Listpic, the controversial visual front-end for Craigslist, has made the switch to classifieds service Oodle.com. The change comes after last week's cease and desist order from Craigslist, which forced Listpic to discontinue scraping data from the popular classifieds service. Listpic was apparently sucking up so much of Craigslist's bandwidth that the site's performance had suffered. Craigslist then fired back with legal action.
Oodle.com is a service that aggregates classifieds listings from a number of local and national sites. It claims to let users search over 20 million listings that have been pulled from more than 75,000 classified sites.
Before the current swap, creator Ryan Sit had temporarily moved the service to Backpage.com, which hosts its own classifieds service. Listpic has retained the same, simplistic look and feel, visual thumbnail browsing, and the advertisements that coincidentally got it into trouble in the first place.
Listpic classifieds now come from Oodle.com instead of Craigslist.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Flickr quietly launched a new version of its slide show feature today. The new design forgoes the once small black box and takes over your entire browser window with full-sized photos that fade into one another. Also tweaked is the speed control, which has gone from a slow to fast slider to one-click options for slow, medium, and fast. Flickr decided to retool the slide show feature based on user feedback, as the previous version would restrict photos down to small size, even on large monitors or browsers set to full screen. The new version will simply resize itself to however big your browser window is.
Slide shows still retain some of the good qualities that made the original Flickr slide show visually appealing. Picture titles and commentary, as well as links back to the photographer, photo page, and an option to mark it as a favorite still remain. One change I personally don't like is the new viewer, which only shows seven thumbnails at a time. The old player displayed rows of 19, which was often enough to encompass an entire set. Interestingly enough, embedded versions of the slide shows are still presented this way, although that might change down the line. You can still scroll through to the next set of seven, but there was something magical about seeing a giant grid of thumbnails in one place.
One thing that's still missing is an easy way to embed Flickr slide shows in blogs or social networking profiles. It's possible if you know some coding, but for the casual user, there's not a simple "grab the embed code" link available. If you're interested in making some slick embeddable slide shows that are similar to this new look, give Slidez a spin.
The new slide show does full screen now and forgoes the once tiny photo display.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Microsoft announced Deepfish , a new mobile browsing technology from itslabs group. Deepfish is a small, downloadable application for Windows Smartphone users. The app presents Web content the same way you'd see it on your computer's Web browser. If you've seen the mobile version of Apple's Safari on the upcoming iPhone, then you have an idea of how Deepfish works.
Deepfish is designed like an array of photo thumbnails. To zoom into a section you want to see in more detail, you just select it with a "magnify box" controlled by your phone's directional pad or pointer. If you want to zoom back out, the original version of the page will still be loaded in your phone's memory cache--which should save a considerable amount of time (and data usage).
In our brief hands-on with it today, we noticed a few quirks.... Read more
Embeddable video is getting pretty cool. Static preview images seem to be a thing of the past. Blinkx, which is showcasing its service today at Demo 2007, is announcing a new widget called 'Blinkx It' that crawls your blog or Web site to deliver contextual video content. Think of it as Google Ad Sense with videos and no advertising. For example, clicking the 'Blinkx It' widget below will bring up videos related to News.com stories:
This is nice and unobtrusive, but the results aren't necessarily pertinent. In most cases, I was unable to get a smattering of relevant videos with URLs from CNET, Apple.com, and even the NFL. There are some options to tweak how well the widget scrapes for data, but this involves changing code on your Web site, or giving your posts metatags.
What's far cooler--and pulls up slightly more relevant results--is Blinkx's embeddable video preview 'walls.' These let you group together several pieces of video content in one embedded array. Clicking any of the motion thumbnails will take you to the site where the video is located. I've put together one for CNET-related results at the bottom of this post
It's easy to create walls like this. You can quickly choose how many rows and columns you want right from the Blinkx search results. Clicking these thumbnails takes you to the video's source. Also neat is the ability to scroll through pages of content, letting you pack more videos into one embedded array. When using Blinkx's search engine, you can watch the first 30 seconds of each video without leaving the results.
For another multivideo embedding tool, check out SplashCast which we covered yesterday.
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