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Instagram Conditions and the new Flickr app #Instagram #Flickr

Arts, Mobile, Photography, Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

I haven’t used Instagram a lot for sharing photos although I do like going through the photos of my contacts. Today they announced they updated their terms and conditions which has resulted in the internet going crazy. One of the best posts I read was on Business Insider.

If you want to stop social networking services from exploiting your likeness for advertising, you’ve got to start paying up.

Within the article, a reference was made to a post last year from the founder of pinboard.in which basically boiled everything into “Don’t be a free user”.

So stop getting caught off guard when your favorite project sells out! “They were getting so popular, why did they have to shut it down?” Because it’s hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt. And because it’s culturally acceptable to leave your user base high and dry if you get a good offer, citing self-inflicted financial hardship.

So where does that leave everyone? Well, there is an alternative that offers a paid option for enhanced membership. Co-incidentally, they also added a new app this week that rivals Instagram in design and surpasses it in interoperability with other sites.Yes, it’s Flickr. Nice that they include a post clarifying the ownership and rights of photos

In fact, when you upload to Flickr you set the kind of license that you want to apply to the photos, ‘All Rights Reserved’ is the default, or you can select one of the many flavors ofCreative Commons licenses. The choice is yours and you maintain control over how your photo can be used by others. If you want to make your photo available for use by everybody in the world, license it using Getty Images, or to license it to a fancy magazine, it’s up to you..

New version of Flickr App

Photography, Switzerland, Web

New version of Flickr iOS App copies Instagram.

Marissa Mayer is taking action on revitalising Yahoo with this update to the Flickr App. Is it soon enough? Let’s see but the app looks good!

Unlike Instagram, Flickr provides support for Twitter, in addition to Facebook, Tumblr, and email.

Smart move in expanding the reach of the to as many other portals as possible.

Copyright restrictions just lost another sale

Arts, Books, Thought Provoking, Web

I love reading Seth Goldin’s blog for tips and interesting reading material. He posted a list of interesting books that he recently read, of which the first book on the list – The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau looked really interesting. When I go to the Kindle app and look to buy the book, I get the message that the book is not available in my geographical area. Now the moment is lost and I may never buy this book. Those copyright restrictions just cost the author and publisher a sale.

How Flickr was murdered

CRM, Photography, Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

Gizmodo has a fascinating article about what went wrong at Flickr and Yahoo’s failure in general to enhance all of those cool startups they bought in the late 2000’s.

This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

The lesson is clear – if you want your acquisition to continue to grow, concentrate on continued innovation first and corporate integration second. I see parallels with Oracle and all of the industry-leading companies (Siebel, Peoplesoft, etc) they bought. For corporate integration in Yahoo’s case read Fusion in Oracle’s.

The site that once had the best social tools, the most vibrant userbase, and toppest-notch storage is rapidly passing into the irrelevance of abandonment. Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis. Yards gone to seed. Rusting bikes in the front yard. Tattered flags. At address, after address, after address, no one is home.

It is a case study of what can go wrong when a nimble, innovative startup gets gobbled up by a behemoth that doesn’t share its values. What happened to Flickr? The same thing that happened to so many other nimble, innovative startups who sold out for dollars and bandwidth: Yahoo.

Here’s how it all went bad.

I used to be quite active but I haven’t posted in months and visited in weeks. Interestingly, the last image I posted was an Instagram shot.
Iced bike
Read the full article here

Flexslider

Tech, Web

Flexslider looks really cool! I need to add it to one of my sites on the welcome page.

Smashing Magazine gives the lowdown.

The plugin includes fade and slide animations, customizable options as well as all the navigation options you would expect in such a plugin — touch gestures inclusive! It uses simple, semantic markup to create the slider and is lightweight, weighing only 5 Kb (minified). The plugin has been tested in Safari 4+, Chrome 4+, Firefox 3.6+, Opera 10+, and IE7+. iOS and Android devices are supported as well. In three simple steps, you can have a fully responsive slider for your responsive design.

Tracking down your stolen camera

Photography, Thought Provoking, Web

PopPhoto reports about a new site GadgetTrack that tracks if your stolen camera has uploaded images to flickr or 500px

John Heller was on assignment for Getty Images at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, when his Nikon D3 and lenses were stolen, but it wasn’t until a substantial amount of time later that he searched for the camera’s serial number on GadgetTrak’s service, which has indexed all the serials embedded on images from 500px and Flickr from 2006 onwards. With a positive hit on a couple of photos on Flickr, the police were able to track the camera down to a photographer, who bought it not knowing its origins — and even had a receipt for the transaction.

Google Plus

Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

I just joined Google Plus. The main thing I have been getting my head around is how it works. Since I didn’t really use Google Wave or Buzz that much, I was intrigued to find out if lessons had been learned. It seems that they have and are taking the best bits from Facebook and Twitter. I found this article that includes the following paragraph that illustrates its purpose very well: 

That is the big difference between Google Plus and most other networks. Twitter is an all or nothing model. You can share with everyone or you can only share with all the people that follow you. But you can’t share with only a sub set of the people that follow you (such as a specific Twitter List.) Facebook is a little more flexible than that. But you must be friends with people or you must reduce your privacy. You can limit who sees individual things you share, but it is difficult to do and not intuitive to get set up.

It seems that Google learned something from its former employee Paul Adams. His presentation of the real life social network illustrates the problem of using facebook and shows how personal networks are more complicated than the facebook philosophy of everything about you should be public. Look at the whole presentation to see understand his point.