Webware

Flickr announced Tuesday that it has improved its search tool. The site's search results page now allows users to see small previews of photos and get details on those pictures without being forced to visit the individual photo page. It's a nice improvement.

But if you're looking for something a little different, these Flickr alternatives are worth checking out.

Flickr search services

Bubblr Aside from the fact that it lets you search for photos by tag or user name, the real focus of Bubblr is to help you create a comic strip that you can publish for the Bubblr Archive.

When you search for pictures on Bubblr, it displays your search results next to the search box. From there, you can either go to the photo's respective Flickr page, or drag and drop images into your comic strip. When you create a comic strip, you can also add dialog bubbles to tell a story. When you're ready, Bubblr lets you publish your comic strip to its archive. I was pleased with how well Bubblr worked. Search was quick, dragging images worked beautifully, and the finished product was great.

Bubblr lets you add dialog boxes to your images.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Compfight Compfight allows you to search Flickr by tag or text. So, if you choose to find photos by the tags associated with images, simply input a keyword, and Compfight will do the rest. It displays several images matching the query.

If you're looking to search Flickr based on the text associated with pictures, Compfight will do that, too. In my experience, changing how you search will change the results quite substantially. When you click on an image, you'll be brought to its respective Flickr page. Thanks to a simple search box and little clutter, Compfight is easy to use. I liked it.

Compfight lists several search results for any Flickr query.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

There are currently more than 10 billion photos on Facebook. With so many images, Facebook's own photo management tools just don't do the job you might expect. Realizing that, I've found some great apps that will help you get more out of your pictures. You won't be disappointed.

Facebook photo tools

Photo Album Strip Photo Album Strip is a great app. After you install it on your profile, it will allow you to change the designations for your albums to anything you want. You can also change their colors, reduce the number of picture categories, or hide those that you don't want your friends to see. It's an extremely simple app, but it works well and it's one of the more convenient apps in this roundup. It's definitely worth trying out.

Photo Album Strip gives you some ideas for photo album categories.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Photo Box Photo Box is similar to Flickr. It allows you to tag your photos and share those with friends. You can also arrange them based on the topic of the photos. But perhaps the most appealing aspect of Photo Box is that it tracks how many people have viewed your images. That should give you some insight into what your friends like. Overall, Photo Box is a pretty simple app, but it's worth trying out.

Photo Box brings Flickr-like features to Facebook.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Crackle, the video site owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, has expanded its feature film lineup, which means that you can now watch "Groundhog Day" or "Spider-Man 2" at the office, if your boss isn't looking.

Crackle now hosts "nearly 100" full-length features, according to a release, and "dozens more" are on the way. There's also a pop-culture trivia game called "Crackle Cinemactive."

What's not clear is whether these movies will soon be on their way to YouTube, where Sony is one of a number of content partners that will be bringing TV and movies to the Google-owned video-sharing site. YouTube has agreed to use a Crackle player when showing Sony content, and Crackle will get a cut of the ad revenue.

Sony launched Crackle two years ago, a year after it acquired video site Grouper for $65 million. Unlike bigger video hub Hulu, a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., Crackle has a target audience: men ages 18 to 34. That's what Sony hopes will make it more advertiser-friendly.

"Our movie lineup is unmatched online," Eric Berger, Sony Pictures Television's senior vice president of digital content, said in a release. "These are the movies that matter for guys 18 to 34, and this is the next step in creating our direct-to-consumer network."

Gmail's got a new option in its labs section that lets users insert images directly into their e-mails, and not just as attachments. This has been something you've been able to do in standard e-mail software for ages, but Gmail's way of handling them for the last five years has simply been to stick them on as attachments that show up in the bottom of your outgoing message.

This wasn't the worst way to view images, but if you were using Gmail to put together a short photo tour of your travels, or a family newsletter, it's come up short compared with software e-mail clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple's Mail that offer much richer creation tools.

Now, when you want to insert an image into your e-mail you can either upload it from your computer or grab it from a URL (like you're able to do in Google Docs). It sticks it right into the message where it can be resized and aligned to fit in with the rest of your message. Gmail warns that while going the URL route is easier, if your recipient's using Gmail or some other Web mail service they'll have to click on the "display images below" link since it doesn't load them to keep spam at bay.

My own personal request is for Gmail to offer the same kind of simplicity for videos. Does a friend or family member have a video they want to share via e-mail? Great, but it probably won't fit as an attachment. If Gmail were to build in an integrated YouTube uploader, I'd be in heaven.

Inserting pictures in Gmail with the insert images item flipped on lets you drop images into your e-mail just like you do in Google Docs.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you're a Twitter user, you've probably seen tweets directing you to a person's "Mugshow." This is yet another Web gimmick that makes you scratch your head when you first learn about it, but over time it begins to make a modicum of sense. Think of it as the essence of Twitter, in pictures. Kinda.

Both Daily Mugshot and Daily Booth ask that you come back to the site once per day, take a snapshot of yourself, and publish it in your timeline of pictures. You can add comments to your pictures, share them with others, and view other users' pictures. That's it. Twitpic they ain't, but they are fun.

Maybe you find the concept ridiculous. But if you don't, which one should you use -- Daily Mugshot or Daily Booth?

It's time to find out.

After two and a half years of development and a total investment of about $2 million, advertising start-up Big Moving Pictures was just about ready to start signing customers and generating revenue.

Then, in September of 2008, financial disaster struck Wall Street. It was right before the big unveiling of the company's product. BMP's potential customers--large consumer advertisers--lost their budgets. The best contacts at customer companies got laid off. The start-up found itself in a business wasteland. It was ready to go. But its pipeline to revenue had dried up.

It was a disaster for the company, but CEO David Knight (disclosure: a friend) didn't think it meant he had to fold up shop. To his mind, and those of his financial backers, the idea was sound; it's just that the timing had gone bad. Knight found his business in a unique situation that let him execute an unusual business maneuver: he put the company into hibernation.

Knight cut expenses to near-zero, convinced his creditors to cut the company a lot of slack, and stopped angling for new business. It was all to put the firm essentially into deep freeze while he waited for the economy to recover enough to be able to support his business.

BMP's business is placing ultra-large high-resolution video displays at airshows and similar events, and using those displays to show live footage from cameras mounted in and on the vehicles performing at the show (the ability to get permission to mount HD cameras on military aircraft is one of the company's competitive advantages). Wrapped around that unique video are interviews, pre-recorded features, and advertising, the source of BMP's revenues.

Before putting Big Moving Pictures on ice, Knight says he looked at the usual accepted alternatives, including raising money to bridge the recession. He said that would have been both difficult, dilutive to the employee shareholders, and pointless, since there was really nothing of additional value the company could accomplish without customers. He also looked at changing the business model radically into one that didn't rely on advertisers, but did not come up with a concept that made sense (although he is working on some ancillary video productions using his well-placed cameras).

How to put a business into suspended animation
When companies start putting money back into advertising experiments, Knight is convinced, his business will again become viable. But as BMP was still pre-revenue before the market crash, he found himself able to simply turn off the lights without actually killing the possibility of turning them back on.

Here's how he did it.

Hollywood can celebrate that pirated copies of this year's hit films aren't showing up on major Internet sites.

Too bad for the studios' enforcement efforts that some can still be found on smaller sites.

At the same time that the new Batman film, The Dark Knight, was drawing record audiences (the movie is estimated to have earned more than $155 million over the weekend), several copies of the film was available online.

Hit films, such as The Bourne Ultimatum, are readily available online.

(Credit: Videoembedder.com)

A half hour after returning home from watching the film on Saturday night, I got home to find my colleague, Elinor Mills, has sent me a link that apparently originated at VideoEmbedder.com. Sure enough, a grainy and dark copy of the hit film was available for viewing and for download. It was still up on Sunday but could not be accessed on Monday.

Finding newly released movies is nothing new. In the past, it was easy to find them at Google Video and other video-sharing sites. Michael Moore's documentary, Sicko, was posted to the Web even before it had debuted in theaters. Following the appearance of Sicko on the Web, some argued that movies posted to the Internet can help boost interest in a film.

Back then, Google Video was loaded with full-length films and TV shows. The site is now focused more on shorter videos even while there is no limit on duration.

What this illustrates is the coming storm bearing down on the film industry. The size of movie files used to be too large to allow them to be streamed or downloaded easily. That's changing rapidly. The time to download big movie files is speeding up and streaming technology has also improved. The simple fact is it's getting easier to share movie files.

VideoEmbedder is just an online video player that anyone can use to upload clips to the Web. Someone used the site's player to upload a full version of The Bourne Ultimatum. A link to a copy of The Bourne Supremacy led me to a post that said the video had been removed for copyright infringement.

On the front door of VideoEmbedder.com is this note: "VideoEmbedder is free to use and is not responsible for the videos streamed using our player."

Representatives from Warner Bros. Pictures, which produced Dark Knight, said they were unaware of the copy that showed up online. A spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America was unavailable for comment.

Representatives of VideoEmbedder could not immediately be reached.

UPDATE: 3:30 p.m PT on Monday Turns out that there are plenty of places where one can find copies of Dark Knight on the Web. Byron Ng, a computer technician from Vancouver, Canada, has sent in some links where the film can be found. I've been assured by Ng that there are others.

Tiny Pictures, a company that operates a mobile media-sharing site called Radar, announced on Monday that it has pulled in $7.2 million in Series B funding. The funding round was led by Valley stalwart Draper Fisher Jurvetson; previous investor Mohr Davidow Ventures also contributed.

Radar's service lets users shoot mobile photos and videos to its site through e-mail and mobile messaging. All photos on Radar are automatically friends-only; members of a user's friends list can instantly see uploaded content and comment on it from their PCs or mobile phones.

It looks as if Radar has some fairly active users; despite having only 750,000 registered members (it's projected to have 1 million by the end of the first quarter), 15 million photos are uploaded each month--a decent number for a site so small. Tiny Pictures also boasts compatibility with most carriers (excluding a few small ones) and more than 225 varieties of handsets.

The company has deep connections: Tiny Pictures had already raised $4 million in a previous funding round and had also pulled in angel investments from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, as well as longtime entrepreneur and investor Joichi Ito. Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am, who sits on Tiny Pictures' advisory board, is helping develop its "Radar Gallery" sponsored content for movie and music tie-ins.

With the new funding, San Francisco-based Tiny Pictures plans to focus on more opportunities with Radar Gallery, as well as international growth. Founder John Poisson is no stranger to the Asian market, having been head of mobile-media research and design for Sony in Tokyo.

Not surprisingly, he says the service is quite big in Japan.

I was at a bit of an impasse earlier today while writing about the new Google Maps page that lets you see user adjustments in real-time. A video to show off the feature would have been overkill, while an animated GIF afforded the same view to readers at a substantially smaller file size. Not having Photoshop installed on this machine (which has a pretty simple animated-GIF-making wizard), and not wanting to go through a tedious multistep process using Paint.net, I turned to Gickr.

Gickr is a simple tool that lets you upload up to 10 files from Flickr or your PC and turn them into an animated GIF with variable speed control. The service is aimed mostly at social networking users who want to pack the most into their profile picture or photo galleries, but if you've ever been curious about making an animated GIF but have been put off either by some of the obscure special software required or complex how-to guides, then this is the tool for you.

Once you've uploaded your images to the service you can tweak things like how big you want the end image to be, and how fast it cycles through each picture. Gickr hosts the GIF for you, and gives you an embed code and the option to add tags to make it a part of the user gallery. The one limitation is that the service adds a little Gickr watermark to your image in the top left corner, even if you want to host the image yourself. That, and the fast transition speed is truly nauseating unless you're attempting to make a cartoon. I still enjoy its simplicity when compared with admittedly more powerful, but complicated standalone software tools.