Movie and TV show streaming service Hulu on Monday added tagging to the mix, allowing users to add up to 30 tags to each piece of content for the sake of organization. These tags also work site-wide, which means that users can see all types of related content regardless of whether it's a TV show or feature-length film.
Users have two choices for tagging: one is creating an all-new tag, while the other is to vote up a tag someone else has made. Each time a user does this it adds to the number, giving certain tags more validity, although unlike size-based systems it's not as immediately clear which tags are more popular or common. Users can also delete tags, but only their own--meaning that if there is a bad tag placed by another user there's no way to report it.
Hulu's new tagging system is part public, part private and works on all content.
(Credit: CNET)Tags are made public and can be seen by other users immediately, although they do not yet appear to be an integrated part of Hulu's search engine. Instead, users can search for a specific tag within the tag section of each video. It's also worth noting that some content on Hulu has an expiration date, so you can spend all the time in the world tagging videos, but something you tagged a few months ago might not be able to be watched at a later date.
One thing Hulu could do with tags (but probably won't) is add timing to the mix. Recently-launched (although still in private beta) AnyClip organizes movie clips by what's happening in them. Hulu could do the same thing with its content by giving users a way to tag by time the way video host Viddler does. Though again, this wouldn't be nearly as useful as AnyClip due to Hulu's frequent content expirations.
Worth noting is that competitor YouTube has long had tags for its hosted movies and TV shows. However, it does not let users add them.
Social photo-sharing site Flickr is adding a long overdue feature this week that lets users assign a name tag to people in photos. While the service is overflowing with photos of sweeping landscapes and close-ups of bug eyeballs, the Yahoo-owned company has noticed that many of its users are simply using it to share shots of friends and family, and that the existing tag tools were not made with people in mind.
The new system has been designed as a hybrid of the original tagging tools and Flickr's notes feature, all wrapped up into one. Users can tag a Flickr friend or contact in the shot, as well as draw a box around them, which looks and acts just like it does when creating a note so that when users mouse over a photo, they can see who a person is by what box they're in.
An identical system was introduced by rival photo service Photobucket back in late 2007, but there's a big difference between the two: Flickr's system is designed for the Flickr community alone whereas Photobucket's would let users link a people tag to any social-networking profile of their choosing. Flickr's implementation might be a little more limiting, but it makes a better case to join the service and fill out one's profile.
People tags look just the notes feature, except they double as normal tags too.
(Credit: Yahoo / CNET)Privacy and notifications
Each time a user is added, they get a notification through Flickr's inter-service messaging and via e-mail. Their friends get notified too, although this happens in Flickr's user activity stream which each user sees whenever they go to Flickr's home screen. Users can also see all the photos of themselves on Flickr in one central location, including on their profile--just like on Facebook and MySpace.
Of course users won't necessarily be able to add themselves, or others to every shot, and that's by design. In a call with CNET News on Wednesday Matthew Rothenberg, who is Flickr's head of product strategy and management, said that the privacy controls protect all three parties: the person who shot the photo, the person in the photo, and the person who added the photo to Flickr. And for anyone to tag another user in a shot, their permissions have to line up with the wishes of the two others.
Feel like de-tagging yourself from every photo you've ever been tagged in on Flickr? There's a big red button for that.
(Credit: CNET)On top of this three-way permission control system, there's also a way to globally set whether people can add you to shots, and what kind of relationship they need to have with you to do it. This includes an ejector seat-like button that can de-tag you from every photo you've been tagged in all at once, as well as a security measure that won't let anyone tag you in a photo once you've already de-tagged yourself.
Workflow and facial recognition potential
When adding someone to a shot, Flickr's people-tagging tool offers up suggestions from your contact list as you type.
(Credit: Yahoo / CNET)A major difference between Flickr's people-tagging system compared to Facebook's is that there isn't an engine built in that can remember and suggest the last few people you were tagging in any given photo set. Rothenberg says this could be added later on, but that Flickr's auto-complete is fast enough for it not to be an issue when users are looking up a friend's add to name it. In most cases you simply need to type just two letters to narrow it down to a shortlist of the person you're looking for.
The system has also been set up so that you don't need to enter any special people-tagging mode to start tagging friends--you can just double click on someone in the shot for it to come up with the people-tagging option.
Power users are not left out either. If you don't want to go through photos one at a time, you can just skip to Flickr's batch organization tool. This isn't automated like some of the facial recognition software tools we've recently looked at, which can give you suggestions of people it thinks might be in your photos. But it makes it a whole lot easier to go back and people tag (or de-tag) hundreds of your old photos all at once. This can be useful if you're trying to convert a photo set with one person into a batch of name tags.
Speaking of facial recognition, to be clear, it's not a part of Flickr's people-tagging system (yet). But just because it's not, doesn't mean third-party programs won't be able to tap into Flickr to do it. Rothenberg said that like any Flickr feature, people tags are being added into the API, and should be deployed for application makers to use in just a few weeks. That could be good news for sites like Face.com and Polar Rose, which will be able to do some of the people-tagging magic they've done for Facebook using Flickr's community instead.
The new people-tagging feature could be arriving for some as soon as Wednesday, but like with other new Flickr features it may take up to a day or two to migrate through Flickr's servers.
FeedDemon 3 is ready for public use, after months spent in a beta version that saw a confusing migration from proprietary online syncing to Google Reader.
That rough patch sorted, FeedDemon remains one of the best desktop RSS and Atom feed catchers. This version contains a lengthy list of changes, including greatly enhanced Twitter connectivity, a tweaked interface that's a bit easier to use, and better tagging and sharing.
My Twitter stream in FeedDemon 3.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)FeedDemon has dumped its proprietary synchronization site, Newsgator.com, in favor of syncing with Google Reader. New users won't notice, but older users are likely to lose many unread feeds, since Google can't import feeds with more than 10 unread items. Once synced with Google Reader, unread feeds can again include more than 10 items.
There's also a new, persistent ad placed in the lower-left corner of the interface, and FeedDemon's performance could be a lot better--RAM usage was hefty, and 3GB of RAM didn't prevent occasional program hang-ups.
Twitter feed reading has been baked in because FeedDemon supports authenticated feeds. Hyperlinking and short-URL expansion are automatic, and if you use Twitter as a live news stream, FeedDemon's Twitter link sharing should appeal to you. To set that up, you need to subscribe in FeedDemon to your Twitter feed here.
Tagging, tag clouds, and item sharing get a massive overhaul in FeedDemon 3, with all three features added to the item view and a tag cloud added to the Subscriptions Home view. The interface will look similar to FeedDemon 2.8, but there are many little tweaks to improve its usability.
Flags have been renamed Stars for Google Reader consistency, for example, while the Home page features videos, pictures, and content from your feeds. One smart improvement over Google Reader is that you can view your starred feeds in the folders they came from, instead of in a single "starred items" folder.
We'd like to see performance addressed in future versions, but overall, FeedDemon remains a favorite option for desktop feed management. Let us know your thoughts on the new FeedDemon in the comments below.
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
What do you do when you can use the Internet to data-mine a collection of billions of photos?
Find out whether cats are more popular than dogs, of course. Or whether good outdoes evil. Or the Yankees beat the Mets.
The FlickrTrends application takes advantage first of the API (application programming interface) at Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr, which can show how many photos have been tagged with a particular word over a period of time. Second, it uses Google App Engine to present the relative popularity of two tags in chart form to show what's waxing and waning.
... Read more
I can't think of a worse place to look for editorial than YouTube comments. Historically, they've been so bad that YouTube was forced to create a comment playback feature so users could hear what they had typed before sharing it with the rest of the world.
That hasn't stopped two Firefox developers from coming up with OpinionCloud. This small Firefox add-on will give a video's comments a quick once-over and show you which words are most often used, and the general user sentiment based on a percentage of keywords that are either positive or negative. Clicking on one of the keywords will pull up a list of comments containing that word. All of this appears below the video, and can be toggled on and off.
According to the project page the tool indexed 9 million YouTube comments to help build out its dictionary of slang terms and phrases. And that number is growing each time someone uses it.
Why would you want this? It's helpful on longer videos if you don't have time to sit down to watch them. It also lets you see what people are saying without having to cruise through several pages of comments, which YouTube breaks up to just 10 per page. Of course both of these require users to have commented on the video and left something intelligible, the latter of which you may be hard pressed to find.
OpinionCloud sorts out the good from the bad comments. The ones we've blurred are less than child-friendly.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The average person likely won't even notice, but Webmasters can rejoice that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have banded together to support an unofficial standard for steering search engines in the right direction.
All three on Thursday announced they'd support a technique by which a little extra code in a Web page can indicate the address of its "canonical" version--essentially, the original, primary URL. The move will make it easier to tell search engines what they should pay attention to and to avoid treating duplicative Web pages as different.
Today, the search engine bots that scour the Web for pages to index don't have any particular way to know whether they should be pointing to a "http://www.somepage.com/index.html" or "http://www.somepage.com/index.html?lang=en"--the latter with an optional extra tidbit at the end that indicates the Web server should show the English-language version of a page. The new canonical tag can steer search engines toward the desired primary page, which in this example might ease browsing for non-English speakers.
In all likelihood, most people won't notice much of a difference. Perhaps that the URLs in search results on which they click will be a bit shorter, and perhaps that search engines won't be cluttered with repeats of the same pages in search results.
But the bigger benefits are for Web site operators, which can ensure a more consistent experience for people using their sites and cleaner data collected about how people use their sites, and for the search engines themselves, which won't have to make as many guesses about the pecking order of similar pages.
Also notable is that Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are cooperating. Standards aren't always easy to hammer out, even informal ones such as this. Supporting canonical tags, though, probably won't mean give any search engine any new advantage or disadvantage, so this was probably relatively easy to create.
Now if the companies could only join forces better on e-mail identity authentication and instant-message interoperability, the world would actually look better for the average person, too.
Facebook on Tuesday announced that it has made the Facebook Markup Language extensible, enabling developers outside of Facebook to create custom tags.
For example, the iLike application developers have provided an iLike tag that shows favorite songs and playlists.
Initially, FBML included only tags that Facebook created. Today, we're excited to announce a new feature called custom tags. With custom tags, any developer can create new FBML tags. Developers can use these tags in their own applications, or they can share their custom tags with the entire Facebook developer community as prebuilt FBML components.
This is a great step forward, but it's also a highly limited one, as ReadWriteWeb points out. To be highly reusable and, hence, more useful, Facebook should consider exposing its markup code to developers so it can be "more easily altered for reuse in different ways by different apps."
Exactly. This is one of the cardinal virtues of open source: code reuse. By allowing development of custom tags, Facebook has taken a step toward openness, but not the one that developers require to be efficient with their code.
Mike Vernal, a member of Facebook's Platform Engineering Team, tells Web 2.0 Journal that "our goal with Platform has been to allow applications anywhere to become more social by leveraging the power of Facebook," but this becomes doubly difficult if the platform is closed.
Sure, some companies can pull off a widely used, mostly closed platform. Microsoft certainly has. But in the age of the Internet, it's much easier to accomplish platform adoption through transparency and open code, making it harder to justify keeping the Facebook platform closed.
ZigTag, a social bookmarking tool that has been in the works for years, has finally launched to the public. Competing with services like Delicious and Ma.gnolia, ZigTag categorizes bookmarks through the use of tags and allows users to share those bookmarks with friends. To set itself apart, ZigTag claims its service is "intelligent" and uses semantic technology to understand the meaning of tags. In essence, ZigTag tags have stated definitions, which the company uses to categorize bookmarks more effectively. ZigTag is available upon registration.
Times Square NYC announced its New Year's Eve footage schedule Monday for those who wish to view the event online. According to the organization, New Year's Eve footage will begin Monday at 3:00 p.m. EST detailing the events behind the show, including the arrival and installation of the "2009" sign at the top of One Times Square. The site will also feature live coverage of the Times Square 2009 festivities, featuring views of Times Square, the Crystal New Year's Eve Ball, and all those in attendance. The feed will also be provided free of charge to media organizations to use in their own programming efforts.
UpDown.com, an online community that connects young people through investing practice, announced Monday that it has partnered with Young Money to power YoungMoney.com's "Stock Market Game." According to UpDown.com, its trading platform has been deployed on the Young Money site, which will feature real-time trading simulation and contests for entrants who want to earn a prize. Each user will be given $1 million in virtual money to invest as they wish.
GoalSpring, a company that aims at helping individuals with financial issues, announced Monday that it has launched an online application dubbed DebtGoal.com, to help users with debt create and manage a plan to pay it down. According to the company, DebtGoal.com allows users to enter debt information, interest rates, and payment schedules into the app. Once input, it delivers a customized plan to pay down debts as efficiently as it deems possible. To add some social elements, the site also provides a forum where users can share tips and get feedback from experts. DebtGoal.com is free to use upon registration.
Search Cloudlet is a Firefox extension from the International Software and Productivity Engineering Institute (INTSPEI) that gives users a cloud of tags to help modify and focus searches on Google and Yahoo. Once installed it will show up on top of search results and provides a simple way to tweak the original query by offering up keywords pulled from the results.
Words that appear more often in the results appear as bigger, bolder tags that you can click on to re-start the query with that word tacked on. The creators recommend dialing up the number of default search results to 100, which may make your searches slightly slower but result in a much more accurate tag cloud. This can be done from the user preferences in both Google and Yahoo.
In addition to standard Google and Yahoo searches the extension works on Google News both for keywords and locations. It also works for Google Blog search in a really neat way by adding tags for each author that you can click on to filter which posts come up.
Search Cloudlet is an experimental add-on and does not yet work on the latest beta of Firefox 3.1.
Google and Yahoo search results get smart tag clusters that let you narrow down results with Firefox extension Search Cloudlet.
(Credit: INTSPEI)
