Alex Barnett blog : flickr

Windows Live Flickr?

alexbarnett — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:52:00 GMT

Holy testacular Friday. Microsoft has announced in an official press release its proposal to acquire Yahoo! for $44.6 billion in cash and stock, offering $31 a share - a 62% premium over the current trading price.

Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft:

"Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure...The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own."

Bloggers, media and pundits are going nuts over this. Reading through some of the reactions, Larry Dignan at ZDNet asks some of the questions that come to mind when considering what this might mean if Yahoo! accepts:

"...the combinations of assets from a combined Microsoft and Yahoo is a bit staggering. MSN, Yahoo, Flickr, Zimbra and a bunch of other properties would be under one roof. The big question: Can Microsoft manage it all?

Some key questions to ponder: Would Zimbra become the future Office Live? How about rationalizing products, ad systems and search algorithms. What about ad markets? Cloud computing projects? The overlap is immense."

Leaving aside the financial, "economies of scale", increased inventory, IP, IQ aspects, the one thing the acquisition would certainly do is massively accelerate Microsoft's progress into the social media space, an area of innovation Microsoft has been lagging relative to Yahoo!

On paper at least. The question then becomes: could Microsoft really leverage the newly acquired social media assets or would the acquisition stifle the innovation in this strategically key area? Windows Live Flickr anyone?

Geek Juice

alexbarnett — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 04:36:00 GMT

Yup, I've definitely been missing my feedreader (and now FeedDemon is free I really have no excuses to catch up).

So much good stuff out there, so little time! Here's a sample of the good stuff I've been running into...

MVC, I know what you're thinking...

Haacked shares his MVC joke - "So A Model, A View, and a Controller Walk Into a Bar"...ok, so that's a bad start.

Less of a joke though, more the future...I think therefore I click - Microsoft's investigation into the subconscious, studying thought patterns as part of battle against Apple, Google:

"When a Microsoft Corp. patent application for a method of sorting brain waves surfaced late last year, it drew quips that the company now plans to read PC users' minds, in addition to selling them software."

But that's a while off. I think.

Build it!

In the meantime, back to some semi-reality - here's a good Facebook app primer on How To Build A Facebook Application...and now you can add your own very own virtual realty into Virtual Earth: 3D Models in Mashups. Customize your own Virtual World on your website!

"In this release we added the ability to load custom 3D models as part of a Collection right in your own web applications"

Ship It!

Skyfire has emerged from stealth mode, this video shows the Skyfire mobile browser enabling Flash video through server-side rendering

"While the mobile phone industry scrambles to adopt faster graphics platforms for rendering video, a startup may have bypassed everyone with an approach so simple, you wonder why nobody tried it already"

It looks pretty slick and could well...It just needs to ship! Something else that needs shipping, and pronto...The World Wide Web Consortium releases draft of HTML 5:

"In its final form by 2010, HTML 5 is intended to bring the markup language forward into today's richer Internet environments, with new application programming interfaces to control audio and 2D video content."

And along the shipping theme, Tommy Williams of Microsoft's Data Programmability team describes how he takes a finished software product and gets it up on the Web for people to download.

Trends ~~It!~~

Here's a comment left by a Brian Campbell re: Tim Bray's 2008 Prediction 1: RIA vs. AJAX post.

"Well, one of the big trends is actually getting AJAX to be able to do what the RIA platforms can."

Yup. Lots more to do here.

And what consumer trends to we expect this year? How about the Expectation Economy? I read this, liked it, but thought: Isn't this really describing the experience economy?

A personal trend for me...How about enjoying the NJOY Electronic Cigarette. My wife got me one of these. I haven't got the balls to try this publicly yet...but my time may come.

And this year, how are devs really going make money with Web 2.0? I agree with Phil Wainewright's prediction:

"a groundswell of smart developers are going to use DevPay to make money under the radar screen"

Useful

Subscribed to Steve Gillmor's podcasting series - The Gang » Audio. It includes a fair amount of stuff I'm not really into, but some very good stuff that's right up my street. Just got to be selective about which episodes I'll listen to.

I liked this tool, FlickrDown - download and save your Flickr pics to your hard drive - pics by username, tags or group. Windows only. Sorry! Maybe Mac support in a future release?

Letting your customers know where you're going with your product, what criteria you're using to float some features / improvements to the top of your roadmap is obviously important when you're dealing with developer customer base.

But that's easier said than done. It's a balancing act - on the one hand you don't want to risk over-promising and under-delivering (in fact, you want the opposite) and yet you want provide the best level of visibility you can, so I liked how Ning is carefully introducing its future roadmap to customers in this post - January Product Roadmap - What's Next.

Defining Community

Having clearly defined and agreed term is generally a useful thing (Web 2.0 anyone?)...it gets us all on the same page when we're trying to figure stuff out together. Bob Rebholz of Microsoft's Community team is doing his bit to define the "Community" bit in Social system design part 1: defining terms

"Defining community should be easy right? And it is, sort of."

Why I love Flickr even more

alexbarnett — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 04:02:00 GMT

<Forward: Some of you will need to forgive me, as I realize that if you enjoy photography and you already use Flickr, then this poast is very much a 'duh!' for you (there's a typo I've left in the last sentence, I think its cute, especially since the 'o' and the 'a' are on opposite sides of the keyboard...)..>

I recently bought a second-hand Nikon D70 and am having some great fun with it. It's the first 'proper' camera I've owned, and although I've always enjoyed taking pics, I've never been bothered to study the mechanics of photography, let alone had a camera that allows me to tinker around with the configurations so I can completely ruin a perfectly decent shot. The more I'm playing with it, the more I realize how much there is to learn.

One thing I've realized on this little journey so far, is how seriously cool Flickr is. I've used the service since 2004 and I've enjoyed the sharing of photos with friends, the ability to subscribe to friends' and contacts' pics and its utility as a photo storage service for my blogging. I've written and talked about how Flickr's 'openess' through its APIs use of RSS and tagging is a great example of Web 2.0nessness and all that, but I've just come to realized that I've missed more than half the point behind the success of Flickr.

I never really got the 'Groups' thing until this week. Sad, but true. And I'm loving it. There is a new depth to Flickr I'm discovering that seems simply amazing to me.

Here I am, now 'getting into' photography, trying to learn and experiment with the medium, and so I turn to the web. But the web seems like an awfully big place to try and find likeminded people - likeminded as in: I like photography and / or am getting into it and want to revel in it. I want to see lots of pics and lots of 'good' ones. And right under my nose is Flickr, where there are thousands - no, hundreds of thousands of people all playing around with their cameras, converging in clusters of passionate photographers arounds themes, things and topics of interest (including, of course, photography).

I'd like to be 'good' at photography. By that I mean I want to be able to create and develop images that are interesting for me and others to looks at, both from an informational perspective but also an aesthetic one too. I want to learn about how to get the best of out my camera. And how do you get 'good' at anything? To practice. But my problem has been what to practice? There are an infinite number of things I could practice, to the point of not knowing where to start. You know, meandering. And how can I practice with people and not feel I'm on this learning journey alone?

This is where the Flick groups come in. There are these groups, thousands of them (some of them are silly) but most that have 'themes'. Some of these theme groups do nothing but the same theme, always. Example is the 'split screen' group. You can only submit photos that contains a split screen - and horizontally only, preferably 50/50 split if you please (thanks to Tommy for finding this one for me). Other groups change their theme weekly or monthly. The theme for this week for the 'Weekly Theme' group is 'numbers' (it has over 2,000 members and some 11,000 pics). I love this idea, it gives me something to focus on, to experiment and hone in but with some purpose - a virtual photopgraphy assignment. Perfect.

Is there a point to this post? Maybe this: that sometimes the coolest stuff is right under your nose, you just need to see it.