Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Haha! I’ve been spending a lot of time on Google Buzz over the past few days. This video is hillarious and good for putting your buzzing in perspective. Found the video on Buzz, by the way, courtesy of Kevin Fox.

If you want to follow me on Google Buzz you can find me here. I’ll probably be spending a bit more time on Buzz for the next few weeks at least.

I’ve only just been playing with Google Buzz for a few hours and I’m only going to make a few early comments and observations on it. I’ll probably be hanging out there *alot* over the next 48 hours or so, so stop by and say hi.

1. The Flickr integration is interesting. I really, really, really, like how they show a great little thumbnail slider thing of your flickrstream on your profile page. The thumbnails are in the correct order as to when you upload them to flickr (unlike Friendfeed which displays them backwards) and the slider is really slick. But I wish that they showed more in your actual buzz stream when you upload photos to flickr.

At present Buzz just shows the *last* photo that you upload to flickr, so people who upload in batches, like me and a lot of my friends, will miss a lot of photos and still have to go to flickr to better follow our contact’s activity there. It would be super slick if, instead of just posting the last photo that you posted to flickr, Google actually posted in that thumbnail slider showing the last *batch* of photos that you uploaded to Flickr in your stream.

2. I wish that there was a way that I could import my flickr contacts into Google Buzz. Is it that Google can’t/won’t do this or is it that Flickr can’t/won’t allow them to do this? I suspect it is the later.

On Flickr in my account settings I can choose to make my email public to my contacts. This is my choice. Why can’t Google use the Flickr API to suck in all of my Flickr contacts who likewise have opted to share their email address with me? Or at least use this data to give me a suggested user list from Flickr?

Flickr has never been a good web citizen about user data portability and I suspect that they won’t allow Google access to email addresses because they want to keep you locked into the silo that is Flickr. I could be wrong on this though and if anyone has any actual information on why this can’t be done today I’d be interested in that.

3. Google Buzz feels alot like FriendFeed. But I like it more because I feel sort of like Friendfeed has become a dead product now that the Founders have moved on to Facebook. Google Buzz feels like it has a lot more potential because it is a new service and likely to get significant resources from Google. I suspect Google Buzz mostly draws attention away from Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed. At least when it comes to my own personal use.

4. Hat tip to Kreg Steppe. The biggest Win that Buzz has over Facebook is that Buzz doesn’t have Farmville or Mafia Wars notifications! Indeed. It’s so nice being able to get all that crap out of my social network.

5. The “mute” feature on Buzz is powerful and handy, even if it is a total FriendFeed Rip Off (not a bad thing by the way). They should put the mute button though down by the like button though, rather than have it hidden over on the left under a drop down menu. Like FriendFeed, managing the noise on Buzz will be important. This tool should be front and center.

6. Why will Buzz succeed? One word. GMail. The biggest problem for any social network is getting enough momentum up and running. The snowball never builds up enough critical mass to really get rolling down the hill. By integrating buzz into gmail, it gives Google a *huge* install base to ensure that the momentum gets rolling.

7. I haven’t figured out the “block” feature yet but I hope it works like Friendfeed where if you block someone it filters all of their comments out of your threads. It would be nice to mute out permanently all of the trolls, haters, etc. with a quick block command.

8. The text formatting feels cool. just type *asterisks* around any word and it bolds it. Minuses will strike through, and underscores will italicize. Thanks Adam!

9. It would be nice to see directories of buzz users based on interests as well as geolocational data. Show me a list of all of the photographers in the San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, ranked by number of followers. It would be great if Buzz could use the geolocational data to help connect me with new potential contacts based on geography and interest.

That’s all for now. I’ll try and post more on Buzz as it goes on. Overall, I’m VERY optimistic about the service. It’s one of the more exciting things I’ve seen on the web in a while. Feel free to post any of your own comments or observations on the service and if you read this feel free to post your Google Buzz ID in the comments section so that I can follow you.

You can find me on Google Buzz here.

It was interesting to read over at Rev Dan Catt’s blog today that Google has now begun including Flickr photos into their Google Maps product. I love Google Maps and use it *heavily,* especially when planning trips to new cities to photograph.

Basically, when you are in Google Street View mode for any part of Google Maps, you are presented with an option to click on “user photos.” Google then presents you with a list of thumbnail sized photos that you can go through one by one and view actual photos on the maps based on their own Picassa photo sharing and now Flickr. As you click on the various photos, it pulls up a high res version of each of the photos, showing you the image.

When I first learned of this feature I thought for sure that it would be limited to Creative Commons Flickr photos. I wasn’t sure how Google could legally take high res photos for CC non-commercial photos or all rights reserved photos and integrate full sized versions of them into their product. But it seems as though this is exactly what they’ve done.

If you look at the screen shot above, it features a photo by Flickr photographer Patrick Boury, if you look at that photo on Flickr, it is licensed as “all rights reserved.” I surfed Google’s Street View around San Francisco today checking out lots of the photos and many (in fact I’d say most) of the Flickr images that Google is presently using are either Creative Commons non-commercial licensed photos or all rights reserved licensed photos.

While I know that in the past Google has used thumbnail images in their Google Image Search product of all rights reserved Flickr photos, I haven’t actually seen them use full scale large versions of all rights reserved photos in other products like this.

Me personally, I have no problem with Google using any of my own geotagged photos this way, but I’m pretty open and willing to share my photos. Especially though with thousands of Flickr users now formally licensing their all rights reserved photos through Getty Images, it makes me wonder if Getty Images would consider this sort of use by Google as infringing on the exclusivity that Flickr users give them over images when licensing them for sale with them.

I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not exactly sure if Google is infringing here or not, but it raises an interesting question about fair use. Google is a for profit company and even displays adverts on the street view pages using Flickr photos.

It should also be noted that Flickr has a way to exclude your photos from being indexed by Google and other search engines in your Flickr preferences. I suppose if someone felt strongly enough about this issue then they might consider hiding their images from search engines and I’d assume that they’d then not be indexed in Google’s Street View product.

Glitch, a game of giant imagination, is the new slogan crafted by a group of former Flickr employees, including Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, to describe their new socially based massively-multiplayer game. CNET has a meaty indepth behind the scenes article out on the new game which will be free to play, is browser based and is currently in private alpha testing to be released publicly in the second half of the year.

In addition to Butterfield, former Flickr employees Cal Henderson, Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov are also co-founders of a new company called Tiny Speck that is releasing the game. Daniel Burka, former creative director at Digg, is also part of the new team.

For those of you who are familiar with the history of Flickr, you’ll be aware that prior to becoming a photo sharing site, Flickr was originally released as a socially based game called Game Neverending.

I’m really digging American Suburb X lately. It’s a wonderful photography magazine format website and has some interviews and articles definitely worth checking out. This week they posted a wonderful meaty essay on the work of one of my favorite photographers Garry Winogrand.

The site is chock full o’ interviews and substantial articles on the past, present and future of photography. Doug Rickard edits the site. His photography is pretty good as well and can be found here.

Check it out, if you haven’t already.