Laughing Meme

See: Day of Donut

Congrats to waferbaby, mroth, and ph for totally owning on today’s friend importing feature (aka beehive).

We’re a little late to the game but its awfully nice to be able to launch with zero screenscraping, and zero phishing-creepy-give-us-your-password. This is what data-portability-open-data-delegated-trust future looks like.

update: and yes, we’re cheating, because Yahoo’s addressbook API is still internal+partners only. We’re working on it.

Steve Ford’s first cups is probably my favorite photo project on Flickr. I’ve been watching for photos of his first cup of coffee each morning for nearly 3 years now (Oct 18th, 2005, when I saw and faved this photo from Ritual). And today he uploaded number 1,000.

And I remember the first drink Steve ever poured for me, at the Linden alley location, in late March 2005, when I was living in Boston, and flying out to consult for Odeo. After that I started flying the 3,000 miles for the coffee, and doing the Odeo consulting on the side.

Flickr trivia: First Cup was the first set on Flickr to get a feed (an official one at least).

Congrats Steve.

The Yahoo OP is officially live today! Congrats to Shreyas and Allen for shepherding this for many months!

If you’re a Flickr user you can your photos URL (http://flickr.com/photos/yourname), or if you’re signing into a RP that supports XRDS, just use flickr.com.

You’ll also want to visit openid.yahoo.com, and click on “Get Started” and customize your OpenID identifier.

Personally I just use laughingmeme.org as my OpenID. I had to futz around a bit to figure out OpenID 2.0’s slightly different syntax, but if you view source on this blog you’ll now see in the header:

<link rel="openid2.provider" href="https://open.login.yahooapis.com/openid/op/auth">
<link rel="openid2.local_id" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kellan">

Geocoding is hard work, figuring out where exactly on this wobbly sphere a given humanly vague string might be referring to is just crazy.

Turns out there are a bunch of interesting things you can do without knowing a lot of detailed latitude, longitude stuff but instead just having an agreement that when I say “San Francisco”, and you say “San Francisco”, we’re talking about the one in California, and not somewhere else.

On Flickr we call these things “places”. (creative?) And as I mentioned on the Flickr API mailing list last week and in my early places blog post, places have “place ids”.

This post is just a quick note to the effect that as of this afternoon on top of getting place_ids back with flickr.photos.getInfo, and being able to round trip a place_id with the flickr.places.resolvePlaceURL and flickr.places.resolvePlaceID you can now do a free form search for places with the new flickr.places.find.

George just announced about the coolest thing ever: the Commons. The Library of Congress has started sharing a fraction of their photo archive on Flickr under a special “no known restrictions” license.

You can tag, comment on, fave, and share these historical photos just like any other photo on Flickr.

And the collective wisdom will hopefully bubble up some great photos and metadata.

John just spotted one of my favorite features I’ve added to Flickr.

Here is another tip, the “Send to a Friend” links at the bottom of every page will generate a Guest Pass behind the scene if needed.

And if you’re interested in this kind of thing, Flickr’s Guest Pass is the seed of my expanded “Casual Privacy” talk at Web 2.0 Expo SF this April.

You might have seen the post on the Flickr blog announcing Places, or maybe the Good Reverend’s write up, but if you haven’t:

Places is a new Flickr feature that mines our corpus of geotagged photos, identifies characteristic features on a per location basis, and then goes back into the data looking for “iconic” beautiful photos. (btw try reloading that /places page, the feature places are random. As to a certain degree are the photos on the individual Places pages themselves)

It also is where a good chunk of my creative energy went for the last few months which is why the blog has been so quiet. And its a hell of a lot of fun, not to mention a privilege and pleasure to deep dive into our database and be reminded just how much fabulous photography there is on Flickr, and maybe just barely fumble around the edges of surfacing the diverse communities shared vision. Eyes of the world indeed.

A Place for GeoRSS feeds

Dan roped me in on Places months ago. We had geoFeeds working for semi-arbitrary places, and we needed a page to hang them off of. That page looked a lot like search result. You never saw it because the Flickr project management process (a blog post of its own) left that particular prototype a bloody, heaving wreck. Don’t worry, the current version is much much much better. (of course you also never saw Dan’s brilliant prototype of the current version, which was too cool to release on an unsuspecting public) And voila, many months later, the feeds are there. (though I’d still like to bring back that SRP view to allow rich searching within a location)

Increased Surface Area

We brought a bunch of different design goals to Places, but one of my obsessions that I think we nailed was the idea of “increasing the surface area” of Flickr. (also known as providing new ways to level up in the Game of Flickr[tm]). Only a few people, and a limited range of styles will ever be featured on the Flickr Explore pages. Which is fine, most people don’t care. But Places provides another way to recognize the contributions of Flickr members, by hilighting their geotagging and their photography skills. I’m looking forward to adding a couple more similar features to Places, recognizing other Flickr Games one can level up in, and other contributions back to the commons you can make.

Mo’ Betta

A bunch of stuff didn’t make our initial launch. Some of that has come in since then. More will be coming. I’m particularly excited about using adding some new data sources to improve the page. (e.g. the Groups right now a bit weak, and we don’t have reliable neighborhoods in cities, both of which are in process of being fixed)

Thats kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ to You

Turns out there are a lot of San Franciscos in the world, and we personally struggle to keep track of which one is which. So we’ve been experimenting with giving them unique place_ids. If you look really close you’ll start to see these popping up around flickr, in photos.getInfo, photos.search, and as microformats on the Places pages. Its all very experimental, this unique identifiers thing, but we think it might work.

Arm Chair Travel

And because I love you, I’m going to let you in a on a secret. Have a great trip.

Taking a break from all the collaborating, originally uploaded by George.

I’ve measured my life out in flickr uploads, originally uploaded by Laughing Squid.

An uncountable number of years and design revisions ago the masthead of this blog read, “I’ve measure out my life in coffee cups“. Maybe I should bring that back.

Though I was always tempted to replace it with, “Fuck this spoon business, I’m measing my life in cups thank you very much.”