifications when someone in their social network posts something new. The more information Twine gathers, the better it gets at recommendations and understanding a user's preferences.

Radar Networks' plan is to offer a free service that is advertising-supported and to introduce a line of premium services, which would be more geared toward business users.

Also in store are a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that will let outside developers write applications on its platform. Spivack said that Radar Networks intends to follow the same strategy that Salesforce.com has in building its online development platform AppExchange, which provides a foundation for building third-party applications.

The Radar Networks platform is based on Web standards RDF and OWL (Web Ontology Language), which means that information can be transported into another service, says Spivack.

Flickr has 42 million photos with geotags--information called metadata that records the location where a photo was taken--and now it's trying to let users get more out of them.

At the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield plans to demonstrate two new features, which are scheduled to debut in coming weeks. First is a revamped Flickr map page, an interface that lets people look at the photos taken at a specific location. Next is a new "places" feature that lets people explore specific geographic sites--a catalog of more than 70,000 so far.

For a look at the new pages, you can look at a gallery of Flickr screenshots we posted. And Yahoo itself is posting some information on the new feature.

The changes bring some refinement to the current world of geotagging, which is not for the faint of heart. (Though my experience has been a lot smoother once I got the time zone issue straightened out.)

Flickr's current map interface presents users with a map dotted with pink circles; a number in each circle indicates how many photos tagged with that location have been recently uploaded to Flickr. The new maps interface replaces those circles with the descriptive tags commonly used to label regional photos.

For example, some areas are likely to show tags with geographic descriptions such as "London." Others could get event-based tags that show a spurt in popularity, such as the San Francisco Bay to Breakers race, Butterfield said. Not too many words fit on a map of the world, but users can click a button to bring up a fresh supply.

"The current user interface is slow and confusing. People don't get the idea of a paging through photos in this kind of user interface," Butterfield said.

So far the tag interface appears at the global map level, but Flickr will gradually spread it to more local views, said Dan Catt, a Flickr engineer who works on the mapping technology.

The places pages offer a prepackaged view of thousands of locations. Clicking on a link on the maps page can take a user to the nearby place page, sifted to show the tag on which the user clicked. The page itself shows recent and interesting photos taken at the site, featured photographers who have photographed the region often, and popular and recent tags that lead to a new category of photos for that area.

Josh and I are at the Web 2.0 Summit. Ironically, network connectivity is spotty here, but it looks like we can Twitter this conference pretty reliably.

The conference started Wednesday with a series of workshops. Our coverage begins at 3 p.m. with the introduction of the main session by organizers Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle.

Update: It's Thursday, and we're kicking off the conference with a discussion between Steve Ballmer and conference organizer John Battelle.

Click through to the story page for the Twittercast, and reload frequently for the latest updates.

... Read more

Up-and-coming semantic search company Hakia is launching a new social feature next week, called "Meet Others." It will give you the option, from a search results page, to jump to a page on the service where everyone who searches for the topic can communicate.

For some idealized (yet realistic) types of searching, it could be great. For example, suppose you were searching for information on a medical condition. Meet Others could connect you with other people looking for info about the condition, making an ad-hoc support group. On the Meet Others page, you're able to add comments, or connect directly with the people on the page via anonymous e-mail or by Skype or instant messaging.

From a search results page, you can jump into an ad-hoc community around the topic.

It's also a built-in marketplace. People could post items for sale on the Meet Others pages. It's "Google with Craigslist," Hakia president Melek Pulatkonak told me.

You can connect directly with other searchers.

Since Hakia is a semantic search engine, your search queries don't have to be exact to find a related community. "Flu shot" and "flu vaccine" both should get you to the same place.

If you don't want to be part of the ad-hoc community that Hakia will build around every search term, you can just ignore the Meet Others links, and no one will find you.

There's a rating system for posts on the Meet Others pages, so relevant topics should float to the top of the page. I do worry about the pages being gamed or spammed, but I still like the feature. It could be very useful to be able to connect directly with people looking for the same obscure thing you are.

The feature should launch on Hakia next week.

The Facebook chat panel at the Web 2.0 Summit this morning was a time to talk about the Facebook platform and how it's changed the development and monetization of Web services. Several of the panel speakers have immensely popular apps on Facebook, and widgets for MySpace including Slide, RockYou, and iLike.

The two big question pitched to the devs were how Facebook has changed what they've done internally and what's on the horizon. "We looked at the Facebook platform and thought this could be the greatest paradigm in technology since the Internet itself," said Ali Partovi, the CEO of iLike. Partovi and company are one of the real success stories of the Facebook platform, and are currently up to over 700,000 daily active users with their iLike music-sharing application. Partovi also noted that when they launched their app the first weekend of the Facebook apps platform launch, the company had to rent a truck trailer full of servers to handle the traffic.

Partovi also said that iLike is currently pooling close to 100 percent of its resources on the Facebook app, and is actually launching new features first on the Facebook platform before it happens on iLike.com. Other developers on the panel said that their development focus for Facebook apps fell somewhere between 80 percent and 90 percent. Slide was the only one of the bunch that noted it's only spending 10 percent of the time working on Facebook in lieu of working on offerings for other social networking services like Bebo, MySpace, etc.

Also mentioned was the article by Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital earlier this month that lambasted the Facebook app platform as being aimed at "toddlers." Lance Tokuda CEO and co-founder of RockYou said, "She's not a teenage girl...we're targeting the MySpace market...one day I'm going to build something just for her." A statement that eventually led to a chat about some of the more inane apps on the Facebook platform, and how involved users are wiling to let themselves get, both with time and money. One app in particular even lets people spend $10 of virtual currency to throw virtual feces at one of their Facebook friends (or enemies). ILike's Partovi links the "infancy" of these apps because of the age of the platform, and what developers have had the time to build. He also noted that apps for Windows weren't that great either when the operating system first launched.

So what has made this platform so successful? ... Read more

What could be more Web 2.0-ish than Steve Ballmer making a public pitch to would-be deal makers to pick up the phone?

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Thursday, Microsoft's CEO said his company was on the prowl for acquisitions that made strategic sense.

"Microsoft will continue to invest in buying technology, products and market share," he said. "We'll buy 20 companies a year consistently for the next five years for anywhere between 50 million and 1 billion bucks."

Sitting in front of a standing-room-only audience jammed into the main ballroom at the Palace Hotel, Ballmer also said Microsoft may also include open-source software makers on its shopping list.

"We will buy smaller companies. We will buy smaller companies that make some use of open source software," he said. "We don't want to discourage people who would talk with us just because they do some open source."

While Ballmer was surprisingly frank about Microsoft's expansion plans, he carefully juked his way past a question put to him from conference co-host John Battelle about his company's relationship with Facebook. Last year, Microsoft landed a deal to provide Facebook with search and advertising listings. When Battelle asked "how the financing's going," Ballmer smiled but demurred.

"As Mark (Zuckerberg) said, it's going pretty well, so I guess that's the answer," Ballmer said. "We've got a great partnership with Facebook on the advertising side...we'll see where it takes us."

As the proverbial 800-pound gorilla of the software business, Microsoft is increasingly under fire from old and nascent competitors. The company also remains several steps behind Google in the search business, a predicament that Ballmer suggested is being addressed--albeit with mixed results.

"I'd probably tell you I'm happy with everything and I'd probably tell you everything needs a lot of improvement," he said. "In every area there's a lot of good and in every area there's a lot of room for improvement."

Asked whether Google was a "one-trick pony," Ballmer shifted the focus of the question.

"One of the things that's true about most technology companies is they start in an area, get really good in that area and fill out that core," he said. "We're trying to be a three- and four-trick pony."

The conference, which began on Wednesday and runs through the rest of this week, has become a schmooze-fest where myriad entrepreneurs and investors can swap ideas about the next direction of the Internet business.