Webware

I recently went on a nice, long vacation, and the first thing I did when I got back was to upload some of the best 200 or so photos I had taken.

As an experiment, I uploaded many of the same shots to two services--Flickr and Facebook. Both let users tag photos, so I wanted to see which ones would get tagged first, and not by me.

The winner? Facebook.

Just an hour or two after having uploaded to both services, all of my 88 shots on Facebook had been tagged. The most amazing part is that very few of them were tagged by me. Right after my upload, I tagged a handful of them, which in turn alerted those users to view the shots. From there, they (not me) went on to tag some more of my photos, continuing the cycle.

Facebook lets you tag individuals within the photo like in this group photo.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Flickr, on the other hand, was a different story. I uploaded close to 200 photos to the service. There were still the same shots of the same people, but there were also additional shots of landscapes or nature. Of those shots, only a handful were tagged, and only by one user--my colleague Stephen Shankland, whom I had pestered to look at my artistic capturing of sand castles. His tags weren't even of people; instead, he added descriptive keywords about the photos.

Now, to be fair, I have far more friends on Facebook than I do on Flickr--more than eight times the number to be exact. But in terms of photo usage, my Flickr activity far outweighs what I do on Facebook. I've only created 37 albums on Facebook which contain a total of 532 photos. On Flickr, I have 101 photo sets (Flickr's nickname for albums) which total 3,438 photos. More importantly, anyone on Flickr can see the photos I've uploaded, not just people I've put on a friends list.

In terms of use, the sites are quite different, too. Facebook may have gotten into the photo arena a little later than Flickr, but it's quickly outpaced it. The company says it's getting 900 million photos uploaded each month from its more than 200 million users, whereas Flickr's official numbers put that number somewhere around 90 million uploads from some 40 million registered users. Just keep in mind those 200 million Facebook users are probably not using the site specifically for photo hosting like they are on Flickr.

A tale of two tags

So why are Flickr users so hesitant to tag other people's photos? There are many reasons, but the biggest is that the two tagging systems are just plain ... Read more

Picnik has a new and simple way of distributing photos you've just edited in your browser. Using application programming interfaces from Photobucket's TwitGoo photo-hosting service and Twitter, it lets you compose a tweet that includes a link to the photo right inside of the editor.

To do this you simply link up your Twitter account once, and Picnik saves your credentials for future use. It also lets you take a shot you've edited in Picnik and quickly make it either your Twitter profile picture, or background. In either case it's skipping the step of you having to venture off Picnik to make the changes.

There are several benefits to blasting out photos over Twitter. People on many modern desktop clients can view the image without leaving their app. And TwitGoo provides a simple way for other people to see the original and directly respond or retweet it from their own accounts, which can give you extra distribution power if people like what you've just made.

You can take photos you've just edited in Picnik and send them straight to Twitter with a simple new feature.

(Credit: CNET)

A correction was made to this post. Read below for details.

Photo-sharing site Photobucket announced Thursday that it has inked a deal with T-Mobile that makes it a provider of a mobile photo service for T-Mobile customers. According to the company, users will be able to send photos directly from their mobile phone to their Photobucket album, their PC hard drive, or any e-mail address. To use the app, customers will need to download it onto their BlackBerry Curve, Pearl, or any one of three Windows Mobile devices. The app is available in a free 21-day trial. Once that period is up, subscribers can choose to keep using the free version or purchase the full software for a one-time fee of $19.99.

Community discovery service Citysearch announced Thursday that its new site design and new features have officially gone live. According to the company, users will have access to its new "hyper-local" search that enables them to find and share local information and recommendations with friends in social networks across the Web. The revamped site boasts 150 local city guides and information on over 75,000 cities and neighborhoods nationwide, the company claims. With the help of Facebook Connect, users can sign in to Citysearch with their Facebook usernames and share their local reviews on the popular social network. All of Citysearch's new features are live now on its homepage.

Peer lending company LendingClub.com announced that it has raised $12 million of Series B funding in a round that was led by Morgenthaler Ventures. The company also announced that Pamela Kramer, former chief marketing officer at MarketTools, has joined the company as its own chief marketing officer. LendingClub did not disclose how it will put the funding to use.

Personal finance site Wesabe launched a new version of its financial management tools for banks and credit unions Wednesday. Dubbed Wesabe SpringBoard, the service will offer customers a "smart statement" that allows them to view their account data and guide them in savings and creating financial goals. The service also boasts community features that will allow users to share advice, support, and tips for acquiring more wealth. Along with the software, users will be able to use widgets for the Mac Dashboard or Vista Widget pane to have access to their information. Wesabe declined to disclose availability or pricing information.

Correction at 5:00 p.m. PDT: The Photobucket/T-Mobile deal is not exclusive.

Photobucket has enhanced the way its users can publish photos and videos from its site to others, an activity its users use to post to more than 2.4 million different sites a day. Users now have the option to first resize a photo, then post it to 15 different social networks and blogging tools without leaving the sharing page. Authorizations to each site are now made in a pop-up window that is powered by Gigya.

Along with the sharing update, user slide shows have been tweaked to automatically update when new content is added to the source album. Previously, users would have to republish, and update the embed code, which was a bit of a hassle. The company has also updated its Facebook application to let users insert one of these directly into their Facebook profile.

With updates to its core site, Photobucket has also relaunched a new mobile version of its site for WAP phones that stretches and resizes images to match the handset's resolution. Each mobile photo page now shows any user comments and ratings. The mobile-friendly front page has also been reworked to displays more streams of information in a smaller amount of space, like the most viewed and highest rated images.

Although unrelated to today's news, I'm told HD video is well on its way to coming to Photobucket. As mentioned in a previous post, Photobucket-owned TinyPic, which serves as a testbed for experimental social and content features that trickle up to Photobucket introduced streaming HD video in late February. If it comes to Photobucket, expect it to be a feature aimed at the service's paying Pro users.

The new sharing options let you post to other social networks without leaving the page, using technology from Gigya.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

A few weeks ago TinyPic.com quietly launched support for HD video uploads. I gave it a spin earlier Thursday and the results look great. It supports files up to 200MB in size, which I'm told will get bumped up to 500MB starting next week.

The service's main appeal is that you can quickly upload and share these videos with friends, all without having to register. You can also upload an unlimited number of videos, however each one can only be up to five minutes long in length if it's in HD. SD videos, like most taken on point-and-shoot digital cameras, can be up to 15 minutes, which is five longer than YouTube allows.

Something worth mentioning is that TinyPic (which is owned by Photobucket) often serves as a test bed for upcoming Photobucket features, meaning Photobucket's video player may soon be getting an upgrade. It currently accepts HD video files, but the quality is just a hair below what's offered on TinyPic.

I've embedded my test video below. Here's the same clip on Photobucket for comparison's sake.

Related: Which HD Web video service is the best?

On Thursday, Photobucket introduced two new features: a way to skin albums and an overhauled organizational tool that lets users drag and drop photos into various folders.

Of the two, the organizer is the biggest enhancement. Users are taken to a dark gray editing environment that lets them make changes without the entire page having to refresh. Everything is drag and drop, which is useful for ferrying photos and videos between albums, and reordering album arrangement. There's also support for batch operations, so you can quickly move, reorder, and rename multiple photos at once.

Compared with Adobe Photoshop Express and Flickr's Organizr, this new organizer isn't nearly as technical. Missing are things like group tagging, and control of the metadata. Considering you can add and edit tags from the individual photo pages this seems like an oversight.

The new organizer is black and sleek, but is missing some editing capabilities found elsewhere on the site.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The other big feature is the skinning of album pages. This is just another level of personalization you can give an album short of reordering the images. There are a few hundred themes to choose from, and like a blog theme on Wordpress.com, you can preview what it looks like before applying it. Each theme changes the colors of various page elements, with the centerpiece being the background. I found most of the themes with background images to be too distracting, but there are some simpler ones that dramatically improve the somewhat barren white look the service had before.

The album theme editor.

In addition to the grouping of Photobucket-built themes, users can design their own with a simple editor that lets them pick the color scheme, background image, and border colors. You can preview all of the changes in real-time, then push it out to one or more of your albums. There's also a publishing feature that lets you share it with other Photobucket users.

One thing I'd still like to see with both of these features is more cohesion among other parts of the service. For instance, if you want to edit a photo from the organizer, it kicks you out to the special partnered FotoFlexer editor. Likewise, if you're in an album and want to rearrange the shots it feels like you're going to a completely different site. I'm not saying Flickr's done a better job at this, however on Photobucket the experience feels far more disjointed.

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.

Photobucket on Monday fixed a security hole that allowed people to view private photos of strangers.

All that was needed was the user ID of someone with a private album on Photobucket and the file name of one photo in their album, said Byron Ng, a Vancouver, B.C.-based computer technician who exposes security flaws in social networks and other sites.

Many MySpace users use Photobucket to post material on their MySpace pages, he said in an e-mail, adding, "This is a way to find 'some' private Photobucket albums."

MySpace and Photobucket are both owned by News Corp.

Photobucket fixed the hole Monday afternoon after being contacted by CNET News in the morning.

"Photobucket is aware of the issue and it has been resolved. A fix was rolled out this afternoon, less than 24 hours after the site was made aware of the issue," a Photobucket representative said in an e-mail.