According to the latest blog entry on Flickr, over 2 billion photos have been uploaded to their database. The rise in the number of people in using Flickr and uploading photos since Yahoo! acquired Flickr in 2005 has further proved that Flickr is a good buy for Yahoo! At the time of writing this post, 3,121 photos have been uploaded in the last minute. As usual, people seem to enjoy visit Flickr and upload photos on this site.
Congrat to Flickr!
The other day I came across a new visual search engine that called oSkope. I believed it has been released on the web for a month or two. As stated on their landing page, oSkope is a visual browser that fetch and organize the items from Web services such as Amazon, eBay, Flickr and YouTube. Users are allowed to select one of these four services and play around with it, the search results display can be viewed in a variety of ways such as in the mode of grid, stack, pile, list or graph. Click on one of the thumbnail images that can be enlarged when mousing over, and in the right-hand side of the image will display a dialog box that list the item’s product and price information. For an instance, a book image fetched from Amazon will list the book’s particular details. For every book, you will find that there is a link that provided in order for an user to go to the Amazon’s original book page and buy the book.
Visually, oSkope meet the users’ needs when they want to get a better browsing experience. The establishment of these visual search engines tend to complement the existing search engines such as Google or Yahoo! However, if I’m looking for a specific book or photo, I prefer go to the Amazon or Flickr Website and enter the specific search query. Nevertheless, there is still room left for a visual search engine to further grow on the Web and oSkope might well situated to make money through the referral programs of Amazon or eBay.
Yahoo! Photo begins to closing down its service, as announces in this help page. Moreover, it allowed the existing users few alternative choices besides Flickr, owned by Yahoo!. Users can migrate their photos to Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Photobucket. Users are advised to go to http://closing.photos.yahoo.com to make their decisions before September 20, 2007. Meanwhile, the leading photo and video hosting site, Photobucket has announced the welcome of Yahoo! Photos users, capitalize this situation and strike while the iron is hot. Furthermore, Their forums is also discussing the technique of migration the Yahoo! Photos.
Apparently, Flickr is the most successful photo sharing application on the web right now. I’ve been tracking the rapid creation of the third-party tools that aimed to enhance the services of Flickr and it seems that the number of these tools are increasing month by month. This generation of web developers with a flair of marketing have realized that that’s a huge opportunities inside the Flickr. Imagine and assume that we’re looking for some tools to help us embed the Flickr slideshows on our blogs or websites and we desperately for the code, there’s at least a few of them available on the web now. flickrSLiDR, SlideFlickr, Flickr Slideshow Generator, and even the flickrshow can help us do the jobs.
At this moment, I could not find any distinct comparison among these tools and hence, there will be no early analysis on each of the tools that stated in the above. However, what I noticed here was the fads and fashions, indeed the driving force for the web development process in the past few years.
