noisylime

When I heard that Flickr was making announcements this evening, I assumed it was the long awaited integration of video into the service. That isn’t happening (it will soon, though), but they are making significant upgrades soon around geotagging and a new area of the site will launch called “Places Pages.”

GeoTagging Updates

a year ago - to date 29 million public photos have been geotagged, with 150,000 new ones coming in each day. They aren’t making any changes to the way photos are geotagged (using Yahoo maps), but they are updating the results pages for searches.

The existing pages don’t show large numbers of geotagged photos effectively; the new pages will do a better job by placing actual tags from photos on a world map. Users can quickly find photos based on tags and geotagged information. Enhancements to navigation are also being introduced.

Overall, the enhancements are good, but the real win here comes when devices auto tag photos via GPS devices. Until then, most users can’t be bothered with taking the time to add the appropriate meta data.

Flickr is giving a preview of the new features at Web 2.0 and will launch them in a few weeks.

Places Pages

Now this is more interesting. Flickr is announcing “Places Pages,” which are dedicated pages that provide users with specific information about places. We’ve uploaded an overview PDF to Scribd, here.

Pages will be built around the Flickr concept of “interestingness,” but based on places and tags. So China/bicycle shows popular photos of bicycles taken in China. Paris/architecture is another example. Any of 70,000 places can be viewed, optionally followed by any tag. Flickr is also adding in additional information on the place, such as weather and local time, as well as relevant Flickr groups.

The product will get better over time, too. Eventually users will be able to adjust pages by time or season, so pictures from New York in the Fall can be viewed, for example. Or pictures from a specific event that happened in a city.

Flickr now has over 1 billion photos and 37.7 million unique monthly visitors. 2.5 million news photos are uploaded daily by 15 million registered users. I wonder if founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield ever wish they hadn’t sold out to Yahoo so quickly, for just a rumored $30 million or so in 2005…

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

[via TechCrunch]

Fotoflexer may be my personal favorite among the many online photo editing tools, but Flickr has chosen Seattle-based Picnik (profile) to handle the long requested photo editing feature for Flickr users.

Currently, you can rotate photos on Flickr, but the editing stops there. When the new tools launch, users will be able to edit photos more extensively using the Picnik Flash based tools (see our review here).

The deal has been signed and implementation will occur sometime in the next few months, Flickr told me yesterday. Flickr users will have an edit button on their photo pages. Clicking on it will import the image into Picnik for editing; when finished, it can be sent back to Flickr.

Basically, the integration is not much different than most of Picnik’s competitors who use Flickr’s API. But the crucial difference is that the edit feature will be highlighted on Flickr itself, pushing Flickr’s 15 million registered users towards Picnik.

CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

[via TechCrunch]

This may be the most useful website you ever read about on TechCrunch.

New La Jolla, California startup ProQuo launches this evening to help you battle all the evil that is being perpetually perpetrated against your personal information. Get countless credit card offers, catalogs and other junk in your mailbox everyday? ProQuo intends to do what the NoCall list did for telesales calls for all that stuff, too. Which means, kill it off.

ProQuo users not only save the hassle of dealing with junk mail (and the resulting identity theft risk), but also benefit the environment by cutting down on the amount of paper that’s shoved in their face.

After registration you are presented with a dozen or so types of mailing lists (coupons, credit cards, catalogs, etc.). You can stop most of them with a single click. Others require printing out a form or going to another website. But at the end of the process, you can kill off a ton of unwanted mail.

The company was founded in July 2006 and has raised $5 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. In the future, they plan to expand to give users more control over other types of personal information, including financial and medical records.

Note that we’ve also recently written about CatalogChoice, which focuses on stopping unwanted catalogs. Services we’ve covered which focus on stopping identity theft include TrustedID and LifeLock.

As an aside, in my interview with CEO Steven Gal, he mentioned that the five year anniversary of the Do Not Call Registry is coming up this January. Anyone who registered at the site when it first went live is in for a nasty surprise - the opt out is valid for only five years. If you wait until January to do it again, you’ll have to put up with thirty days of telesales calls while the request goes active. And telesales companies are gearing up to make your life a living hell for those thirty days.

[via TechCrunch]