Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Former Flickr Chief Architect Cal Henderson.

Om Malik reported yesterday on more layoffs at Flickr. Most notably Flickr Chief Architect Cal Henderson seems to have left the company and is rumored by All Things Digital to be working on a stealth gaming start up with Former Flickr Chief and Flickr Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield (who had probably the best resignation letter of all time when he resigned himself last year).

Engineer Rev Dan Catt, probably my favorite character on Flickr, is also leaving and says on his blog that he’ll be moving back to the UK near Manchester. In his blog post he hinted that he’d like to work for Google. Among other things, Rev Dan did a lot of work on the geotagging of images. I think that’s one of the more exciting areas on Flickr and am disappointed to see that he won’t be working on that directly anymore. I’ve got thousands of my own photos geotagged on Flickr at present.

In looking at an Apr 23, 2009 23:58:04 GMT cached version of Flickr’s about page, which includes who they list on the Flickr team, it looks like others who are gone include Ashot Petrosian, Sara Wood, and Neil Kandalgaonkar. An updated version of the team can be found here.

Silicon Alley Insider reported that Yahoo laid off 600 in total yesterday. Yahoo had announced on their most recent earnings conference call that they were going to lay off about 700 employees. In December during a previous round of layoffs, Yahoo laid off three other Flickr team members including Flickr Designer George Oates.

Last month San Francisco magazine reported that Flickr had recently become profitable for Yahoo.

Update: Earlier this morning I listed Kevin Collins as one of the Flickr employees whose name no longer appeared on the about Flickr page in error. I’ve corrected this and removed his name as one of those absent. It was also brought to my attention that two additional names who are no longer on the about Flickr page are those of Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov, both long-time Flickr team members. In September of last year both Costello and Mourachov were listed on the about Flickr page, today they are not. I suspect that both may have left Flickr prior to this most recent round of layoffs. Or they could both still be at Flickr but for some unknown reason removed from the about Flickr page.

Update #2: Another Flickr staffer, Do Kim, now appears to be gone from the about Flickr page. Also Om Malik is now also reporting that “we’re hearing that further changes at Yahoo’s Flickr are going to be announced shortly, including exits of some senior/director-level people.”

The slide show above is from a new photo viewer by Microsoft called DeepZoomPix. The technology feels a lot like CoolIris to me and I think that you are going to see more and more dynamic ways of viewing photos online like this in the future. The view above is pretty simplistic as an embedable slide player, but you get a far more interesting view if you actually click through to one of my albums. You can check out the more interactive version of the above slide show here.

Use your mouse or scroll pad to increase or decrease the magnification of the photos and to move around and explore a bit.

The player allows you to either upload your own photos to it or to link the player up with either your Flickrstream or your Facebook photos and import photos from there.

I found that it took me several hours to import a little over 400 slides for the slideshow above. For some reason it did not import all 2,000+ of my neon photos, but the average person probably doesn’t hae a 2000 photo high res slide show to put together either.

I think that this player will make for an interesting way to share sets of images from events, vacations, parties, really anywhere where you’d like to put together a relatively quick and easy slideshow.

The service has a fairly strict Code of Conduct which prohibits your using it to display any “nudity of any sort including full or partial human nudity or nudity in non-human forms such as cartoons, fantasy art or manga.pornography, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity, hatred, bigotry, racism, or gratuitous violence.”

The offering also is only available through the end of 2009. I’m not sure what happens to your slide shows after that but I suspect that if Microsoft chooses to discontinue the service that the shows could be deleted. Microsoft makes a point of noting that you should not consider this site as a primary place to host your photos and that there are no privacy controls, so anything you publish here will be viewable to the entire world.

According to Microsoft, the primary purpose of this technology is three-fold:

1. Provide an end-user friendly demo around a scenario that everyone can understand.
2. Show designers the capabilities of Silverlight for creating rich user experiences (UX).
3. Show developers how they can use various Microsoft client and platform technologies to easily create compelling and scalable systems.

You can learn more about this new viewer at the FAQ for it here.

Thanks for the heads up Steve!