Month: April 2006

ThePodcastNetwork :: The Gadget Show ? Blog Archive ? The Gadget Show #48: George Oates from Flickr Flickr’s George Oates is interviewed on The Gadget Show Podcast.

Laptop thieves descend upon wireless cafes / Grab-and-run robbers find pricey computers easy to resell The San Francisco Chronicle had a story out this weekend about a horrible attack a man suffered at an internet cafe when he was stabbed in the chest for his laptop computer.

Certainly with recent news of San Francisco’s upcoming citywide wi-fi initiative we ought to see more and more laptops out and about.

Recently I ranted about a stolen laptop that potentially compromised 196,000 HP employee’s personal financial data. I myself have lost three laptops over the years to theft (and one to a big glass of chardonnay that accidently went tumbling over the keyboard).

So answer me this. They can put GPS in a cell phone. Why not put GPS in your laptop? And why not also put GPS in your car DVD player (I’ve had several break ins with my car at West Oakland BART and as such no longer park there)?

It seems incredible to me that with all of the massive laptop theft that some innovative company wouldn’t come out with GPS for your laptop as a distinguishing factor. Maybe if a few of these criminals got caught wiht stolen laptops and served time then the word would get out that laptops can be tracked back via GPS and you’d have less of people getting stabbed in the chest at internet cafes.

TechCrunch The Flickr Gunners Arrington posts this morning on four small hungry and obsessive companies that he sees as gunning for Flickr to wear the crown of coolest photo site: BubbleShare, Ookles, Smugmug and Zooomr.

In his article Arrington points out what he considers three central weaknesses of Flickr. 1. Flickr is not the biggest photo sharing site. 2. Flickr hasn’t done much in terms of new features and that they missed the video boat entirely and 3. There are a number of UI issues that could easily be fixed but remain unchanged.

It’s an interesting conversation and one that I’m very interested in given my affinity for digital media and more specifically photography. In addition to the new cool places for photo sharing mentioned by Arrington I’d also definitely throw Riya in with a mention.

To start with I’m very happy to see the competition. As an advanced user I LOVE the feature implementation. Zooomr in particular seems eager to grow and build a better and better site. Riya also is doing very interesting stuff with facial recognition software.

What these sites lack though and what they need to develop if they hope to become as successful as flickr is the true glue that makes Flickr sticky — the social glue. I have not seen a photo sharing site yet that gets this. Why do I spend hours each day on Flickr? It’s because I’ve become a part of the Flickr family. It’s not just about sharing my photos with my family and friends or even the attention I get from sharing them with the general public.

It is that fact that I can have rich and meaningful conversations with people online about photography and flickr and life.

A ways back in one of the groups that I’m active in, deleteme uncensored, I gave a bunch of the participants names from the television show Cheers. Mr. Chalk seemed best matched to Woody’s wacky personality. BigVern seemed a perfect match for Frasier, BigFrank a personality match for Cliff Clavin. Beebo? Definitely Norm, etc.

But this Cheers thing got me thinking. Is Flickr in fact the virtual version of Cheers? Here each night a bunch of us would each have our cocktails in our own home and pretty much chat back and forth via Deletme Uncensored. On the one hand we probably all have big “Ls” for loser written on our foreheads, but one thing I will tell you is that for all of us, although we enjoy taking photos it’s much more than just about the photography.

Since meeting people online on Flickr I’ve gotten to know many of these people in the offline world as well. Now THAT is sticky. Until someone comes up with something that is as addictive from the social networking side as Flickr if I were Flickr I don’t think I’d be too worried.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the innovation going on at these other sites and I do wish Flickr would innovate more. I do think that they will be innovating more shortly though. Heather Champ recently posted in a group on Flickr as much:

“We’re working towards completing a rearchitecting of the backend servers (what worked for 20,000 is not so special for over 2,000,000 members).

It’s not been possible to release any new major features while this has been underway, but I know that we all are chomping at the bit to do so when federation is complete.”

Still at the same time a group of us were having this very debate over at Flickr Central and one user, Striatic, had some interesting things to say about how Flickr needs to in fact get simpler, not more feature rich. Striatic seems to feel that what is in the best interest of the Flickr community longer term is that it attract more users and that to do this it needs to get easier and easier for users to use and that the energy should be channeled there rather than in developing cool new features for nerds like me.

Stiatic put it this way: “flickr needs to have a much shallower learning curve. this site scares the punk out of a lot of users who don’t have the ego to invest a ton of time climbing the learning curve just because they get a handful of hits.

think flickr doesn’t need to get more mainstream? well that’s great, but i don’t agree. casual users don’t “fit” in flickr, and it is a bloody shame. flickr is swim or die and the ‘pure blog’ model alienates a lot of casual users.

“so what?” you say, the casual users go to yahoo photos and will be quite happy. they probably will be content over there .. but it is ME who won’t be happy, because population diversity benefits the “heavy” users.”

Striatic also pointed out that through Flickr’s open API that innovation was in fact still happening. I happen to agree with him here and feel that Flickr Leech Scout and Slickr are all great examples of this. All three are very much worth checking out if you want to get deeper into Flickr.

I’m looking forward to the new features coming out shortly for Flickr and I’m looking forward to innovation happening at the other sites. I upload my photos to multiple places but my advice for the sites that want more of my attention is that they should not lose sight of how very important the social networking side is to the stickiness of the whole photosharing experience.

:: who should we invade next? :: a livingstonemusic.net/article ::Ok, I don’t venture off into the political landscape very frequently but this video from livingstonemusic.net is just priceless. An Australian guy goes around interviewing Americans about who we should invade next and then asking them to find the country on a map. Hilarity ensues. Thanks, Chalk!

San Francisco Picks Companies for Wi-Fi: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance: Although you should never take a politician’s timeline for anything and certainly using words like “hope” are a sure sign that it will take longer, but Google has now been selected to provide a blanket of free wi-fi to the City of San Francisco and Mayor Gavin Newsom says that he “hopes” that the service will be operational by year end.

From the article: “San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who first proposed a free Wi-Fi network in October 2004, hopes the service will be operational by year’s end.

Newsom believes free Wi-Fi will make San Francisco a more appealing place for businesses and help close the so-called “digital divide” by enabling more low-income households to connect to the Internet more easily.”

The free City supported wi-fi service in the Ferry Building certainly has had problems. It frequently is slow and has been simply unable to connect a number of times in the past, but even then you have to be in the main lobby of the building in order to get it at all. The Google supported wi-fi service at Union Square has been much more reliable.

An interesting afterthought to this free wi-fi service will be that companies that seek to put up internet filtering software on work networks will now have another issue to contend with, employees who simply bring their own laptops to the office and end up connecting free to the new Google wi-fi.

I guess I’m pretty lucky to be living in an area progressive enough to be able to envision free muni supported wi-fi. Hats off to Mayor Newsom for getting this done!

flickrz.info: antimethod – Your flickr superstars, interviewed. Cole Rise is one of my favorite photographers on Flickr today. His work is breathtaking. Amazing talent and someone to keep an eye on. Flickrz.info interviews him.