Tag Archives: flickr

by Brian Solis

Originally published at PR 2.0.

I’ve invested a significant portion of time and energy into the support, development, and refinement of an ambitious project led by Jodee Rich. I did so, because I believe that it is one of the most compelling and promising services for uniting our distributed social presence and the relationships that make us stronger – personally and professionally.

Introducing PeopleBrowsr, an attention-centered dashboard for managing your online relationships and communication in Twitter and across multiple social networks.

It made its public debut in Alpha this past Friday, which means that it is still in an early, but a highly functional, stage of development. The only way to improve it is to let real people have access to it, without restrictions.

PeopleBrowsr offers a vast breadth of features and functionality. If you’re a Social Media power user or a brand manager, this is a wish come true.

At its foundation, PeopleBrowsr is a first of a kind meta-network for social networks that works with Mozilla FireFox 3, Safari 3.1 or Google Chrome – no download or plug-in required. It essentially turns your Web browser into a simple, visual social media dashboard. While there are many third-party tools for Twitter, PeopleBrowsr brings the best features from all of the popular add-on services into one solution – without requiring a download or a browser plug-in.

It combines your profiles and your connections across multiple social networks into one, easy to manage place, including, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Upcoming, among others. You can mix views to include activity from all or selected networks simultaneously, individually, and also communicate with your contacts across networks, from one place.

Mixing your view and interaction.

As an introduction to the service, we’ll start with Twitter.

Anyone familiar with TweetDeck will enjoy an instant familiarity with the friendly interface. But that’s where the similarity stops and the unique benefits emerge.

PeopleBrowsr supercharges Twitter.

With one simple to use browser-based hub, everyone can view, group, and communicate with friends, and friends of friends, in and across all of the popular networks. You can update status, view posts, connect with contacts, make new friends, and share content within and between networks.

At first sight, PeopleBrowsr provides either a columnar view (The PostStack) or a “people” grid gallery of organizable tweets from “everyone” in the Twitter stream with additional distinct columns for “following” and replies. Additional stream options feature the ability to view direct messages and other standard views into dedicated, scrolling columns. PeopleBrowsr also provides integrated search functionality of Twitter directly within streams, displaying results in new stream columns. And, if you want to focus on key regions, you can also run hyper local searches to see who’s tweeting in a certain city. Searches can be additive for further refining of streams.

But wait, there’s more…

With PeopleBrowsr, you can monitor brands, engage with communities, and improve communications with friends through a myriad of unique features that include, the ability for power users to easily build and communicate specifically with dedicated tag-formed groups; scheduling tweet posting at a later time; and also network-wide, wiki-style tagging of people for grouping, categorization, and also searching.

Most importantly, PeopleBrowsr introduces the foundation for the very first address book for Twitter.

Take a deep breath, PeopleBrowsr is much more than a dashboard for Twitter, it’s a social network for all social networks.

Today, many people participate in multiple online social networks. From Twitter to FriendFeed, LinkedIn to Facebook, and Youtube to Flickr, the attention of today’s online enthusiasts is thinning and distributed. While the alpha version of PeopleBrowsr focuses initially on empowering the Twitter community, the service actually unites Social Media and the Social Web.

PeopleBrowsr empowers power users and “the rest of us” alike to concentrate energy in one place instead of wrestling with a distributed presence. You no longer have to open different tools and browser tabs to log in and connect with people through disparate services. As a single social media dashboard, PeopleBrowsr allows anyone to manage all of their personal network profiles. It simplifies communication and relationship building with friends and like-minded individuals – regardless of social media network.

PeopleBrowsr also introduces PeopleBrowsr IDs (PBIDs), a new genre of intelligent social media profiles for those looking to learn more about interesting people. These rich IDs offer an instant and highly detailed overview of an individual’s presence across the social Web by automatically aggregating their other network profiles and blogs as a social graph. You can also can share what you know about each individual for others to see using PeopleProfiles.

The team is reading Tweets and implementing fixes, fine-tuning the product, and integrating new features ahead of the beta release due out at the beginning of the new year. “Live” Tweets from the community are being used to build a new product in real time. They’re listening!

At the very least, I hope PeopleBrowsr offers a refreshing and helpful alternative to centralize your online presence and the relationships that define who you are today and tomorrow.

Please spread the word…

I also wanted to send a special thank you to each and everyone who took the time to meet with Jodee and me to share their initial reaction and feedback to help us get to where we are today.

Thank you.

Ariel Waldman
Cal Hendrickson
Cathy Brooks
Chris Saad
Christopher Golda
Dave Mathews
Frank Gruber
Guy Kawasaki
Jason Kincaid
Jeremiah Owyang
Jodee Rich
Justin Kan
Laura Fitton (Pistachio)
Loic Le Meur
Louis Gray
Marissa Louie
Mike McGrath
Robert Scoble
Sarah Lacy
Tara Hunt
Tim Ferriss
Tim O’Reilly

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by Michelle Lentz

Thanks to Brian’s own Twitter feed, I’ve discovered that its possible to make Twitter backgrounds with Powerpoint or Keynote. You don’t have to rely on Twitter’s own backgrounds or your lacking graphic design skills.

One of Brian’s tweets led me to Thomas Carillo’s The Closet Entrepreneur, where we’re offered Keynote and Powerpoint templates for Twitter backgrounds. Cool, yes?

I think the Twitter background is a pretty underrated thing. It’s a great way to advertise yourself and your personal (or professional) brand in graphics and using more than 140 characters if you want. I’ve seen some rather kick-ass Twitter backgrounds. It’s nice to know there’s a template out there that helps me create a more professional appearance without my having to actually know the pixel sizes for the various columns and rows.

Thomas also points us to the Extended Twitter background collection on Flickr, which is impressive on its own and may serve to inspire you.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email at michelle[at]writetech.net, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

by Michelle Lentz

PhotoJoy is a free application that lets you easily create all sorts of toys with your photos. You can create desktop widgets (toys), 3D photo screensavers, wallpaper collages.

Their theory is that we take the photos, store them in an archive somewhere or upload them to Flickr, and then never look at them. Photojoy figures you should, well, enjoy them.

Uploading your photos to PhotoJoy quick and simple, and it even works with your Flickr account. You can choose to upload photos saved on your computer or any photos from your Flickr account. In addition, PhotoJoy also offers a Web streaming option that automatically updates your PhotoToys, screensavers and wallpaper collages with new photos from Flickr as soon as they become available.

Did I mention the software was free? For an example of what you can do with PhotoJoy, here’s a great video they made featuring our own Brian Solis. And Brian, this is exactly what you get for having your photos all over the Internet.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

by Michelle Lentz

Last night was a monumental milestone in the history of our nation. We’ve also had some small, but notable milestones with two of your favorite technology firms.

It seems only appropriate that an underdog browser, first released in early November 2004, would rise to claim 20% of the market share this month. Back in 2004, Internet Explorer had a firm grip on the market and alternate browsers were hardly considered.

According to data released from Net Applications, Firefox grabbed 20% of the web browser market in October 2008, planting it firmly at #2. Now, I realize 20% isn’t that much, but consider that IE has Microsoft and the power of expensive advertising behind it, as well as being the default browser on every PC purchased. Firefox relies primarily on word of mouth marketing.

Flickr had it’s 3 billionth photo uploaded on Monday. With that milestone, Flickr has grown 50% in the year since the 2 billionth photo was added to the service. While Flickr still pales in comparison to Facebook, which has over 10 billion photos, it still shows a dedicated user base and the ability to scale. It also shows that you can successfully charge for services in the Web 2.0 landscape. (In case you’re curious, Flickr’s milestone photo was of a door.)

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology. You can also catch Michelle presenting on Twitter at the upcoming DevLearn ’08 in San Jose.

by Brian Solis

I host just under 10,000 pictures on Flickr today. Most of those images solely reside online under Yahoo’s care. As local external storage servers continue to boom in terms of capacity and ease of installation, footprints are shrinking and prices are only falling to the point of absolute affordability. The prospect for me to host tens-of-thousands of high resolution pictures in addition to hosting them online now becomes a realistic option for me. I just picked up one terabyte of storage for $99.

Now that I have the storage capacity, how do I retrieve all of my pictures without having to either pay to order disc after disc or having to download images manually?

Introducing FlickrDown, a free solution for Windows users to pull pictures from Flickr, by set or individually, into designated, local folders on the hard drive of your choice. You can search by flickr usernames, tags, email addresses, or groups and the software will automatically created folders using your search criteria as the naming conventions for each respective folder. Authorization is required for private pictures.

FlickrDown is available for free here.

It requires Microsoft .NET 2.0, which you can download it here.

As soon as my Sony returns from the shop, I’ll download it and give it a more formal review. For a more detailed review, please visit DownloadSquad.

UPDATE: Please see Lane’s comment below. This is an important issue and would love to see a response from FlickrDown on this…

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