Scoble and Butterfield views about Zooomr

Robert Scoble is good friends with Thomas Hawk and Kristopher Tate, so he's been close to the action as Zooomr has launched their Mark III version  over the past few weeks.

To say it went badly is an understatement - the website was down for close to two weeks.  Robert's recent post is a considered summary of what happens now.

• Zooomr is the underdog (basically just a single developer), but it has put together some good features
• These good features may pull in more users - it's currently getting good reviews from bloggers
• The infrastructure they have now cant cope
• The community has rallied round to give them some breathing space (Zoho has put them up in its datacenter, Sun has loaned them a hefty server)
• It's time to end the experiment - by the time the loaner Sun system goes back (56 days), Robert thinks they should make sure they have VC funding in place, and turn this into a real business

For another good take on Zooomr, see this forum post by Stewart Butterfield (one of Flickr's founders), which appears in along thread which offers proof that Zooomr includes copied source code from flickr.  Stewart states:

• I'd be astonished if Zooomr (without a radical change) is even around in two years.
• I've never had a moment of doubt in thinking that Zooomr poses zero competitive threat to Flickr.

More Tips from Mike DelGaudio

Mike continues to provide useful and informative tips and techniques on Picasa on his blog.

Amongst the latest post of note are:

• Adding captions to picture pile collages
• Picasa can zoom with a gesture
• Create your own Warhol

Although I noted this blog as being a new blog in December, I've since found out that it's a continuation of his earlier blog Photo Editing with Picasa. Although that is no longer being updated, its back catalogue of posts contains a wealth of useful information. My pick includes:

• Adding Keywords to Photos in Bulk using Picasa
• Create a Multi-Exposure effect with Picasa
• Picasa Thumbnail Icons Explained
• 5 ways to create black and white images in Picasa

I've already noted Mike has a Picasa Web Album, but he also uses other photo sharing services, with collections of images on both flickr and zooomr.

Too late for Voting for Your Favorite Photo-Sharing Site

Mashable ran a vote to find the favourite photo sharing site.  In an ironic twist, Mashable, which profiles slick Web 2.0 social networking sites elected to hold the vote by having votes cast by entering comments on the blog entry - hardly a slick way to conduct such matters.

The choice of sites you could vote for was:

• Flickr
• Pickle
• Zooomr
• ImageShack
• BubbleShare
• Webshots
• Photo.net
• Tabblo
• Parazz
• Shutterfly
• Kodak Gallery
• Photoblog.com
• Twango

PhotoBucket was explicitly excluded, because they sponsored the poll.  Picasa Web Albums were not even listed.

Voting seemed to go in bunches, perhaps as news of the vote appeared on various blogs, some of them with a vested interest!  In fact voting continued after the winner was declared (and the post is still open for new comments even now).  The post appeared on the 22nd December, and the winners were declared on the 24th December.

The winner was Flickr, with Twango as the people's choice, and Zooomr getting a special mention.

Picasa, flickr, and Google Image Search

Thomas Hawk, whose comments on images uploaded via Picasa ranking higher than images uploaded to flickr were reported by Robert Scoble, has stepped up to provide a much deeper set of observations - Why Picasa Images Are Indexed Higher in Google Image Search Than Flickr.

He quickly dismisses the conspiracy theory, and elaborates on the fact that providing a good filename is key, which uploads to blogs made by Picasa do, but which files uploaded into flickr do not.

flickr users are discussing this in Google is Penalizing Flickr, Right?, where Thomas has made some more insightful comments - including that it is a problem that his own employer, Zooomr (which also replaces upload filenames with a number) may have to address in the future.

Picasa uses real filenames when uploading - good for indexing

Robert Scoble (who was hanging out with Thomas Hawk earlier in the week), notes

Here’s one thing I learned from Thomas Hawk, though. He says if you want a lot of traffic from Google Images that you have to upload your images using Google’s Picasa instead of to Yahoo’s service.

Sounds like Google is penalizing Flickr, right? Well, probably not explicitly Thomas told me. Instead Google’s algorithm biases on URL names. So, if you are searching Google Images for “Cool Cars” then Google will bring back images with the name in the URL. Picasa, when it uploads, includes the file names you give your photos in the URL. Flickr changes those to numbers.

Although the point is a good one, Robert's post is slightly unclear, and there is a good clarification by Danny Sullivan in the comments, who notes that the point is to always have good words as the filenames of the images you upload. Picasa preserves the filenames when you upload [though there is no mention of where you might upload to!], whereas all files uploaded to Flickr by whatever means are simply assigned numbers, thus losing some very valuable metadata that indexing currently relies on.  However, you don't need to use Picasa to ensure the names are preserved - other systems, including doing it manually, work just as well.

Thomas was not just talking about Picasa Web Albums (which only half heartedly uses the the filename you gave the photo when producing the URL which displays it on the Web Album), but rather photos uploaded with the desktop version of Picasa, presumably to Blogger.  I note from his blog posts that Thomas is actually a great fan of that lesser known Picasa program, Hello, which offered image uploads to Blogger even before Picasa itself did.

The advantage of the good names for photos is when various image search engines index the photos.  Currently there are no search engines that index the photos in Picasa Web Albums, and the best way to find flickr images is still through the flickr provided search, rather than an external search engine, though the availability of a good API for flickr does mean that external engines have a good chance of accessing the flickr data. 

Thomas Hawk - evangelist at Zooomr

Robert Scoble writes of a evening photo walking with Thomas Hawk.  In it he describes Thomas Hawk as

... one of the most talented photographers I’ve seen ... an authority on everything photo. Including all of his competitors like Flickr, Picasa, Smug Mug, Riya, Tabblo, Vizrea, Web Shots, Photo Bucket, FotoLog, and others.

Thomas Hawk is the Chief Evangelist for the Photo Sharing Site Zooomr, and writes about the same evening in Had a Great Night Hanging out With Scoble.  Robert was filming the evening for his new job At PodTech, and we should be able to see the results some time in September.

I had a look through Thomas' blog, to see what he's shared with his readers about Picasa:

• Better Than Flickr, Better Than Picasa... it Just Doesn't Exist Yet, Photohawk is a insightful look at what various photo programs and sites offer, and how a fictional Photohawk site would take image search to the next level. [January 2005].
• Google Acquires Picasa noting it was a good move, and hoping that they made it possible to upload from Picasa to Blogger (which is indeed now possible) [July 2004]
• Does Hello Picasa Effect Google Image Search Placement wondering whether uploading images via Hello provides a boost to ranking in Google image search. [September 2005], a theme also mentioned in Stockpipeline Wants to be the eBay of the Stock Photography Business [September 2005],  Is Something Up with Google Image Search? [January 2005], I Think Google is Reindexing Their Image Search Again [October 2005]
• BusinessWeek Online Pans Google's Picasa consisting merely of a link to a review of Picasa by BusinessWeek. [November 2005]
• Why an Open API is Important to the Web 2.0 Social Contract covering the need for user data to be portable amongst photo programs and sites (and by implication, criticising Picasa which does not make an API available). [June 2006]
• My Dinner With Microsoft Exec Jim Allchin in which he reveals that Windows Vista will have photo editing and tagging similar to many of Picasa's features built in [January 2006], which is also mentioned in CES Day One [January 2006] and dealt with in much more detail in Photo Tags in Vista Media Center [July 2006]
• 10 Tips for the New Digital SLR Photographer in which after urging the photographer to get hold of Photoshop, notes that "If you really, really can't afford Photoshop or want something else for a laptop on the go or something, also take a look at Google's Picasa. It's pretty good for free software. Not as good as Photoshop, but you can't argue with the price and it does do a lot of the basics nicely." [April 2006]
• Pixoh: Edit Pictures Online commenting on the prograssion from Photoshop (expensive and complex), to Picasa (free and easier to use), to Pixoh (online, and very easy to use). [March 2006]

Certainly plenty of insightful comment there, backed by plenty of real experience.