Where are you Living and Learning Online?

Lately I've been somewhat overwhelmed with how many place there are to consume content now online. On a given day I make my way to Google Reader, Twitter, Friendfeed, Tumblr, Facebook, and Yammer all just to read content. Some of it is news, some of it is editorial, some of it is friend content (pictures, videos, etc), some of it is recommended links, etc. And, yeah, there is a lot of overlapping content in all of those places, but there is also a great deal that is unique to the environment. There are hyper-users (I'm one) who post content everywhere, and I'll probably be reading their stuff several times on each stop, but a lot of people have their spot and they stick to it. Also, more interestingly, each place has its own culture and voice. Jump over to Tumblr, for example, and it's mostly people sharing interesting pictures and music a few times a day. Friendfeed, on the other hand, is all about comments and conversation.

I usually find something great in each community that I wouldn't have found anywhere else every time I visit, so I can't stop.

The other half of it is also interesting. I syndicate my blog, my Google Reader items, and my Flickr photos all over the place, and I share some links in each of these communities. But for my specific group of friends, most of the time when I share content the only place I see a reaction/response (comments) is on Facebook. On the other hand, most articles I write here or at UsableClicks receive a majority of their traffic leads from Twitter.

So where are you spending time, where are you getting your information, where are you experiencing true community?

Piclens is the best Firefox extension ever invented and changes photo viewing

I have to thank Galen for repeatedly telling me to try Piclens - it's by far the coolest Firefox extension ever designed (and yes I know I'm in a small minority that think any are cool). If you ever look through flickr albums, search google images, or browse youtube, installing Piclens will completely change your experience. Instead of using whatever interface those sights has, Piclens allows you to zoom in and out seamlessly through all of the images/videos available in a slick interface that is easy and entertaining to use. It actually can't be explained without seeing or trying it, but if you use Firefox you should be taking the suggestion and trying this extension right now. If you head over to the product page and watch some demo videos that can't really do it justice.
Another Firefox extension that I use often is ScribeFire, a blogging platform that builds right into your browser. It was helpful but buggy in the beginning; now it has gotten a million times stronger in recent months with support for blogger categories, much more customization, integrated image search and formatting, among other things. If you blog via a web-based blog tool like blogger or wordpress.com, it's probably going to make your life a lot easier.

Watch the World of Photos and Texts

If you want to be a global voyeur, check out twittervision and flickrvision - sit back and watch the latest twitter posts and flickr uploads from around the world in real time.  Might be particularly interesting if a globally impacting event takes place.

Technorati Tags: twittervision , flickrvision , twitter , flickr , sms , real time

Flock is the Facebook / Flickr / Twitter / YouTube / Blogger Social Media Web Browser

Flock, the long-time in development social web browser that I wrote about 16 months ago, finally released version 1.0 of their web browser, a very different product from their beginning. Flock is meant to create a browing experience that is integrated into your social media existence - it merges you with flickr, youtube, facebook, twitter, blogger and more. The screenshot above is what Flock can look like with everything opened - your default homepage, sidebar, and top-bar.
The left bar handles your contacts in your social networks - you can sort by recent updates, or tab to a specific network. In this view you can see recent changes or postings by all of your contacts, as well as all available options for each of your contacts depending on the social network. You can also send links, pictures, and more directly to a particular friend by simply dragging an object from the main browser over to particular person in the sidebar. The top bar handles media streams - the most interesting pictures on flickr, your friends recent photos on facebook, etc. Then the main "home" tab offers you a quick view of your most recently used favorites, news updates via the built in RSS reader, and your friends recently updated media on Flickr, youtube, etc.
Additional features that are interesting - direct upload to flickr, a built in RSS reader, and a blogging tool (which this post is being written in). And the whole browser is built on Mozilla code, so most firefox extensions will be available for Flock.
I doubt many people will rush to download Flock, but I'm sure the heavy Facebook users would love it if they tried to use it. And as with all things social on the web, the more social tools that people use, the more valuable this browser will be.

Blogged with Flock

Planning a Boston Trip With Yahoo! Travel

boston with angela 041
Originally uploaded by kskobac.

I was planning a trip to Boston last weekend and I decided to give Yahoo! Travel a shot - I was looking to plan a trip covering the highlights of the whole Boston / Cambridge for someone who had never seen any of the city at all. Yahoo! Travel it turns out makes things very easy - you can view top rated restaurants, hotels, events, entertainment, and more. You can view other people's trip itineraries. And anywhere you see something you like, it's a simple click to ad to your own itinerary. Then you can easily schedule when you want to do something, view all locations on maps, get print outs of location and description of all trip elements, driving directions, and more. Afterwards, you can import pictures directly from your Flickr account. Yahoo! Travel shows the value of social media, so much so that I came home and added the restuarants and events I went to that weren't in the tool yet because of how many benefits I got out of using it. I will definitely look here to start when planning my next trip.

See my Boston trip here:
http://travel.yahoo.com/trip-view-1114737-boston_trip_with_angela

Technorati Tags: yahoo, yahoo travel, flickr, cambridge, massachusetts, boston, social, event planning

Flickr needs dynamic albums of your network's photos

So I have this network of friends with pictures that I really like; with all of the social design of Flickr, why can't I make smart sets of photos that are mine, as well as my friends/family's? Why can't I search for "kevin" and create an album of pictures my parents, my brother, and I all tagged that have me in it? Why can't I take a picture that my friend gave me rights to, and add it to one of my collections?

I'm sure other services are offering this - even shutterfly has the option to take your friends photo albums and add them to your collections. Does Flickr offer this and I'm missing it?

(My flickr albums)

Technorati Tags: flickr, sharing, social, photos, tagging, sets, shutterfly

AOL Testing Facial Recognition Image Organizer for Your Photos

I haven't read anything else about this, but AOL has a prototype of a facial recognition image organizer available for download at their beta site, AOL Greenhouse. It has a fairly poor interface, so once you start to tag your photos going back and viewing them is, say, not even close to as easy as with Picasa. Still, it does identify faces in pictures pretty well, groups similar faces, and is fairly intelligent in tagging people once you've begun training it. In early testing, it seems to be more accurate than Riya, but isn't even as usable as Riya's web interface.



The problem with this, of course, and the problem with Riya, Flickr, Picasa, etc, is that they all have their good and their bad, but none of them are as strong as I want them to be. Picasa is necessary for managing a full collection of photos on your desktop, but Picasa Web Albums is limited in storage and usability, so I need to have Flickr on the web. Flickr is a step behind in web functions, though, and could definitely benefit from the addition of some AI such as facial recognition.



So now I have photos in Picasa, in AOL Image Organizer, on Flickr, on Riya, on Picasa Web Albums, and a few scattered on things like Zooomer. What I really want is the ability to share information from site to site - share geotagging, facial tagging, descriptions, etc, and important/sync the data across the storage / community sites. It simply takes too much work to manage a large collection of pictures at this point, and no one property is strong enough to handle all of my wants.



So is anyone else writing about AOL Image Organizer? Is anything out there going to tackle these problems?

Technorati Tags: zooomr, flickr, riya, picasa, webalbums, picasa web albums, google web albums, aol, aol image organizer, facial recognition, photo storage, photo organization, geotagging