104 posts tagged “flickr”
2008
Flickr Engineers Do It Offline. Flickr wrote their own queuing mechanism (in PHP), and currently run ten queue servers on dedicated hardware for tasks like pushing new photos in to indexes, denormalisation and “backfills” which move data between clusters and run bulk scripts against large numbers of existing rows.
WolfenFlickr 3D—An unlikely mashup. Brilliant: Wolfenstein 3D style raycasting in JavaScript with images on the walls that have been pulled in using Flickr’s JSONP API.
FriendFeed Blog: Simple Update Protocol. FriendFeed infamously poll RSS feeds on the 43 services they support millions of times an hour in an effort to keep their content as real-time as possible. SUP is a new proposal by FriendFeed for a sort of “master feed” of changes to a site—instead of hitting the Flickr feed for each of their users they would just poll Flickr’s SUP feed every minute or so to find out who had uploaded a new photo, and only retrieve the RSS feed for those users.
Flickr Developer Blog: API Responses as Feeds (via) Flickr API calls that return a “standard photos response” (e.g. flickr.photos.search and flickr.favorites.getList) can now output eight different feed formats as well, including Atom, RSS flavours, geoatom, geordf and KML. Error codes are returned as X-FlickrErrCode HTTP headers.
Around the world and back again. Flickr are using data from OpenStreetMap to provide street-level detail of Beijing for the Olympics.
Reviews of the Pownce app on the iPhone app store on Flickr. I had to stitch together a screenshot because you can’t actually link to content in the App Store (unless you don’t care that people without iTunes won’t be able to follow your link). Three out of the four reviews complain about the OAuth browser authentication step, which is frustrating because Pownce have implemented it so well.
Exposure (iPhone app) behaves suspiciously. Exposure on the iPhone does OAuth-style authentication incorrectly—it asks the user to authenticate in an embedded, chromeless browser which provides no way of confirming that the site being interacted with is not a phishing attack. Ben Ward explains how the Pownce iPhone app gets it right in the comments. Exposure author Fraser Spiers also responds.
There is a reason why Flickr eventually killed Yahoo! Photos and why it was decided that Google Video be relegated to being a search brand while YouTube would be the social sharing brand. The brand baggage and the accompanying culture made them road kill.
Yahoo! Internet Location Platform. As an ex-Yahoo! this is really exciting—WhereOnEarth (a London company acquired by Yahoo! in 2005) provide the incredibly detailed geographical data used by Flickr, Upcoming and FireEagle—and now it’s available as an external API.
Video on Flickr! There’s a 90 second length limit, because “... Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of long photos, of capturing slices of life to share.”
Welcome to Game Neverending. It really is back! Hot tip: start by taking the survey, then sell the five pieces of blue paper at the bank with the pig on the roof.
Find Your Friends. Flickr have added a characteristically classy friend import feature, pulling from Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail address books without any unhygienic password sharing. It’s a crying shame that the Yahoo! contacts API they are using isn’t available outside the company.
Flickr Uploadr: Open Source and Powered by XULRunner. Quietly released a few months ago; it’s really nice.
The overdue Places post II—Prototyping Iconicness. How Flickr Places works.
flickr.places.findByLatLon. New API method for Flickr Places. If only Flickr could return a bounding box for each place...
Flickr Place IDs. flickr.places.find, flickr.places.resolvePlaceURL and flickr.places.resolvePlaceID combine to provide a really useful, lightweight not-quite-a-geocoder API. It’s a shame you can’t search for places by providing a latitude/longitude point yet.
Yahoo! Announces Support for OpenID. Here’s the official press release: “Yahoo! Support Triples Number of OpenID Accounts to 368 million”. Directed identity gets a mention; it’s going to be enabled for www.yahoo.com and www.flickr.com. The public beta starts on January 30th.
Flickr: The Commons. Exciting pilot collaboration with the Library of Congress to release images with “no known copyright restrictions”. The header photo (of a bench) is one of my favourite spots in the world, in Mission Dolores Park, San Francisco.
The Art & Science of JavaScript. The JavaScript book I contributed to is now shipping! My chapter describes how to build a Flickr / Google Maps mashup entirely using client-side code (via JSON-P).
The Flickr [OpenID] implementation, coupled with their existing API, means we could all offer things like "log into my personal site for family (or friends)" and defer buddylist management to the well-designed Flickr site, assuming all your friends or family have Flickr accounts.
Yahoo!, Flickr, OpenID and Identity Projection
Via ReadWriteWeb, view source on a Flickr photostream page and search for “openid” and you’ll be rewarded with the following snippet:
[... 582 words]Flickr to Authenticate OpenID. Flickr /photos/username/ pages are now (almost) OpenIDs—they point at a new Yahoo!-wide OpenID server, but it hasn’t been switched on yet. It’s OpenID 2 only, presumably so Yahoo! can protect their users’ privacy by using directed identity to hide individual screen names.
Do not treat Flickr photo IDs as integers (via) “The good news is, Flickr reached photo number 2147483647 yesterday. Go Flickr! The bad news is that number 2147483647 is the limit for signed integer data type.”
2007
Photos taken in Brighton on Flickr! (via) The new Flickr Places feature has finally launched, and it’s absolutely beautiful.
New on Dopplr: The Past (with Pictures). Dopplr’s trip pages automatically display your Flickr/Facebook photos that were taken during the duration of the trip—simple and smart integration of third party sites.
Flickr: [what was with the pirates?] Garrrrhhhh! (via) It’s fascinating reading all the complaints on this thread—partly due to different international senses of humour, and partly just because as Flickr became more mainstream it attracted users who never picked up the sense of fun at the center of the Flickr brand.
Lithuania 2007 set on a Map. Nat has painstakingly geotagged 285 photos from our trip to Lithuania.
Virgin Mobile Botches Creative Commons-Driven Ad Campaign. Virgin Mobile Australia used CC Flickr photos (and added offensive captions) for an ad campaign, but failed to get model releases from the people in the photos. Hopefully this won’t result in a backlash against CC; it’s Virgin who are at fault.
oxfordgeeks.net
Nat and I had a bit of a mini-hackday this bank holiday Monday. Nat’s been doing a great job summoning local geeks out of the woodwork with Oxford Geek Nights event, but it’s still pretty hard to find other interesting events in the Oxfordshire area. It’s not that there aren’t any, it’s just that the geek community in Oxford is currently pretty fragmented.
[... 295 words]The top 10 presentations on scaling websites: twitter, Flickr, Bloglines, Vox and more. I normally avoid linking to “top 10” lists on principle, but this one pulls together some great resources and adds extra context to each one.