A little over a year ago I wrote about how it was getting very difficult to choose which camera to use in a given situation. The iPhone 4′s camera was good enough for almost every circumstance I had run into and so the convenience and speed of using the iPhone 4 over a DSLR made for a tough choice.

With the iPhone 4S that decision just got even harder. The iPhone 4S now has an 8MP f/2.4 camera that is also capable of shooting 1080p HD video (the iPhone 4 records in 720p). For any photographer that still pulled out their DSLR over the iPhone 4 they may find it a little easier to use the iPhone 4S. That is why I think the curve to popularity will be a very steep, up-and-to-the-right graph. More serious photographers will use the iPhone 4S then did the iPhone 4.

Time will tell if I’m right. I’d guess, 12 months.

There are services that fit in between the size of Flickr and Facebook (such as Photobucket) but it is an interesting way to look at things.

“Geofences are special locations that deserve their own geo privacy settings. Simply draw a circle on a map, choose a geo privacy setting for that area, and you’re done. Existing photos in that location are updated with your new setting, and any time you geotag a photo in that area, it gets that setting too.”

Merlin Mann quipped on Twitter:

“Flickr’s Geofences sound clever—but a little like writing “Definitely Not Where Money Is Hidden” on the one drawer you’ve locked.”

He’s right. Flickr will likely not make a dime with this feature alone. But getting back to its innovative roots is exactly what Flickr needs to do. And if it takes them being uprooted from their offices and working at a co-worker’s dinner table in order for that to happen, I say that Flickr Management should set fire to their offices immediately. They need to be doing stuff like this more regularly and letting people know about it exactly as they’ve done with this feature.

/via Code: Flickr Developer Blog

Google+ has run me over like a freight train. Over the last few weeks I’ve been living on it instead of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare. In fact, I made the prediction that Google+ could replace many of the most popular services.

But before I get into all of that I thought I’d share how Google+ is different.

Every social networking site was started with a particular purpose in mind. Over time those services typically find their niche (if they survive long enough to do so) whether or not it was the original reason for its inception or not.

Let’s use LinkedIn as an example. LinkedIn was created to be the professional’s social network. A network of people that are connected at some professional, rather than personal or familial, level. This sort of distinction for LinkedIn is completely different to that of Facebook, which tries to connect people that know each other in some way, or Twitter, which doesn’t care if you know anyone, and is an invaluable differentiator in the world of social networking. Heck, it led to LNKD.

Google+, however, goes against this “find the niche” convention. Rather than trying to fill a niche like Facebook or LinkedIn they’re taking on every level of human connection; professional, familial, social, voyeur, etc. and combining them all into one service. They do all of this by providing a different relationship model called Circles.

Circles are nondescript buckets of relationships that you create on your own and can change at anytime. For example you can create some typical social Circles for Coworkers, Friends, Family, Ex-Schoolmates, Basketball Friends, etc. Each of these Circles will have specific meaning to you and no one else. They allow you to segregate your relationships into very meaningful categories that help you connect with many different people all in one place.

Why is this a good thing? In my mind the reasons are innumerable. For instance, maintaining profiles and networks in multiple locations, and somehow engaging with those services regularly, can end up being a monumental draw on your time. I won’t say it is a waste of your time because keeping a LinkedIn profile up-to-date and active has meant many professional opportunities for people. However, keeping every single site up-to-date can get cumbersome and, for those that “follow” you in multiple locations, noisy.

Your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook networks could all co-exist and never intersect using Google+’s Circles.

One more thing to say about Circles… they aren’t just lists. Facebook and Twitter both have lists and Google+’s Circles are not, and should not be, comparable. On Facebook someone has to confirm that you are their friend before the relationship is created. So if you only want to “follow” what is going on with a particular person you can’t unless they approve the relationship (or if they are a Celebrity and create a “page” for themselves rather than a normal account). Once they have, though, you can then separate them into lists. On Facebook you may use lists to filter your main stream or use them to send messages directly to those within those lists (though not nearly as easily as you can on Google+ which I’ll get to in the next paragraph). On Twitter, lists are made to keep your main stream cleaner. Rather than “following” Ashton Kutcher, as an example, one can add him to a Celebrities or Entrepreneurs or Investors list. This way Kutcher’s tweets don’t muddy up your main stream but you can check in with him from time-to-time using Twitter’s Lists. At least, that is how I use Lists. Oh, and you can’t specify how you share on Twitter. You’re either public or private and that is it.

Here is where Google+’s Circles really separate themselves from the pack. Sharing. Anything you share on Google+; a post, a photo, a video, specific information on your profile such as your phone number, etc. can be shared with a limitless subset of your relationships on Google+.

Here, I’ll provide some examples. Let’s say that you want to send a message to everyone at work. If you had a Coworkers Circle you can type in your message to them, choose to only share it with your Coworkers, and hit publish. Only people that you’ve put into the Coworkers Circle will see it. But it can get even more granular than that. You can choose to share a bit of information with more than one Circle or a Circle and a specific person and so on. Maybe you want to tell all of your friends that you’re going to see a movie tonight but you also want to tell your family and one guy from work. You can do that. Or maybe you just want to send a message to one particular person, or two or three, you can do that too. Or, better yet, maybe you want to send a message to someone privately that doesn’t even have you in their Circles, you can do that (unlike Twitter’s Direct Message feature).

Privacy and Sharing options on Google+ are probably the best we’ve ever seen on a social networking service to-date and, believe it or not, they’ve made it pretty easy to understand and use. We all remember the flack Facebook got for making privacy confusing to its hundreds of millions of users. Google+’s privacy options, by comparison, are very easy to understand.

They even have a “view my profile as” feature that allows you to view your own profile as if you were someone else. You can view your profile as if you were your boss or the public-at-large or your future girlfriend. This makes it simple to edit who can see what.

Hopefully this helps frame where Google+ could potentially fit for some. It could, in theory, replace Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn’s niche approach to social networking and allow you to combine all of your relationships in one place. And, you can control exactly what you call those relationships rather than being tied down to the world’s nomenclature of relationships.

The Plusses

I’ve described why Circles are, potentially, better at describing relationships and give us the ability to combine all of our social networks in one spot. But that isn’t the only thing Google+ has going for it.

Ever since the days of Brightkite I’ve been using a secondary service to handle check-ins. Checking into a place, for me, is a better option than simply tweeting “I’m at such-and-such with so-and-so”. Surrounding a check-in is important metadata like location, time, etc. and a tweet is fleeting. Also many check-in services provide you with some sort of context around the location you’re currently in. At the moment my favorite check-in service is Foursquare. However, Google+ provides you with a nice set of check-in tools (although very young). From the Google+ iPhone application you can simply check-into a place and provide no other information (ala Foursquare, Gowalla) or you can choose to add additional information or a photo. While it separates out an actual check-in from a normal post it doesn’t make you feel as though the two are not interchangeable. They’ve struck a great balance with this and I can only hope it will get better.

Photo sharing from your computer or mobile-phone on Google+ is not only simple but also has a rich feature-set. Don’t forget, you can use the power of your Circles to share photos with any subset of your relationships. A photo of your newborn that you only want mom and dad to see? Done. A super-secret-mockup of something you’re building at work that you only want your coworkers and wife to see? Done. A photo of you in front of a landmark for the whole world to see? Done. Oh, and Google+ allows you to apply some effects to your photos as well. Someday Google+ could replace Instagram, Flickr, and Facebook photos.

Posts on Google+ have no character limit. Some consider the 140-character limit of Twitter to be its single greatest strength. As is often said sometimes your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness. There are times when our thoughts span beyond 140-characters (no matter how succinct you are). I’ve found the slightly longer posts of Google+ to be most enjoyable and the Google+ team have designed the interface in such a way that longer posts don’t detract from the shorter ones. The vast majority of posts I’ve seen on Google+ could fit within Twitter’s character limit but every once in a while people have more to say.

Google+’s Hangout, Huddle, and Sparks features are neat but they don’t yet fit into my plusses list. They aren’t minuses either. Whether you use them or not they do not get in the way. I’ve played around with these features and while I haven’t found a valuable use for them yet I may in the future.

The Minuses

For any social networking service the single biggest reason they fail is lack of adoption. While Google+ has become the fastest growing site of-all-time that doesn’t mean that people are using it. In my Circles (get it?) Google+ has not yet been fully adopted. The people that have been most active are very early adopters, people that work at Google, and people that do not have accounts on Twitter or Facebook. Will this change? Will Google somehow convince people, as they did me, to use Google+ for a few days to see if it sticks? We’ll see.

Keeping up with your stream on Google+ is fairly impossible and by that I mean making sure you see every single message. It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that these realtime services care less and less about people keeping up-to-date with what has happened but care much more about showing them what is happening right now. This is a design choice and one that ultimately we may all have to get used to – but it isn’t one I particularly care for at the moment. Right or wrong I treat these streams like I treat my email inbox. I don’t want to miss messages from my family or friends and on Google+ this is very difficult. You see, Google+’s stream shows you the most-recently-updated post on top rather than the most-recently-published post. This distinction is important. A post that was written 5 days ago could resurface to the very top of your stream because someone left a comment in it. From what I’ve heard and read Google is using some complex computation to manage the stream. These guys are extremely good at fiddling with “algorithms” until they’re just right so I’ll withhold judgement on how they do this until they think they’ve got it.

The brevity of tweets makes them very, very easy to consume. Posts on Google+ can be a little harder to digest and that has caused, in some, a feeling of being overwhelmed. When my mother logs onto Twitter she sees a few messages from friends and family and perhaps a tweet or two from NASA. On Google+ with links, photos, videos, hangouts, etc. it can be a bit jarring and you feel like you can’t get your feet on the ground. Maybe Google will be able to figure out this problem but maybe not. Those of us that stick with Google+ may be the type of people that can wade through an enormous amount of information quickly while those that can will be left out in the cold. We’ll see.

At a technical level Google+ is fairly sound. The growth rate of Google+ has been nothing short of astounding and the fact that there hasn’t been an interruption in service is commendable. The iPhone application, on the other hand, is another story altogether. It was released fairly soon after Google+ went into “field testing” mode and its newness shows. It is incredibly slow, poorly designed (for actual use but it looks great), and has major issues with location. These types of frustrations, no doubt, will go away but for now the iPhone application falls squarely at the bottom of my minuses list.

Overall I believe that Google+ could replace many services for me; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Instagram, Flickr. Each of these services may still have their place but the majority of what I choose to share could definitely be handled by Google+ if more people actively used it. Ultimately whether or not I go 100% Google+ or not will depend on whether or not people adopt it. I don’t know if the 25M+ people that have created Google+ accounts will give it enough time to sink in and use it on a daily basis. Selfishly I hope they do because I’m sort of tired with keeping up with multiple streams and services. It’d be very nice to consolidate many of these things into one stream.

Time will tell where we all end up. But if you’d like to add me to your “Really Cool People” Circle I’ve created a special URL for my Google+ profile: cdevroe.com/+

/via Jason Kottke.

My friend Marisa McClellan is shooting a photo per-day and posting it to her blog (and Flickr account if you’d prefer). Most of her photos are fairly drool worthy but the above tips the scales (you know, because of the cast iron).

She’s up to 38 or so. I’ll be watching every single one.

Other projects like this exist on Flickr too such as the 365 days group and Project 365.

I’m back to Safari. I still love Chrome but Safari’s latest update made it edge out Chrome for speed. Speed, it seems, is the killer feature for me in Web browsers.

Until this latest release the Top Sites page in Safari was too slow for me to find useful. Now, however, it is much faster and I’m liking it very much. I liked Chrome’s New Tab page a lot. However, unlike Safari it wasn’t really all that useful for more than giving you a clickable tile to go to your favorite sites. Safari’s Top Sites page does a bit more.

First, it shows a ‘page-curl white star on blue’ icon to show which pages have been updated since you visited them last. This makes is quick and easy to go to the pages that have been updated rather than checking them yourself. Second, Safari allows you to choose how many sites show up on this page. Chrome does not. Depending on your screen size you can choose between Small, Medium and Large tiles for each site. Small is more, large is less.

Third, but not necessarily specific to the Top Sites page, Safari allows you to search your history in a visual way right from the Top Sites page itself. As you type in your search query a coverflow like window shows you a thumbnail of the Web sites that match it. It makes finding pages you’ve been to in the past much, much easier than in Chrome.

So, for now I’m back to Safari.

My Top Sites in Safari are (from left to right and down) this site, my WordPress admin, Twitter (although I rarely use this because I use Echofon so it may be replaced soon), Facebook, Gmail, Instapaper, Tumblr, 37Signals Launchpad, Flickr, Viddler’s Recently Uploaded page, GitHub and Google Reader.

• On Viddler I save videos that I like, that I want Derek (our Community Leader) to see, or that I want to promote to the front page.
• On Flickr I save photos that I like, would like to paint or draw, or want to find again easily.
• On Twitter I save tweets that I like, would like to read later, or that I think are notable in some way.
• On Tumblr (no permalink?) I save posts for the same reason I do tweets. Reading later.
• On Google Reader I star things I want to read later.
• On Facebook I like things that I agree with but have no comment on.

And that is about all of the services that I use on a regular basis or that I favorite things on. With my recent addiction to Instapaper I like less Tumblr and Google Reader items but I still do occasionally.

What about you?

This simply isn’t the case. It isn’t that Flickr isn’t very big and has an incredibly impressive amount of photographs, videos, and users – it is just that it isn’t nearly as big as the top-tier photo sharing Web sites.

According to TechCrunch’s recent article “Who Has The Most Photos Of Them All? Hint: It Is Not Facebook” here are the current standings.

1. ImageShack: 20 billion
2. Facebook: 15 billion
3. PhotoBucket: 7.2 billion
4. Flickr 3.4 billion
5. Multiply: 3 billion
6. Picasa “billions” (?)

It appears we really don’t know where Picasa sits on this list but them aside you can see that Flickr is the fourth largest photo sharing Web site. Again, this is really impressive. But look at the gap! PhotoBucket is double the size, Facebook double the size of PhotoBucket, and ImageShack is leading the pack at nearly 7 times the size of Flickr.

Yes, Flickr is pretty big. Yes, Flickr is (in this writer’s opinion) the best way to share photos online at at the moment. But no, they aren’t the biggest – by a mile.

Blog posts like this are everywhere. Page through my Photography tag and you’ll see a ton of tips and tricks that I’ve linked to in the past. What separates Kyle’s post from others is that he points out exactly what has helped him, rather than just a laundry list of tips that may help people shoot better.

Oh, and I love what he’s been doing with his photos section. He uploads his photos to Flickr and they are automatically synced with his site in an orderly fashion. Definitely a different approach but one that I think works extremely well.

Random 60: What to do about Flickr? | Favorite on Viddler.

I’ve been a Flickr member since mid-summer 2004. I’ve been a Flickr Pro member for nearly as long. Yet, now that my Pro account has expired, I’m wondering if I will renew my subscription.

Why? I think Flickr is great. The Flickr team is fantastic. Nearly everything they build is superb. But with Yahoo! on the rocks (being the parent-company for Flickr now) I’m just not all that eager to fork over more money to a company that could, potentially, fall into some hard times this year.

What do you think I should do?

Oh, and I’m serious about most of these. Darn serious. Seriousness level = 10.

Favorites. It is time. Dare I say, past due? I can not even begin to count the number of times I’ve seen a post on Brightkite that I’ve wanted to save for later, acknowledge its greatness, or simply file away into a list of great Brightkite objects. Anything and everything should be favoritable. I know one of the new terms on the Webz is “likes” – and you can use that if you’d like too.

Flickr preferences like Twitter preferences. The granularity of the Twitter preferences is one of the reasons I was able to begin using Brightkite painlessly. In The way Brightkite fits I wrote:

“Brightkite will update Twitter with any of your activity on Brightkite, but again, there are layers upon layers of options.  Remember I said that you don’t have to switch away from Twitter if you use Brightkite the way I do?  Here is how I have Brightkite set up to notify Twitter.”

“Layers upon layers of options” is not an understatement. You get to choose precisely which actions on Brightkite will notify Twitter, the way your Twitter messages are crafted, and more. Somehow, I need these types of options for sharing photos on Flickr through Brightkite.

I don’t mind if every single photo I post on Brightkite goes to Flickr. For me, it is more a matter of the metadata saved with the photo on Flickr that is important. I choose my titles carefully on Flickr. If Brightkite has its way it simply saves the current location (no matter how messy) as the title. Sometimes this works, othertimes it doesn’t.

What can I say? I’m picky. But Brightkite, usually, allows me to be my picky-self. So, you’ve spoiled me. Your fault Brightkite. You’ve created this animal.

Messages on the Web site like messages on the iPhone. The way that direct messages work on the iPhone is, in my opinion, a lot nicer than the way they are styled on the Web site.

Fix Childs, PA. This really isn’t a “wish list” type of request – because something is obviously fubar for my hometown of Childs, Pennsylvania on Brightkite. Posts, check-ins, photos, etc. are showing up from all over the world. No idea how this happened but it started a while ago.

Odd request: Move these two check-ins and one post. So now we’re getting really nitty – but my friends and I went to Goal Line Sports Bars (which I’ve now created a location on Brightkite for). I’d like the check-ins and posts found here (by myself and CamouflageNoise) to be moved to this location.  I suppose, at the end of the day, I’m asking to be able to move posts and/or check-ins myself via the Web site. So if this situations arises again, I can do it myself.

Hashtag support. If someone uses a #hashtag make it clickable to a post search for that hashtag.

Automatic wall creation. Walls are awesome. No doubt about it. However, if someone does a search – say for No Reservations – I think that it’d be nice to click 1 button and have it create a wall for you with the results of that search. (This is sort of related to the #hashtag support, because for me if I’m following an event, it would be nice to be able to go from a friend’s post to having a wall created for that event with two clicks).

A desktop application. Right now I’m using Fluid and the iPhone web application for Brightkite. But the iPhone web application is, in a matter of speaking, not a good solution to this problem.  Perhaps there is a Brightkite desktop application that I am not aware of that rivals the likes of Twitterrific or TweetDeck but I do not know about it.

Forward /username URLs.  Ooops!

Viddler video. We’ll talk.

I have said it before, I like Brightkite better than Twitter. But, is the above too much to ask? Thanks Brightkite.

Tonight, Eliza is out and I’m home by myself. I’ve had to fend for myself. So, I made some soup from some of the stuff I found in the kitchen. Here is a video, styled after My Day, Yesterday videos, but just making a single meal.

I’ve created a new Viddler group called Making. If you’re so inclined, consider contributing a Making video.

About the video quality: I only have a Flip video camera, which is Eliza’s actually, at the moment. Someday I’ll get my hands on a shiny new HD-quality video camera. Until then, suffer.

Me, speaking at Podcamp Hawai’i. Credit: Eliza Devroe

I have an awful lot of writing to do. I figured one of the easiest things to start off with, and hopefully get the ball rolling with everything else that I need to write about, would be the photos, videos, tweets, and much more from both Podcamp and Wordcamp Hawai’i.

Oh, did I mention that I learned how to properly spell Hawai’i while I was there?

If you’ve been following the pch08 tag on Flickr, on Twitter, on Viddler, and pretty much everywhere else, you’ll probably have seen these already.  If not… than I just did you a favor.

The visuals tell only part of the story. You’ll have to be there next year ((There will be a next year, right?)) to experience what type of conference the outstanding people in Hawai’i are able to put together.

And I thought the llama suggestion was going to be tough to write?  What the heck does this suggestion actually mean?  It isn’t like I was able to ask who suggested it, because it was suggested anonymously.  What’s worse is that it was voted for 3 times!

I’ll do my best. I’m going to separate this suggestion into two posts. This first one is called “Web applications that I use on my iPhone”. The second will be called “Web applications and sites I use to stay in the loop”. How is that? Good? Good.

I have over 4Gb free on my 8Gb iPhone 2G. So I don’t install a lot of applications, store a lot of music or photos on my phone. Surely I must use a large number of Web applications or sites to get things done on my iPhone? Well, not really.

I have tried a lot of different Web applications on my iPhone.  I always like to see what sticks.  But for me, these are my most frequented URLs on the go.

Brightkite – As I’ve written about so many times in the past, Brightkite is quickly becoming my favorite social network to update while I’m mobile.  It automatically updates Twitter for me, which was what I used to update, so it is a two-fer.  The granular preferences and notification features are gold.

Hahlo – Since there are still a number of people that I follow on Twitter that have yet to make the jump to Brightkite, though I believe they will at some point in the future, I still have to “check” Twitter from time to time.  And, to be honest, that is where most of the conversation is anyway.  When I asked for help via Brightkite, and it updates Twitter, the number of answers I get via Twitter is much higher than on Brightkite.

This isn’t to say that Hahlo isn’t probably the best iPhone Web application I’ve ever used.  It is certainly the best Twitter Web application built for the iPhone. In fact, from the remarks I’ve read and discussed with others, it still beats the native applications without beating a sweat.

Flickr mobile – A site most definitely not built for the iPhone experience, but it works, and I don’t know any alternative.  I’ve tried Exposure and, while I admire the skill of Frasier Spiers, I do not think Exposure is the right approach to a native iPhone Flickr application.  For quick updates, m.flickr.com works for now.

Google Reader – Every now and then I will read a few posts on the Google Reader iPhone interface.  I don’t do this very often, but it is on my home screen and so it is getting a mention here.

Wait, that’s it?  As far as Web applications is concerned, that is it.  That is all I use frequently.

 

What web applications do you use on your iPhone?

As it turns out, some one lost a camera, some one found the camera, and then someone went to great lengths to return the camera.  After turning the camera into police, and they not finding the owner, they gave it to the person that found it.  So the woman that found it posted a few of the photos online and asked for help in figuring out who owned it.  After some expert sleuthing, the owners were found and the camera returned.

Source: “I found a camera…”. And the Flickr Group discussion thread.

The above photo was posted to Flickr from my iPhone a few minutes ago.  I wanted to show off, in all its glory, the new desktop picture I’m using on both my Macbook and external monitor courtesy of Mark Bixby.

But this brings up something that I’m completely torn over.  Where should I post my mobile photos?  I have a mobile photos category here on my blog, a Brightkite account that makes it dead-simple to post photos and remember where they were taken an in context, and a Flickr account.

It seems like every time I snap a photo with my iPhone I have a different idea of where I think it should go.  I like having everything I submit to the Web here on my site.  I think photos of what I’m currently eating at a restaurant is best kept on Brightkite for a lot of reasons, and perhaps an artsy mobile photo like this one would be best submitted to Flickr.  Is that the answer?  Should I diversify where I submit my mobile photos?

And better yet, why do I care so much? Should I care?  Does anyone else care?

UGH!

The most notable take-away from this first weekend of my using third-party applications on my iPhone is how very different the applications I’ve downloaded from the store feel from the applications I’ve been using for over a year.  It is something I didn’t think about as I was anticipating the release of this update.  Nearly all of the iPhone applications that are currently available are, in my opinion, beta-level 1.0 applications.  Add to it that they’ve not been built by Apple, and we’re talking about a lot of poorly designed applications.

This isn’t to say that the applications that were release on day-one aren’t valuable, good applications to have, worth the money they’re asking for, or even that they’re bad applications in any sense.  It is just that they don’t feel nearly as refined as the applications that Apple has released themselves.

Some of the most glaring examples of this are Facebook’s application, Connected Flow’s Exposure, and the Mobile AIM (this is an iTunes link) client by AOL.

First, Facebook’s iPhone application, while built natively for the iPhone – is not nearly as refined or aesthetically pleasing as their Web application for the iPhone. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great application, and I think it works well.  But at the moment I prefer their Web app.

Exposure.

Second, Connected Flow’s Exposure application, the one I linked to the other day, is a pretty good way to browse through Flickr.  If I had to guess at the UI of this application prior to launch I would have been dead wrong.  The application feels very much like the Contact app on the iPhone.  Click a menu item, slide to the right, see that information, then slide back.  But, clicking on the photo and clicking on the arrow give you two different information panes.  One is the photo, full-screen, another is the photo’s metadata (ie. number of views, comments, tags, etc.).  I think all of this information should be on the same panel, inline, and the ability to leave a comment on a photo should not be 3 or 4 clicks into the application.  I think this application should look like the iPhone’s built-in photo browser, with added metadata on touch.  But it isn’t.  It went a completely different direction than I would have assumed. It isn’t all bad, Exposure is free!

Mobile AIM

Last, at least in this post, is the Mobile AIM client. This application feels like someone built it that never built for the Macintosh before – but they tried really hard and nearly pulled it off.  Some of the UIs largest faults is that there is no way to sign out from the application unless you go into your iPhone’s settings panel first, there is no way to close an IM “tab” without first clicking edit on the active IMs list and then clicking the minus button, and that Mobile AIM does not use your iPhone’s contacts.  There are many, many things wrong with this application but the fact that it works and you can be on AIM anywhere in the world makes this one a must-have-installed application.

Let me be clear, I’ve chosen these applications not because they are the worst user interfaces, but because they are among some of the better ones.  These are some of the applications that I think are going to dramatically improve over time.  I think most iPhone application UIs will improve overtime, just as some of our favorite applications on the Macintosh have.  I think more applications will be released that are better than these and as they do, everyone will benefit from the competition.

Kudos to all of the developers that locked themselves in their closets and tried their best to provide good, stable applications for the launch of the App Store.  And I’m looking forward to the future versions of your applications.

Now, if I could just find time to go through the hundreds of applications in the App Store.

Connected Flow, founded by Fraser Speirs, is very well acquanted with the Flickr API. Fraser developed both the iPhoto and Aperture plugins for Flickr. He also toyed around with a full Mac application that utilized Flickr, which was also called Exposure, but it was never publicly released. ((Though this application was never released, you can see screenshots here.)).

So Connected Flow is well-suited and in the perfect position to release an iPhone application for Flickr.  I said it was free above, but there will be a pay-version for $9.99 that will eliminate the ads.  This is very much the same model that I expect Twitterrific’s iPhone application to take, especially since Twitterrific itself does already.

Let me also say that I think this application is going to be extremely popular.  The fact that it will be a full-featured free application, with the option to buy, is going to make it a no-brainer for any Flickr + iPhone users.

Source: Exposure: two billion photos, in your pocket.
Connected Flow: Announcing Exposure. 

FriendFeed, of which I’m a member, recently launched an iPhone-friendly version of their site.  Notably, however, they’ve done it in such a way that I much prefer to some of the ways other sites have done it.  They detect the iPhone’s mobile browser and automatically format it for you, rather than requiring you to remember the URL of the iPhone-friendly site.

Flickr, on the other hand, has a mobile Website that – while it works fairly well on the iPhone (though it isn’t built for it) – is not interchangeable with the normal Website.  What I mean to say is, if someone links me to a Flickr photo on my iPhone either via Twitter, FriendFeed, or even through an SMS message – I’m forced to be taken to the full-fledged, slow-loading Website without so much as the choice of loading the mobile version.  At least with Twitter I’m able to simply prepend the URL with m.*, which switches the site into “mobile mode”, and see the same content.  Flickr’s URLs for their mobile site aren’t hackable.

FriendFeed does have hackable URLs ((Just insert /iphone/ into any URL.)). Combine the hackability of their URLs with the detection of the iPhone and you’ve got nearly a perfect solution for iPhone users.

Side note: I love the FriendFeed looks nearly the same on my iPhone as it does on my personal computer.  FriendFeed’s design lends itself to this because of its simplicity, lightness, and straight-forward “the content is the design” approach.

Source: FriendFeed iPhone interface.
Via: TechCrunch: FriendFeed Finally Gets iPhone Friendly ((I don’t like the use of the word finally in this title.)).

Some of my favorites (pictured) are the Spartan, Gene Simmons of KISS, and a Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle.

So far Joe D! has published 75 peices of his art work, which have received a total over over 500,000 views.  He is as surprised as anyone about the attention they are getting.

“wow, i’m surprised how much everyone likes this. it’s just something i’ve been toying around with every now and then, it all started when i would draw glasses or beards on money with the counterfeit pen on the registers at work and just grew in to a hobby.”

 I wonder if he takes requests?  A Mr. T version of Lincoln might be a good place to start.

Source: Refacing Government Tender.
Via: Boing Boing: Hilarious Money Doodles. 

As of: May 1, 2008

Somewhat recently, according to this graph (pictured), the Apple iPhone has taken over the top spot as Flickr user’s use it more than any other camera phone to publish photos to Flickr.  The Nokia N95 had a demanding lead over every other camera phone, while the iPhone took the lead with an amazing upswing.

This is not suprising to me, giving the ease of uploading from the iPhone to Flickr through email.  For those that have “jail broken” their iPhones there is also an application they can use to upload photos directly to Flickr.  I shutter [sic] to think what this graph will look like once version 2 of the iPhone software comes out, and there is an official application, or many applications, for uploading photos to Flickr.

Source: Flickr: Camera Finder.

I think it is great that Flickr has joined the online video sharing space. I think it is great for Flickr, its members, the online video sharing market, and in-turn; Viddler.

A quick side note: I will not be addressing the whole “Should Flickr have video.” debate we’ve seen since they’ve launched. I realize some photographers do not want “their Flickr” muddled by videos, but we can’t ignore the fact that Flickr does have video now whether or not you like it.

Point one: Crumbs shall fall

Flickr’s entry into the video sharing space is incredibly focused. Flickr only allows people to upload 150Mb video files (or less) and only a play time duration up to 90-seconds. This saves their community more than I think they even realize. This saves the Flickr community from dealing with pirated TV shows and movies popping up all over the place. It saves the Flickr community from becoming the next place to upload your podcast (unless of course your podcast is only 90 seconds long). I would say that Flickr’s limitations will help keep the “noise” down really, really well.

But it also means something else; Flickr users that find themselves wanting to go outside of the limitations, will need to find somewhere to upload their videos. I think the “crumbs that fall from Flickr’s table” will end up falling on other video sharing sites. Lets face it, some of the people that have uploaded video to Flickr have never uploaded video to the Internet before. Ladies and gentlemen, the video sharing market just grew. And no matter who you are, this is good for the industry.

In case you’re curious: Viddler offers a 500Mb per-file upload limitation at an unlimited play time duration. Oh, and you can upload as many files as you’d like to.

Point two: Will people pay?

The other unique point of interest is that Flickr’s video features are not free. Flickr only allows their Pro members to upload videos and as such they are, unwittingly or not, showing that people will pay to upload video. In fact, they are doing something a bit beyond that. They are showing that people will pay to upload short-form video. Obviously Flickr already has a Pro-member base that will be uploading videos, but if their Pro-member base grows by only a few percent, it will be statistics that all of the other video-sharing sites will be able to use to their advantage.

In other words; If people are willing to spring for a Flickr Pro account just to upload 90-second clips from their family vacations, surely others would be willing to pay to upload long-form content. I think this is one of the larger points that the rest of the industry can really take note of.

At present, all of Viddler’s offerings are completely free.

In conclusion

All-in-all I think Flickr’s video solution is perfect for their community. I know they’ve hinted at allowing longer than 90-second clips, but I don’t see that happening for a while. As the video-sharing market expands, both in user-base and companies offering the technology, I believe there is more opportunity for innovation and and quality service, rather than less.

Kudos to the Flickr team for launching a well balanced product that I know, as I have with past Flickr endeavors, I will be sure to learn from.

They also integrate with Flickr and are running a photo book contest where you could win $25,000.

(Source: Blurb)

Starting today, mobile photos that used to show up on my Flickr account, will now be on my site. You can see the first one which is a photo of the TVs in the lobby at ViddlerHQ. I plan on adding a new section, to the main navigation, to handle mobile photos and notes that I post while on the go – but I’ll worry about that later. I am going to wait until I get a few mobile notes and photos up before worrying about how the site handles them.

Thanks to Owen Winkler, via Twitter, for hooking me up with this plugin that enhances WordPress’ built-in email-to-post functionality. Now, from my iPhone, all I need to do is select a photo and email it to a special email account I’ve created, and it will be posted here on my site within 5 minutes of me emailing it. Works like a charm.

As with the Photo section, all will be available through the feed – so there is no need to change subscriptions up at all.

I’ve also modified the way that my automated processes for notifying Twitter and Pownce of new mobile photos works. Now, both of these processes are pointed at this sites feed, rather than at Flickr. So all links will be pointing back to here instead of there, and will be for any new post not just mobile photos.

Another big step forward in bringing it all together. For those taken notes, I’ll be digesting the entire strategy to bringing all of my content onto my site sometime in the future when I’m nearly done. For now, subscribe to my feed, if you’d like the play-by-play of how I’m experimenting with this.

Next up? Links. (But probably not for a few days.)

As it stands I post what I’m currently doing to Twitter, I am testing out Pownce with mobile blogging, events, links, and files, I post mobile phone photos to Flickr (as well as the occasional screenshot), videos go on Viddler, bookmarks end up on Ma.gnolia, tasting notes end up on Cork’d, and my thoughts on Apple products find their way to TUG.n.

It is exhausting, and starting to become a little bit of a headache.

There are definitely many pros to using each of these services, as I believe each and every one is built very well for their purpose, and each have their own thriving community of users that make you feel right at home. Services like Viddler and Flickr also make sharing videos and photos extremely cost effective. Even with these benefits I always feel as though I’m spreading myself out too wide, so I think I’m going to start pulling all of these bits together here on my site in some fashion.

As it stands, I use my front page as the main way to show the latest activity on each of these services. This has been fine for a while but I now would like to change from aggregating everything to storing everything here, and perhaps pushing updates to the services, rather than the other way around. This isn’t going to be an easy thing to accomplish at first, but once I get everything setup, I think I’ll be much happier and have much more control of what and how I share.

There are a few other benefits to this change, at least for me. Cutting down on distraction is always a goal of mine and my most recent try at this has been to remove a huge portion of my Twitter and Flickr “friends” so that I cut down on a lot of the noise. I’ve also switched the Twitter notices preference to not include @replies from people I am not following, and this has really cut down on the chatter that I’m not even part of. I believe I went from seeing hundreds of Tweets per day to now only seeing a few an hour. Actually, I’m not even seeing that many since I’ve now decided to keep Twitterrific hidden in the background until I need it. I’ll still see @cdevroe messages, so that will still be a valuable way to communicate, but will also cut down on distractions. A win-win.

I’m going to begin working on one service at a time, slowly bringing it all together, and giving each a home here on my site. I’ll try my best to keep a log of my experiences doing each of these, jotting down why I’m handling it the way that I am, and asking for feedback as I find the best solution for me as I go forward. Of course, I’ll be using WordPress as my backbone for this – as I’ve always found it to be extremely flexible and powerful enough for me to do just about everything I want to do.

I’m looking at this as both a fun project and an experiment. Have you ever thought of doing this, or can you point me to some good examples of those who have?

The script isn’t anything special mind you, all it does it “watch” any Flickr feed for new entries. To be more precise, my server runs this script every 15 minutes and checks for new photos, when there is one, it creates a TinyURL and posts it to Twitter (like this).

But I wanted this to work for Pownce.

I immediately dove head first into Pownce’s API only to find out that the API didn’t allow posting anything. I thought my Powncing days were over until, out of some crazy stroke of coincidence, I read an article on TechCrunch that said Pownce was due to release a new version of their API the very next day. Turns out, I didn’t even have to wait that long and the Pownce wiki was updated to include documentation for version 2 of their API.

Without blinking an eye I finished my script, grabbed myself an app_key, and Pownced the script (you’ll need to be logged in, and be my Pownce friend to see this Pownce message). Once I figured out that I couldn’t Pownce a file to the general public, I knew I had to find some time to write this post.

Since then I read that Dave Winer also enjoys the way Pownce shows links to Flickr photos and that he is running a similar script. So I thought I’d put this out for everyone to use.

Powncer!

Enough beating around the bush, you can download the script here which includes an XML parser for ripping through Flickr’s RSS feed. You’ll need to edit the first few lines of powncer.php for it to work, so this isn’t your run-of-the-mill plug-and-play type script, unfortunately, but for the PHP savvy of you, you should be able to get it up and running pretty easily. If you need help getting it setup, just ask in the comments.

I run this script here on cdevroe.com every 15 minutes using cron. You may run it however you’d like.

“37signals responds to downtime, perfectly. They start with an explanation of what happened, then apologize with the promise to compensate where warranted, and assure it won’t happen again, all with human feeling. Learn.” — (view bookmark | view their post)

Pulling this off is no easy task – though for a remarkably customer service conscience group like 37signals perhaps this comes pretty naturally. I wanted to take a second to show some bad examples of this type of response, so that you can see the contrast (and I’m sure I could be one of these examples if I was harder on myself).

Recently Flickr had some downtime that they knew they were going to have so they gave fair warning about it. This is a good thing. However, their maintenance took longer than they thought it would, and I think they might have stepped over the “snarky remark” edge just slightly. Just so we’re all clear, I love Flickr. I’ve met some of their staff members and each of them are good people. Here is a snippet from their downtime notice post.

“Do you remember when we said we were almost back online? Well, that time we were joking, but this time is for real!”

Personally I think they could have skipped the “every few hours” approach to updating and just waited until the service was updated to bring the community up-to-speed (more on this below). Snarky remarks like the above don’t help too much. How can this be avoided though? You don’t want to be completely unhuman. Let’s look at how 37signals brought the human-feeling into their post, with this line.

“Again, we’re truly sorry for this interruption. This is not how Fridays are supposed to be.”

During their downtime they also updated their users as best they could (this particular situation was relatively out-of-their hands) and while they injected some heartfelt messages into those updates, I think they could have saved that for this post.

Another bad example would be to remain silent and have your service degrade, well, not so gracefully. Blogger recently had some outage and their users just saw a weird message and there was no updates from the Blogger staff. Silence isn’t a good tactic at all.

Points to remember

Based on the good example of 37signals and the bad examples above, I think that we should all strive to do the following when web services go down – and I’ve ordered these by importance (in my opinion).

• Degrade gracefully. When downtime occurs, forward to some sort of friendly message that is easily updatable by staff members to let the community know what is going on.
• Keep explanations short and simple. Don’t update every 5-seconds (especially if you have nothing to report), and don’t be long winded. Sometimes “we’re working on it” is sufficient. Oh, and each update should have a timestamp.
• Don’t give false expectations. I’ve learned this the hard way. Even if your engineers tell you that it will take an hour, there is no need to say that publicly. Keep the “we’re close” messages to a minimum too.
• Be human. Try your best to explain the situation in human terms and be warm.

Once the service is back up and running, and a longer explanation is warranted, you can look no further than 37signals post for inspiration.

One thing we can’t see is whether or not 37signals did any contacting of their users behind the scenes. Since their product is a pay-for service, they could have very well personally contacted some of their larger accounts to let them know what is going on. Or, after they were back up, they could have reimbursed them beyond the offer they made publicly. Things like this go a very long way.

Please notice that I believe this task to be extremely hard to pull off well and that I think both Flickr and Blogger are great services.

I’m hoping that I can take all of these points and learn from them the next time we have any troubles at Viddler. In the past we’ve handled these situations fairly well, but I know we can improve a lot by learning from others good and bad examples.

Thoughts?

Addendum: It appears that I am not the only one that thinks 37signals did a great job. Not only do they have numerous comments on the post, but Dan Benjamin also thought so.

Recently I decided that, instead of allowing my Flickr account to go to waste, I would use it as my primary way of uploading photos from my iPhone. Instead of creating a mobile version of my photolog, I now just email my photos to my Flickr account and display them there.

After leaving MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn – I’m beginning to think of new ways that I can use some of my accounts that I have lingering all over the place. Do you have any good examples of how you’re reusing older accounts on web sites?

As with other overviews I’ve written I want to take you back to the time I first downloaded Skitch and met its designer Cris Pearson. I was sitting at a table in the Mashroom at Web2Open in the Moscone Center (which was caught by Scott Beale in this photo). Cris pulls up a chair next to me and begins enjoying his lunch provided by the Expo and we get to talking about Skitch. Details are a little fuzzy because of the number of conversations I had at that table but he quickly launched his Dashboard and was able to create an account for me which then emailed me a link to download Skitch for myself. I was thoroughly impressed with the way he setup his account activation process so I knew I was in for a treat with Skitch.

Being incredibly busy during events such as the Expo I was unable to give Skitch a thorough run through until I got home. Since then I’ve been using Skitch pretty regularly for both work and play and I’ve been loving every minute of it.

Me wishing my salad was made of Skitch.

Skitch’s features

How can an application, with the primary purpose of taking screenshots, quickly become one of my favorites? I think it is a combination of the user interface and how well thought-out Skitch really is. Skitch is jammed packed with features yet the interface for those features never gets in your way or becomes overbearing. This is the result of a ton of research, trial and error, and well thought out design by Cris and his team. Here are the main features of Skitch as I see it:

Quickly take a screenshot in just about anyway you can think of. The Mac OS has some really great shortcut keys for taking screenshots. You can select a specific viewable area for your screenshot, select a specific window, or capture your entire screen space. Skitch wraps all of these into an easy to use UI that then lets you “do something” with that screenshot.

Then you can annotate a screenshot once you’ve captured it. By adding shapes, arrows, text, etc. you can quickly highlight and draw attention to the specific parts of the screenshot that you’d like to. Or, you can put earrings on dogs. I remember doing this type of thing in Photoshop for years and what a pain that was! Not only was I forced to open an application that is far too complex for this type of simple annotation but it hogged all of my memory!

Sharing your screenshot with the world is probably Skitch’s strong suit. Skitch is not just an application but it also connects to a hosting service provided by plasq called MySkitch. MySkitch gives you a simple way to share your screenshots without worrying about saving, emailing, or FTPing those files to those you want to share with. With one-click your screenshot is available for the world to see! You don’t want to use MySkitch because all of your friends use Flickr? No problem because Skitch supports MySkitch, .Mac, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and of course Flickr. I’m fairly certain that this list will grow before and after launch of the final product.

Taking photos with your webcam is dead simple. Skitch does not come equipped with all of the effects that Photo Booth does, but if you need a quick way to take a snapshot with your webcam, annotate it, and share it – Skitch is for you.

The little things

The main thing that separates the good applications from the great applications is attention to detail. Skitch has a few ‘little things’ that both surprised and impressed me.

First was the delete feature. Skitch saves an entire history of your screenshots (which in itself is great), but the history remembers where you shared that file. So, when you go to delete something out of your history that you may have shared via Flickr, Skitch will ask if you’d like to delete the local file, the file that you shared on Flickr, or both. How cool is that?

Howdy, from Skitch.

I suppose the second would have to be the ability to drag the “drag me” file from the bottom of the window at any point while you’re editing the original screenshot. Instead of saving and sharing what you’ve done so far you can quickly drag that “drag me” file into an instant message, email, onto your desktop, or into a document. This saves a lot of time and also saves your Skitch history from having multiple copies of unfinished work.

Resizing screenshots has always been a hassle. Perhaps you’ve taken a screenshot of your entire desktop which spans thousands of pixels in every direction and you’d like to share that with someone via email who may not even have the same resolution as you do. Simply resizing skitch to be the size you want your screenshot to be (which is indicated in the bottom left hand corner) will resize your screenshot automatically.

There is a lot about Skitch that I’m leaving out. Really I wanted to provide a general overview of why I like Skitch so much and why I recommend that you register to be notified of Skitch’s public release. Also be sure to read what everyone else is saying about Skitch so that you know I am not alone.

Want an invite to try Skitch?

Cris was kind enough to allow me to give away five invites to use the latest Skitch beta along with getting yourself a shiny new MySkitch account. After noodling it for a bit I’ve decided on who is going to get these invites. The first five people to write a blog post about how they’d use Skitch (linking to both this entry and the Skitch site) will receive a MySkitch account and a beta copy of Skitch. Be sure to trackback this entry so that I see it and if you don’t know how to do that send me an email (which is on my about page).

Happy Skitching!

One of the good examples of scaling communities mentioned was Flickr. Obviously they’ve become the community poster-child and rightly so. They’ve put a lot of thought and hard work into making their communities thrive, grow, and in some ways scale very nicely. However, there is still a limit that any community will hit and then it is forced to divide regardless of the feature-set that the service offers.

Online communities reflect their real-world counterparts so lets use New York City as an example of community division. Everyone that lives in New York City is part of a community. They all feel it. They all take pride in it. And in some way or another they all take part in it. However, none of them are familiar with everyone inside of their community. Most of them will never meet face to face. But each one of them has their own much smaller communities that they belong to. Maybe they work at a company, or visit the same coffee shop everyday, or play basketball with their same five friends in the park on Saturdays. Regardless, they’ve divided themselves from the much larger community and created or taken part in a much smaller community inside of the one that surrounds them.

Flickr has given some really great features to its group administrators allowing them to setup their own communities under the much larger Flickr community. That’s the first divide. Flickr has worked really hard to make those communities work well whether there are only two members of that group or ten thousand. But, is there a limit? I feel there is and it might be different for every community.

Once a group gets too large, other groups begin to emerge that may do things very much in the same way as the much larger group – yet they divide in order to find elbow room. To help themselves separate the signal from the noise or even just to pull their friends along. I’ve done this myself. I belong to both the 365days group and the MeToday group. However I’m far more active as a MeToday group member than I am a 365day group member because the MeToday group seems like its my friends getting together and posting their 365day shots. I’m a member of the enormous Macintosh group but I also belong to the Macbook and Apple symbol groups.

On Viddler I’ve noticed other divisions occurring too. We’ve not released any group type features, though we plan to, and yet already groups of people are banding together to create their own social groups. This is done a combination of ways and obviously marking each other as friends is one way, or tagging videos the same way is another. But then we have our forums where small grass roots efforts to form communities (like our newly formed Viral Marketing Team, which is too freaking cool) are taking place. This is the first divide. I’m sure we’ll begin to see others in the near future and I can’t wait for those days to come.

When you put people into the same place with similar interests they all band together with common goals. When that group reaches “the community limit”, they begin to divide while still being loyal to the larger group. I do not think that any set of features can help to stop this and I don’t think too much time should be put into trying to stop it either.

The Expo

The Web 2.0 Expo Floor

The expo floor was filled with companies of all types ranging from large companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to smaller more fun companies like Viddler, Zimki, and Piczo. Some people were being very professional and demonstrating some very high-level enterprise applications (which are typically found behind-the-scenes of more social software. ie. Analytics and monitoring systems for server grids). Others were demonstrating their next-generation web service that can take care of all your development needs from coding, to versioning, to deployment all in a social and collaborative way. Each had their pitch, each had something very interesting to offer, and each were trying to make their product/service stand out from the pack.

The sessions that I got to see (which weren’t many since I didn’t have a session pass so I had to sneak into any of the rooms by tossing Hershey Kisses on the floor in front of the badge-checker on the way in) were much more “professional” than the panels I got to see when I was at South by Southwest this year. This isn’t to say that those panels at SXSW were not done in a professional manner, but that the sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo were much less interactive and more a demonstration of some products/services/companies that stood out as doing good work in their various fields.

Web 2Open

The Web2Open Mashroom

Running adjacent to the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes and sessions was Web2Open which is a *Camp style event that run in the main corridors on the second floor. Various presentations and discussions given by people that attended and participated in Web2Open were very good. “Minutes” were taken by various people and left on the walls so that if you came late to a particular discussion, you were able to quickly catch up and be part of the conversation. If you didn’t like where the discussion was going you were able to change the topic yourself by suggesting a topic, or – you could literally get up and go into another room where maybe the topic suited you a little better.

The idea of doing Open conferences like this is still very much in beta – and the process is being refined by the attendees each and every time one of these events goes on – but they are definitely much more attractive than any other event that I’ve been to. Simply being able to steer the conversation by simply raising your hand and asking a question lends itself very well to building value for those that attend.

The Viddler team and version 2.0

Viddler had a massive push to finish Q&A and testing on the its latest version of the site and player and managed to fit in many hours of development in order to release version 2.0. There are still a few bugs being worked out as soon as the developers and managers get back home from this trip – but overall the release was a big success and was fairly well received. The roadmap for Viddler is still quite exciting and the entire team is looking forward to the next step. I’ll have some more information about this and will be asking for everyone’s feedback on some of our ideas shortly.

Viddler 2.0 Cake

We celebrated version 2.0 a little bit early with some champagne and cake. The entire team was staying in Saratoga at our President’s relative’s house. We were so well taken care of that none of us wanted to leave (freshly squeezed orange juice right off the tree every morning makes a man wanna stick around).

Meeting the entire team for the first time was awesome. Working remotely with our team is really great and is actually conducive to getting very good work accomplished without the added expense and overhead of having everyone move to one location and setting up the proper digs for such an effort. However, it was nice to finally spend some time together to get to know each other even better and fit a real personality to the people that I have the privilege of working with everyday.

Harry and I got to work on our commercial together, which has caused a little bit of a stir with some members – which is always good to know that our users are reading our terms of use. We’re looking forward to updating our terms of use to fit more inline with what we really want to be able to do — promote really good video content and display it in an interactive and valuable way.

The Web 2 Party

The moment I got a feel for who was going to be at the Web 2 Expo; namely my friends from Citizen Agency, Ma.gnolia, etc. – I decided I really wanted to have a party with a few companies to help fit the bill to really pull off something nice. I mentioned this to Larry Halff and Chris Messina and I must say – they really took the ball and ran with it especially considering my inexperience in putting something like this together combined with the fact that I’m on the east coast far away from finding out about all of the venues that were available.

Tara (unknown last name) (aka Tara 2.0) came through in a very big way and secured our venue and setup everything we needed go pull off a successful event. Having an “event planner” is really key when you are trying to do one of these events with multiple companies and tons of logistics involved. If you are thinking of doing something like we did – I definitely recommend assigning one experienced person to get everything setup properly.

The party attendees

The party, in my opinion, was a huge success and it seemed like everyone had a really great time. People were lined up outside to get in, we were “at capacity” for the entire duration of the party, and people had to be escorted out of the gallery when the place closed. I had been to a few events at South by Southwest where people leaved early, the bar tab ran out quickly, or where generally not many people showed up. Such was not the scene for the Web 2 Party and we had a great time meeting everyone who came, shooting some video, and had some great discussions.

We’ve been talking about doing something in New York in the Fall so be sure to keep your ear to the ground. We don’t want to let all the west coast peeps have all the fun!

I know I’m speaking for the entire Viddler team when I say that we’d like to thank Citizen Agency for helping to coordinate the entire event, and thanks to Ma.gnolia, Scrapblog, JanRain, faberNovel, Facebook, Plasq, and WineLibraryTVfor helping us in throwing the best party during the Web 2.0 Expo. We hope you had as much fun as we all did.

The photos

Here is just a small collection of photos that I took over the course of the week. I didn’t have a lot of time to shoot many photos as I always seemed to be busy recording video, talking at our booth, chatting with friends or just generally preoccupied with other things. I recommend you look at the Viddler Group on Flickr for more photos (oh, if you have photos please put them in the Viddler group) and also watch the Viddler tag on Viddler to see any video that may pop up over the next few days from the Expo.

Oranges from Saratoga

Breakfast meeting

Chris Tingom

Viddler Palace

Lucasz and Kasper

Version 2.0 development

Viddler booth

Blake Burris

Crazy Keith

“Naked” Dustin

Joyful Jina

The gang

Firecracker Harry

Photos taken while in California

Again I wish that I had more time to take more photos than I did but I’m thankful that friends like Chris Tingom were able to take a bunch of photos during our trip.

So the next time you hear that Viddler is coming to your town or throwing a party in your neighborhood – be sure to give us a shout and come out and drink some of our beerz…

[tags]web2expo, viddler, ma.gnolia, citizen agency, chris messina, tara hunt, larry halff, scrapblog, party, event, version2, california, saratoga, san francisco, santa clara, photos, flickr, google, yahoo, microsoft, d. keith robinson, dustin diaz, jina bolton, harry snodgrass, chris tingom, food, oranges, faberlove, facebook, scrapblog, hatomic, microformats, zimki[/tags]
[slug]webexpo-experience[/slug]

The latest version of Viddler really add some fantastic features, which will be detailed much better on the Viddler blog once some of the major kinks have been worked out – but here is a general overview:

• Video commenting can now be done on the timeline. This makes it quick and easy to actually respond to a video using your web cam while you’re watching the video. Here is a comment I left on one of Chris Tingom’s videos.
• Global commenting shows all of the comments in the timeline, as well as just general comments that were left about the video, in a threaded manner below the video.
• Feeds are found everywhere to make it easy to subscribe to the forums, your favorite users, your own videos for syndicating to your blog perhaps (like Chris J. Davis’ lifestream as an example) and even tag subscriptions.
• Sharing your videos has never been easier and the functionality has been enhanced ten-fold with this version. You can now do things like give out a “Secret URL” to share private videos with non-Viddler users. Or, you can share your videos with your friends via any of the many social sites out there.
• Blogging your videos can now be done without ever leaving Viddler. Two-clicks and a video is posted to your blog via XML-RPC. I love this feature, and we’re working hard to expand on it to include even more blogging platforms.
• Personal and global tags now make it easier to look at a specific user’s videos filtered by a specific tag. Or, you can view all videos tagged with a keyword.
• Social tagging means that you can now tag your friends videos, in case their lazy. Or, you might want to tag a video to make it easier to find later. Right now, this is limited to timed tags only – but it won’t be long until you can also use this for global tags on a video.
• Flickr and Twitter have been integrated into user profiles. To go beyond that, Viddler will now automatically update your Twitter account whenever you “do something” on Viddler. This is highly-customizable, so go into your profile options and check it out.
• Yes there is more. Our featured videos have an updated home. Now it is easier than ever to keep up-to-date with the greatest videos on Viddler. Not only are the latest few shown on the user’s dashboard, but we’ve created a calendar to show each day’s featured video.
• Several new ways to explore videos are now in the Explore section. You can view by Most Popular, Most Favorited, Most Discussed, and so on. This will make it easier to find content that the entire community is watching, favoriting, or talking about.
• Play all of a single user’s videos with one click. Simply go to a video of the user you want to watch, click Play All, and Viddler will create a “playlist” of all of that user’s videos and automatically play them all. You can skip around if you’d like to.

There are endless updates to Viddler’s UI, as well as over 100 revisions that have been made within the video player itself, and that is only scratching the surface of what Viddler 2.0 really holds. I’m really happy with the way that this version has turned out, and I’m looking forward to seeing what is next, and how the community utilizes these great new features.

I’m writing this email in the back of the “Viddler mobile” in Santa Clara, California on the way to San Francisco to the Moscone Center for the Web 2.0 Expo. If you have any questions about Viddler 2.0, send me an email or message and I’ll get back to you asap.

[tags]viddler, version 2, upgrade, flickr, twitter, features[/tags]
[slug]viddler2-launch[/slug]

The video is only a few minutes. Enjoy.

The MeToday group was founded by Luke Dorny (luxuryluke). Since then we’ve grown slowly to over 38 members and we’re still looking for more people to do this, so if you’re interested – join the Flickr group and start tomorrow!

Happy Anniversary MeToday-ers!

[tags]metoday, flickr, photos, video, viddler, anniversary[/tags]
[slug]metoday-3m[/slug]

My personal weblog is the first way that I “blog”*. I use it to gather together most of the ways that I blog. If you haven’t seen my home page lately, I suggest you check it out. I wish I actually had the time, and the creativity, to write more often on my blog.

I also write on TUG.n (which is about to get a kick in the pants in March), ChanceCube (which is also going to get a kick in the pants), and the Viddler blog (which is bustling like crazy actually and we’re really happy with what we’ve been able to do there in such a short period of time).

My MeToday photos is another way that “blog”. Almost daily photo updates wherein I explain what I am currently doing, or just whatever I feel like. I’m hoping to continue this (though I may migrate it onto my site as a copy or something) for quite awhile. There are many others that do it too and it keeps growing.

My current statuses that I post to Twitter is another form of blogging. Instead of just saying “Away”, or “In the office.” as a status, I try to add a little more to it. I’ve been scalded for my number of updates so I am continually trying to strike a balance.

My videos on Viddler may not be very structured at the moment, but I have some plans in the works. I probably won’t structure it like a typical “video blog” but I plan on adding a ton of fun content to it over the next few months. More on this later.

So how many ways do you produce content? How many ways do you blog? I’m at four and I hope I don’t add any more anytime soon.

* By blog I mean put my thoughts into content. In my opinion there are many various forms of blogging that span the different types of media.

[tags]blogging, twitter, cdevroe.com, flickr, metoday[/tags]
[slug]my-blogging[/slug]

First, I grabbed a modified version of Cutline and made my own little tweaks (which I’m not quite finished with yet). Obviously I changed the way the headers work and brought back my featured headings in order to highlight certain posts randomly. I’ll be adding many more banners over time, since there are ton of posts that should be highlighted. I’ll be doing a little more of this by creating a “random note” area in my right-most sidebar soon.

I also edited the way that the sidebars work. I wanted a 3-column layout to allow me to pull in my flickr photos, some posts from Viddler, ChanceCube, and The uber geeks, as well as a place that I will soon be putting various other collections. However, I wanted to have only 2-columns on my single entry pages because I like having the width for things like photos. Also, some of the pages (like the new diet page), have 3-columns, while some only have 2-columns.

On the frontpage you will notice the latest posts from the other sites that I write on (mentioned above). This section is powered by BDP RSS Aggregator. Obviously I could have built this type of functionality myself but after seeing how well thought out this WordPress plugin was – it made the decision to use it very easy. BDP RSS Aggregator does far more than what I am using it for, and if you are looking to syndicate some feeds on your WordPress powered site, I highly recommend you looking into it.

My most recent Flickr photos, on the frontpage, is powered by FlickrRSS. Since BDP RSS Aggregator has so many options, I could have technically used it and ended up with the same result, but I chose to use something that was specifically built for grabbing my photos from Flickr. Obviously Flickr’s API could have been used for such a task, but all I really wanted was a cached list of my 4 most-recent photos, and using the API would seem like a little overkill. FlickrRSS does an excellent job, is easy to configure, and has just the right number of options. Another plugin that I highly recommend.

For my recent comments I’m using a highly modified version of the recent comments plugin. I’ve added support for Gravatars and a few other options that it didn’t have out of the box. Once I clean up the code I hacked to get it done I may submit the changes, but since it is reliant on someone using the Gravatar WordPress Plugin (site currently under repair as of today) too, I may not. If you want this, just give me a shout.

For my archives I’m using Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives plugin. I like my archives simple, and this plugin allows me to have just that. I see now that its been updated recently, so I may have to get me a fresh copy.

For my keyword tagging I can’t do without the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin – which in my mind is the best keyword tagging plugin for WordPress. It allows me to use MarsEdit to write my posts and put my keywords inline – which has increased the accuracy and ease of searching quite a bit too. There are many benefits to using this plugin.

I’m using Shaun Inman’s Widon’t plugin to help clean up the straggling words on my post titles. This layout doesn’t succumb to these problems as much as the last one did, but this plugin is handy nonetheless. Plugins that work completely behind the scenes and yet make such big differences in your site should really be applauded.

My feed is being delivered through Feedburner via the Feedburner WordPress plugin by my friend Steve Smith. It is all transparent to you on your end, but to me it adds a nice little layer that allows me to pull some nice stats on how many people and who are subscribed to my site’s feed. If you are using Feedburner and WordPress, this plugin is a must have.

Obviously I’m using ChanceCube‘s Slugger plugin to help me never to see WordPress’ administrative area as well as HappyPals to take advantage of my XFN relationships in my links. I also have Mike Stickel‘s Simple Countdown plugin installed and activated, but you’ll have to wait till the weekend to see why. These three plugins have become indispensable for me in how I publish, Slugger the greatest of these. I could never stand using WordPress’ admin (or any administrative area that I’ve seen) to write my blog posts. I’m happy I don’t have to anymore.

I think I covered pretty much everything. Poke around, if you see anything outta whack just let me know. Other slight tweaks will have to wait till the weekend as I have a fairly busy week this week.

Oh! For those of you on the diet that have recently been contacted by me (which most of you have, and if you have not then it probably means you’ve been fairly active in the dieting area over the last few months) – I’ll be updating everyone today or tomorrow but suffice to say that Tuesday begins another 20-week (minimum) run of updates. More soon.

[tags]cdevroe.com, redesign, shaun inman, wordpress, plugins, chancecube, mike stickel, slugger, happypals, simple countdown, ultimate tag warrior, justin blanton, smart archives, flickrrss, gravatar, recent comments, bdp rss aggregator, viddler, theubergeeks, cutline, theme, steve smith, feedburner, flickr, api[/tags]
[slug]cdevroe-v0207[/slug]

I guess some people are seeing this as a “big brother” type move or something but I just don’t see what all the fuss is about. Flickr, or more specifically Ludicorp, was bought by Yahoo!. If you do not want Yahoo! to have your information, you should have left Flickr the day you heard that (and even then it’d have been too late). Why do people care that Yahoo! has their information? Are they really that naive to think that Yahoo! didn’t already have it?

I agree with Anil and John on this one.

I kind of have more to say about this but I’m deciding to simply state that I do not agree with the backlashers. I think we can all let this issue die now and if you are one of the people that does not like this move – I suggest you close your Flickr account.

[tags]flickr, yahoo!, ludicorp, login, anil dash, john gruber, daring fireball[/tags]
[slug]flickr-login[/slug]

Being entertained by today?

The world continues to shrink due to the speed at which information is broadcast worldwide. This makes it really easy to tap yourself into pretty much whatever type of information you want and soak it all in. However, regardless of how small the world is perceived to be because of technological and information distribution advancement – the world is still huge. The amount of information found on the Internet is increasing at an immeasurable rate. In other words; you will never be able to keep up.

Let’s say for example that you are interested in space. By now you probably know that I have a modest amount of interest in space that continues to grow. The amount of information on the Internet about space is staggering. I can imagine a kid walking into a library years ago and pulling an entire section of books off the shelf dealing with space and being overwhelmed with the amount of information he has to catch up on. Even with modern day tools to help us find exactly what we’re looking for, this feeling remains very much the same for me. But this is a good thing – the bad thing would be to try to “keep up-to-the-day” on a particular subject globally, since it proves to be near impossible to do unless you are a researcher by trade.

Call it information overload. But there are ways to combat this. Be specific in what you are looking for and the amount of information on the specific thing can be whittled down into something manageable. Do not “tap your brain” into the Internet and hope that you have the time, or the ability, to weed through the right, the wrong, the bad, and the good. Eventually the cream will rise to the top.

Being yourself?

More specifically; finding out what your personal interests are. I get the whole “social web” thing that allows us to monitor hundreds if not thousands of topics or people in various ways. It allows us to interact with people who have similar interests than us regardless of geography, economic situation, or language. I completely agree that the Web is a cool place.

But have you ever found yourself being a follower of everything? I touched on this in “Taking advantage of the things you already own”, where people want the latest and greatest before they even know how to use what they already have. I’ve been guilty of this. But there is also the idea of the quantity of “things” you have too. Or the quantity of the interests you supposedly have. Do you have 1,000 hobbies? Or, perhaps you just have 1 but it changes every single day before you have a chance to fully explore the hobby you did yesterday? I think it is good to have a few hobbies, this way you can pick what you want to do today based on your mood – but having too many can lead you to never fully exploring any of them.

Where did all of this stem from?

Hopefully if you read this you are able to understand what I am trying to say and maybe you can even relate. I’m definitely not the best writer and I seem to leave stuff out pretty consistently so I hope I was able to at least make a little sense.

Where did this all come from? A few months back I was notified that my Flickr account was going to expire. It got me to thinking about whether or not I use Flickr to its fullest potential, and whether or not I could simply live with the free-account for what I actually do use it for. A few days later I got an email from Microsoft about my Xbox Live account expiring. I looked at the pile of dust on my Xbox and decided that I would not renew that either. I don’t want to be forced into using something because I’m paying for it. Then I looked at my telescope and watercolor paints collecting dust. Realizing I’d much rather use them than the Xbox. I spent some time outside collecting fossils (I used to spend the majority of my life outdoors and now it is the opposite) and I really wanted to start to find out what my “real world” interests were again. It used to be mostly natural things. The woods, animals, plants, dirt, anything outside. Then it completely switched where I spent over 10 years almost completely indoors learning how to do what it is I do now – but I believe there to be a balance and I am definitely not striking it. Call it my resolution for 2007 or just a personal goal – I want to balance things.

I was talking to my friend Dave O. the other day and he feels very much the same as I do. I’m guessing that we’re not alone. He was commenting to me how much he enjoyed playing games with his son, or just “petting the dog and staring at the wall”. I couldn’t agree more. I’m looking forward to this new challenge – and it will be a challenge. I’d like to start spending nearly the same amount of time pursuing real world personal interests as I do online ones.

The World only looks like it is shrinking when you look at it through a monitor.

[tags]personal, thoughts, entertainment, hobbies, flickr, xbox, nature, space, telescope, internet, web, thinking[/tags]
[slug]entertain-yourself[/slug]

It took me about 20 weeks to get close to my goal. I never actually reached the numerical goal I had set (180 pounds), but I was happy to have gotten where I did (185 pounds). Then we moved which made my dieting posts screech to a halt.

Since then I have gotten settled into our new home and dealing with everything that brings. On November 1st I joined the gym for the first time in my life. Eliza and I got 1-year memberships and since then we have been getting to the gym on a regular basis (except this week since I’ve been sick).

I suppose the gym, and those that joined with us, have been my support system rather than the Web, and so I was not keeping up with updates. However I feel as though I might have been leaving all of you in the dark when you were just getting started on your journey, and so I’m sorry about that.

When we started the diet, it was all of you that really helped me to be successful. My wife and my friends played large roles in my losing weight, but those of you that joined the diet had a profound effect on me. A sense of not being alone in my plight nor my delight of incremental loses. Every-time I had a failure on my diet I was picked up by nice comments about how all of you have had similar hardships. Or, when I did really well I was congratulated. This was vital to my success.

So, to pick up the ball once again, I’ve decided to start cataloging the process that happens after you “reach” your goal. The process of maintenance and making sure that the same thing that happened before (to get me as fat as I was) does not happen again. And since I’ve joined the gym, I’ll throw in an update on that front too. I will start keeping a catalog of my progress of cardio, lifting weights, and general activity through the winter months.

To help keep this thing growing a little I will try to keep up my evangelical work on how the diet has succeeded for me – but for those of you still trying to lose weight I asked that you also keep everyone else involved in your progress. This ship has far more than one captain. Every single one of us has made a decision to be on the diet and as such we should all try our best to keep each other on point with that decision.

I sincerely appreciate all of you that have “called me out” on not keeping up-to-date with this. Hopefully I can do a much better job in the near, and distant future. I’ll start by updating the diet pages over the weekend with the latest information. If you have changed your URL, gotten a Flickr account, or anything else – send me an email and I’ll get it updated for you.

I really need all of you who have participated on the diet to help me out. Help me to get this thing going again and really to keep it going. If I miss a week or two (or if any of us do) let us all try to pick up the slack where we can. This diet is not something that stops just because the scale reads a certain number, this will continue for our entire lives. Thanks in advance for anything you can do.

A note about prizes since I was asked where all the prizes are. The diet pages, as I said before, are grossly out-of-date. The Diet Channel has decided to give anyone that wants a diet a diet if they will take their posts and put them on their site. So, no contest really – but they would like you to tell you story on their site. If you want more information on this let me know and I will provide it as best as I can. They also made the diet a success and we don’t want to forget about them.

Oh! Don’t forget to join the Flickr group, if you have not already. It is free, and if you don’t have a blog it is a quick way to post your progress. If you are reading about the diet for the first time, and want to join, send me an email and I will put you on the list of dieters.

[tags]the-diet, diet, gym, flickr, dieting, the diet channel[/tags]
[slug]dec06-diet-update[/slug]

[tags]photos, flickr, new zealand, vacation[/tags]
[slug]new-zealand-goal[/slug]

[tags]flickr, creative commons, pbs, sharing, community[/tags]

Flickr provides me with a great way to share photos with friends and family, and it has some useful tools for me to tag (categorize) as well as geotag (or note where I took the photo), and it lets me connect with different sets of people by using Flickr’s groups. These are all great. However the data that I put into Flickr is not mine and without using the API I will never be able to benefit too greatly from putting in the time it takes to utilize all of Flickr’s tools.

Del.icio.us is a great way to post your favorite URLs, tag (categorize) them, and make some small notes. Obviously there is the entire community aspect too though I’ve never taken full advantage of any of them. Also I do not use del.icio.us (boy is that annoying to type everytime) as my bookmark storage solution.

So I don’t fully utilize the two major web services that I would otherwise really like to — so perhaps something else could be done to openly share data and yet reap the most benefit from the time I put into cataloging it. I think my personal site is the perfect platform for this, and I’m going to start making both dramatic and subtle changes to the site and its architecture in order to do this.

Please “stand by” while I make some adjustments (which will probably take a total of two or three weeks to make, though you should start seeing some of these changes within the next few days).

[tags]cdevroe.com, updates, flickr, delicious, bookmarks, photos, sharing, web services, api[/tags]