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July 11, 2007

Privacy and Yahoo's Integration of Flickr with Image Search

Yahoo! recently highlighted in the Yahoo! Search Blog that they have now integrated the millions of Flickr photos into the image search results. This lets users of Yahoo! Image search access 300 million Flickr photos directly from Yahoo!. I am a huge Flickr fan and love to browse photos.

As an amateur photographer (albeit not very good), I am always very concerned about where my photos may turn up. For a long time this kept me from posting my personal photos on online photo-sharing sites. In the image search results, Yahoo attributes images to the photographer using the 'by membername on Flickr' attribution. A click on the thumbnail leads directly to the photo. A click on the photographer's name leads to the photgrapher's Flickr photo stream. As users of Flckr already know that is a starting point for viewing the photographer's public photos.

A feature of Flick that I personally like is that a photographer can set viewing permissions for each photo and can block from public view any photo. A photographer can also change these settings at will. According to an update posted on the Yahoo! Search Blog in response to comments, images shown in image search are those that the photographer has labeled public. This means that photographers posting personal photos – clearly marked as blocked from public view – can expect to have their privacy rights respected. It is unclear how Yahoo! will handle fickle-minded photographers who change their permissions.

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 10:59 AM | Permalink

June 12, 2007

Flickr Adding 7 Languages To System Today

Flickr, the photo-sharing community owned by Yahoo!, has added seven languages to their system "to help the global Flickr community more easily explore, find, manage and share photos," their press release stated.

The release said:

Flickr, one of the world's leading online photo-sharing communities, today will launch flickr.com in seven additional languages to help the global Flickr community more easily explore, find, manage and share photos. Over half of Flickr members already use Flickr in regions outside the United States, and this new language support will bring the Flickr community to even more people around the world.

“Flickr has established itself as the eyes of the world, with millions of people all over the planet sharing photos of every imaginable aspect of life,” said Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and general manager of Flickr at Yahoo! “Today, we're expanding our language support to make that dialogue easier and to connect those who may not speak the same language, but who share the same passions.”

Flickr fosters connections and interaction among the online community to encourage the sharing and discovery of what people see and experience in their everyday lives. Whether communicating with friends and family, conversing about shared interests, or capturing breaking news, members can upload and share photos from anywhere at anytime. Now, with multiple languages supported, members can traverse language barriers to participate in one of the fastest growing online communities and share, explore and discover over 525 million photos taken by Flickr members from all over the world.

To celebrate this milestone, Flickr will host a series of global community events starting this month in Berlin, Paris, London and Montreal. Flickr will also unveil its 24 Hours of Flickr commemorative book illustrating life as it happened around the world in one day. 24 Hours of Flickr was a global photo project for which members were encouraged to submit one photo taken on May 5, 2007 to illustrate that day in the life of the Flickr community. For more information on the project, visit Yahoo.com and search for “24 Hours of Flickr.”

About Flickr

Flickr is one of the world's leading online photo sharing communities where people explore, find, manage and share pictures of life's daily moments with friends, family and the world. With 24 million worldwide visitors each month1, Flickr serves as the ‘eyes of the world' and has revolutionized the sharing and discovery of what people see and experience through photos. Flickr was developed by Ludicorp in February 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in March 2005. To share and explore the world's photos, visit www.flickr.com.

Posted by Frank Watson at 11:38 AM | Permalink

May 4, 2007

Yahoo Photos Shutting Down, But Who's Telling the Users?

Yahoo is shutting down its Yahoo Photos service, and encouraging users to migrate to its Flickr photo-sharing service, according to TechCrunch, USA Today, and other media outlets. The two services were among the overlaps in service mentioned by Brad Garlinghouse in his infamous Peanut Butter Manifesto.

The problem is, there's no mention of these changes yet on either the Flickr home page or Yahoo Photos, or on any official Yahoo blogs. That's no way to keep users happy, especially when you're about to force big changes on them by taking away a service they use and love. According to comScore, Yahoo Photos had 31.1 million visitors in March, while Flickr had 28.5 million.

The reports indicate that Yahoo will give users a choice of migrating to competitors' platforms as well as Flickr. It would seem that they've made that decision a bit easier for some users by the way they've mishandled this move.

UPDATE: Still no mention on the Yahoo Photos page as of Friday afternoon, but Yahoo informs me that they have posted a Q&A on the Yahoo Photos help page. That page says that Yahoo will begin the process of closing later this summer and will officially close this fall.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:10 AM | Permalink

November 2, 2006

GPS, Geotagging, Images and Maps

The NY Times has a long and relatively interesting article on geotagging images and mapping. It primarily discusses Flickr and, to a lesser degree, Google Earth and Picasa and other services such as TripTracker. The article also goes into the geocoding/tagging technology itself. Not discussed in the article is Microsoft's "Photosynth," which is an interesting hypothetical application and extension of all this technology.

Mapping, images (including video) and local/travel are rapidly coming together in very rich applications, as alternatives to pure text-based online navigation.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 2:01 PM | Permalink

November 1, 2006

The Interestingness of Social Networks

Interestingness is a great name for a ranking algorithm. It's what Yahoo's photo-based social network Flickr uses to show which images the community finds the most "interesting."

Techdirt considers the impact that a couple of recent Yahoo patent applications filed for in February, and published last week (which I wrote about at SEO by the Sea), might have upon the growth of social networks. They reference the thoughts of Thomas Hawk, CEO of Zooomr, who weighs in on the topic in Should Yahoo Own Social Search and Rank in a Web 2.0 World?

We've seen the major search engines compete with each other in the face of patented algorithms, following their own paths to returning relevant results to their users. Social networks shouldn't find interestingness to be an impediment to letting their communities decide together what is interesting or not. Hopefully these patent applications will inspire other social networks to follow their own paths, too.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 6:10 PM | Permalink

October 11, 2006

Yahoo Hurting While Google Healthier Than Ever

The NY Times has an article named Yahoo's Growth Being Eroded by New Rivals (free version available at (IHT.com). The article goes through how Yahoo is suffering and lagging behind its competitors. (1) They made a bid at YouTube but those deals broke down, according to the article, and Google "swooped" them up. (2) The new Yahoo search ad system, Panama, is over a year delayed. This "delay has sucked up the company's engineering resources and prevented it from developing new advertising products."

Based on my coverage of Yahoo over the past year, it seems like webmasters, SEOs, and industry folks have become less and less interested with the company.

The LA Times has an article this morning that goes on the same theme. If you can't get to the article, try going through Google News to gain free access, it worked for me.

Postscript From Greg Sterling:

This is not the kind of publicity you want to see if you're on the PR team. While it's true that Google has momentum and Yahoo may need a kind of "shot in the arm," what people forget is that Yahoo is the largest site on the Internet with the most monthly uniques.

It also has a bunch of market-leading properties including mail, finance and local (among others). Mail is also the number one mobile site.

Google, though a very dynamic and powerful company with lots of momentum, is not without its challenges and vulnerabilities. If anything the YouTube acquisition was an admission of some of those. Though, by the same token, Google now has great opportunity with YouTube.

I'm not sure, from where I sit, how many problems identified in the Saul Hansell Times piece are real and how many are simply perceived. But perception does influence reality.

Yahoo is a little like a strong sports team that happens to be in a bit of a slump right now.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:40 AM | Permalink

September 1, 2006

Google Images Labeler: Google's Challenge To Flickr?

Google Blogoscoped spotted the Google Image Labeler game, designed to help Google improve its image search results through tagging. It feels like a catch-up game with human-powered efforts that Yahoo is embracing via Flickr -- plus it also looks pretty influenced by the work of Luis von Ahn and his ESP Game.

The game pits you against someone else. If you see a picture of a car, and you both label it car, you can proceed to the next image. You continue until your time has run out. Here is an image of Horcrux and Barry Schwartz from our blog (rustybrick) scoring 300 points for matching tags on three images.

Image search has been tough for search engines. They can't easily tell what an image is about, since there's no good way to "see" the images and categorize them. Some technologies to recognize faces, colors, shapes, objects and other things are improving. Still, it's hard with an image of someone like Martha Stewart. Is she a woman, celebrity, criminal or just Martha Stewart? Or all of these? How do you know which one or ensure that all of them are applied.

Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz is probably one of the most famous converts from turning to human power over computer power. He's been cited many times as having originally sought a technological solution to understanding what's in video and image data, then moved to embrace people power. Here's one example of that from a Wired article last year:

Horowitz's favorite project is incorporating people-powered metadata systems from two other Yahoo! properties: the recommendation technology from Yahoo! Music and the tagging features from Flickr, the photoblogging company Yahoo! acquired this spring. Google's original stroke of genius was figuring out how to piggyback on human judgment by following the links people make between Web sites. Horowitz is borrowing functionality from two Yahoo! properties to develop something similar for video.

We've just seen Yahoo make more of a commitment to using that human power when it started inserting Flickr results, rather than Yahoo Image results (which are computer sorted), into regular web searches last week.

Google, of course, has no Flickr to use. Enter the game. It's designed to get lots of people to quickly label images because they want to have fun. If that concept sounds familiar, it's because that's exactly the method behind the ESP Game, created by Carnegie Mellon professor Luis von Ahn.

I first learned of Ahn's work through a 2003 Associated Press article, Researchers Hope to Improve Web Searches. His ESP Game came later. The Google system looks like a copy of it, perhaps with his cooperation. Perhaps he's even there now -- I'm checking. We know he was there just last month, because here's a video of his lecture on classifying images (well worth watching). That Martha Stewart example above? That came from his video. I've also embedded it below:

In his video, Ahn thinks that in two months, all images on Google Images could be labeled. It's not hard to believe after hearing that, Google jumped to try this.

Postscript: I heard back from Luis von Ahn, who sent me this:

Yes, Image Labeler is based on my ESP Game, which Google licensed. I'm not employed by Google, however, since I'm a full-time faculty member at Carnegie Mellon.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:43 AM | Permalink

August 31, 2006

Flickr #1 Photography Site In UK

Hitwise is reporting that Flickr is the #1 photography site in the UK. This isn't really a surprise at all - what's more suprising is that it's taken a while to get there, and how it's got there.

Flickr's UK market share has increased 39%, Photobucket's share decreased by 17% and Webshot's remained flat. This is apparently due good SEO and searches for soft porn using the brand name and various terms you can work out for yourself.

In some respects this is worthy of nothing more than a wry smile and shrug of the shoulders. Unfortunately however, this may be seen in some circles as a justification for the calls for libraries to limit their (innocent) involvement with Flickr.

As reported by Michael Stephens in ALA TechSource back in July various emails have been flying around making rather silly claims. While these emails seem to have been centered on American libraries it will be interesting to see if the same thing happens in the UK. I rather doubt that it will, but it's worth watching out for. So, a slightly double edged sword for Flickr in Britain.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 12:43 PM | Permalink

August 30, 2006

Over 1.2 Million Flickr Photos Tagged In 24 Hours

Flickr geotagging has clearly taken off in a big way, with the FlickrBlog reporting that 1,234,384 photographs were geotagged in the first 24 hours of the service launching, with another 400,000 9 hours later. In general the service has been very well received and the ability to do more complex searches is a real bonus.

However, there's a fair amount of disappointment outside the US and Canada; the maps used for the service are poor at best, with very little detail, making the service close to unusable. I tried it myself and there are large tracts of nothing in the UK, and the map for London is not terribly good. However, the folks at Flickr are aware of this (as reported in the linked blog entry) and it's something they're working on, and are promising 'more, better, soon.' I (and a great many others) are looking forward to it.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 11:02 AM | Permalink

August 29, 2006

Flickr Adds Geo Tagging

Techcrunch reports on the Flickr blog announcement that Flickr has added Geo Tagging to their feature set. Geo tagging will enable Flickr users to mark the pictures with geographic specific information, this way people can know where you took that photo. You can also search for photos within a specific location and then refine that search based on a keyword. Flickr has two very useful screencasts on (1) how to geotag your own photos and (2) searching and exploring geotagged photos. These are neat features, for sure, but I think they seriously need to work on making the registration easier sooner than later. Anyway, a lot more detail on this feature release at the Flickr Blog.

Postscript: Phil Bradley at his blog showed how Flickr Geo Maps don't work too well in the UK.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:04 AM | Permalink

August 24, 2006

Yahoo Search Integrates Flickr Images In Search Shortcuts

The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they have integrated Flickr images into their search results. So a search on funny photos or travel photography would pull images from Flickr and then take you to a tag search at Flickr, if you so request. But what about Yahoo Images? Well, they still come up for some searches, I happen to be looking for an Windows XP logo today, and I searched on xp logo at Yahoo and got Yahoo Image results at the top, some may not be that appropriate. Also, typically a search on photos at [keyword here] would bring back Yahoo Photo results.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 2:42 PM | Permalink

June 21, 2006

Mashups and Other Fun with Flickr

A big part of the appeal of Flickr, Yahoo's photo sharing service, is its ease of use. It's not only easy to upload and work with your own images, but it's also a snap to search for and play around with images uploaded by others—in relatively sophisticated ways, if you take advantage of the Flickr API to create mashups that combine images with other applications. In today's SearchDay article, Hacking Flickr I review a new book that's part of the O'Reilly Hacks series that shows you how to take maximum advantage of Flickr's capabilities.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 6:59 AM | Permalink

June 8, 2006

Yahoo Photos Upgraded, Beta Available

TechCrunch has a good writeup on the new Yahoo Photos beta. To access the beta go to http://photos.yahoo.com/ and after you sign in, you may see a "try the new beta" link, click on that. I personally do not see it, so I will base my notes after TechCrunch's coverage.

New Features Include: + AJAX functionality to drag and drop photos + Taggings and sets from Flickr + Free uploading, unlimited + Also point and click tag editing + "Smart Albums" which creates albums by ratings, tags, date, etc.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:22 AM | Permalink

May 17, 2006

Flickr Goes Out Of Beta; Adds Features; Improves Design & More

Thomas Hawk has an outstanding rundown of the new features and new design features that came from Flickr after coming out of beta yesterday. Here is a quick summary of Thomas's more detailed rundown.

+ Flickr is out of beta - cool. + Replaced some links with AJAX pull down for "You" "Organize" "Contacts" "Groups" and "Explore" + New Flickr Organizer + Improved Search Filters + 8 more photos on your Flickr page + Removed borders from photos + Quicker load times + And the official rundown from Flickr blog.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:40 AM | Permalink

January 23, 2006

BusinessWeek on Yahoo and Social Search

BusinessWeek's Ben Elgin takes a look at social search, focusing on Yahoo, in his article: Yahoo's Social Circle.

Ben's article offers a review of recent "social search" purchases from Yahoo including WebJay, del.icio.us, and Flickr.

Elgin writes: These deals are key building blocks in one of Yahoo's biggest bets. By cultivating online communities -- and encouraging people to tap into the collective knowledge of these groups -- Yahoo is hoping to change the way people find information online.

Let's also not forget the introduction of homegrown services like Yahoo 360 (beta), MyWeb, and Yahoo Answers.

He goes on to say: Social search aims to shift power from Web publishers, who create these links, to everyday Internet users by examining their bookmarks or giving them tools to express their opinions.

The article also focuses on those who are skeptics to the whole social search "thing." They include that, at least to this point, "most Internet users haven't even heard of Flickr or del.icio.us, let alone spent time sharing photos online or posting bookmarks of their favorite sites." He also correctly (IMHO) that it takes effort and time (something many people don't have enough off) to make social search work well for both the individual and group as a whole.

Vivisimo/Clusty CEO, Raul Valdes-Perez is quoted saying that the wisdom of crowds might not trump what "raw" computing power can offer.

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