Tag Archive for 'flickr'

Flock browser review

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 4/7/2006
in Browsers
. 22 Comments

I have been using Flock since it was first released last year and I have been impressed at its progress (if a little frustrated at it’s rate of progress!).

I like the seamless implementation of social media like Del.icio.us and Flickr into Flock. In fact, it was Flock which got me into using Del.icio.us. Flock was even my default browser for a while (at any one time I have Flock, Safari, Firefox and Camino running simultaneously). I stopped using Flock as my default browser however, because of its patchy support for the minimum set of extensions I want to use (SessionSaver, FlashBlock and AdBlock).

The latest version of Flock launched last week and I thought I’d give it a whirl. I heard the developers discussing the photo uploader on the TalkCrunch podcast and it sounded interesting so I have been playing with that particularly (see screenshot below).

Flock image uploader

The Flock photo uploader is fantastic! There’s no other word for it. It is simplicity itself - drag an image to the photo topbar and the uploader opens ready to upload the image.

I was previously using a plugin for iPhoto to upload my images to my Flickr account but it was very clunky. It frequently hung in the middle of image uploading and there was no way to associate photos with a Flickr set. That had to be done manually after uploading. This is all a thing of the past thanks to the Flock uploader.

As well as uploading to Flickr the Flock uploader allows you to upload to PhotoBucket. Now if only they’d implement uploading to Zooomr, I’d be able to upload to my Zoomr account from within Flock as well!

Any questions for Thomas Hawk?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/6/2006
in Interviews, PodLeaders, Podcasting and Technology
. 3 Comments

Thomas Hawk is an investment advisor in a non technology related field but it is not for that that he is known. Tom is far better known as a digital media and technology enthusiast - specifically, Tom is extremely well known for the photographs he uploads to Flickr. Tom posts several photos a day, all of professional quality. Last time I looked he had 5,599 photos uploaded. I thought I was doing well with my 200 photos! How he does that and keeps down a day-job is beyond me!

Now Tom has announced that he is going to work for zooomr. Zooomr? Zooomr is the new competitor to Flickr. It is pretty feature bare at the minute but Tom promises more features to come:

Zooomr is nowhere near where it needs to be today. Much of the best functionality is coming in version 2.0 due out early next month.

Tom also says that this does not end his relationship with Flickr - he will still be posting photos there.

I’m interviewing Tom this Friday evening for a PodLeaders podcast. We will be talking about the future of digital photography, digital media in general and anything else that may arise in the questions! If you have questions you’d like me to put to him, feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll ask him.

Riya frustrations

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/11/2005
in Malware and Technology
. 3 Comments

I received an Alpha invite to try out Riya the other day. I have posted about Riya previously and it does sound like it will be an exciting application - it is an online photo application (like Flickr) but it has facial recognition software built-in. This means that once you upload a photo and tell Riya who is in the photo, it will recognise them in any other photos you upload. This will help enormously when you want to search for pictures subsequently as currently there is no real way to search for images unless they have meta-information attached.

But when I went to Riya, I was unable to upload any pictures as the uploader is Windows XP only - this meant I was unable to test any of the applications features :-(

Riya Home page

However bad it is not having a Mac uploader, how difficult would it have been having a couple of test images in Alpha testers accounts so that if they couldn’t upload images they could, at least play with the test ones?

Riya being bought by Microsoft?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/11/2005
in Blogging, Business blogging and Search Engines
. 2 Comments

Riya is a company I have mentioned previously - they have an incredible application which combines text and facial recognition with photo uploading, so that once you tell Riya who is who in your photo albums, it will recognise those people from then on out in any photos it sees! Riya also has tagging built in to the application - like any half-decent web 2.0 application. Riya is due to launch tomorrow.

Now comes the rumour/news that Riya is being bought by Google - before it has even launched! I have to stress the news that this is still just a rumour - and the way rumours grow legs on the blogosphere (remember the Technorati buyout rumours?), it may well be completely untrue.

However, given Yahoo!’s purchase of Flickr, Google needs a cool photo app like this to maintain a presence in this space - then again, so does Microsoft! Anyone want to start a Microsoft is buying Riya rumour? Funny, Robert Scoble didn’t mention it in the interview of him which I podcast yesterday… then again, he wouldn’t, would he? ;-)

UPDATE:
I see Michael Arrington and Dave Winer and others have picked up on this story as well.

Flock fails to flabbergast!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/10/2005
in Browsers and Technology
. 4 Comments

I struggled for alliteration with that title, didn’t I?

Flock is a new browser which was launched overnight - it is still in beta (isn’t everything these days? 1.0 versions are so 90’s!), and it is billed as a browser for Web 2.0! Michael Arrington from TechCrunch broke the story of the launch.

I have been playing around with it this morning and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it is a very slick interface on OS X - I haven’t tried it on a PC yet (see screenshot below), it has some nice functionality, and it appears to be fast and stable for a beta browser.

New Flock Browser screenshot on OS X

Like Firefox, Flock has the ability to add Extensions and when you browse to the available extensions for Flock, my three favourite Firefox extensions are available for Flock too (Adblock, Web Developer and Greasemonkey) - yeah!

Where Flock is supposed to differentiate from existing browsers is in support for Web 2.0-type apps. It does this by connecting to del.icio.us, Flickr and your blog software of (limited) choice (it has a built-in blog editor).

However, Flock was written on top of the Firefox codebase, so it should be stable and fast and it should support Firefox extensions - so no great shakes there. The blog editor is poor enough, it doesn’t support WordPress Categories, for instance, it doesn’t have a Quick Link for blockquoting and most importantly, it doesn’t seem to allow you to view/edit previous posts or drafts.

I found a very minor bug when adding my blog to the blog editor - notice in the dialog box below:

Flock Blog add bug

The explanatory text says “Click Finish to save your settings” whereas the button you need to click is labelled “Done”

The del.icio.us integration is nice - click the star button beside the uri and the address is automatically added to your del.icio.us account. You can turn on the ability to tag your del.icio.us bookmarks - this should be on by default in my opinion.

The Flickr integration I can’t really comment on as I don’t use Flickr much at all.

All in all, Flock is a nice browser but it underwhelms and I can’t see myself moving from Firefox to Flock just yet.

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