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Flickr
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Posted On
Oct 05, 2007
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Yahoo Photo
The most substantial improvement to Yahoo! Yahoo photos was a revamp of Yahoo. This photo property of Yahoo launched in the year 2000 was rolled back in few months back .
Yahoo users had a number of advantages of the new version. For starters, the information assigned to each photo included tags (comma separated tags no less - my favorite) for easy locating later, ratings to help the better photos rise to the top, sharing at the photo level.
Yahoo Photos' breakout feature was its browser-based photo editor that handled cropping, resizing, and image adjustments (such as contrast and brightness), and also add borders and perform special effects, such as pixelate. The editing feature in Yahoo Photos was so easy to use that one might forget what a neat trick it was to have this inside a browser.
Yahoo photos made it much easier to share images with other users, and also get buddies' new public photos in your own Yahoo Photos home page. It was a simple implementation of community, but was very effective.
Another best things about Y!photos was that there was no published storage or bandwidth restrictions, that smoked Google which just carried a 250MB limit on a free account.
The strength of Yahoo Photos was not in any one particular feature, but rather in its overall clear design and good user experience. It was a top-tier product, and it has all the basic photo organizing and editing tools that most users would need.
Yahoo shuts their photo site
Yahoo, finally shuts its popular free photo-sharing website on Thursday September 20, 2007. Users were given notice in advance to change their services to Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Photobucket. But unfortunately a large sum of users who waited too long to switch their platforms, or download their pictures from the site, will lose all their photos as yahoo will have them deleted by that time.
To sum up, Yahoo purchased Flickr (Vancouver, British Columbia) on March 2005. This website was a popular award winning photo sharing sire that time magazine stated as ‘completely addictive’.
Launched in 2004 by by Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, this website allowed users to upload digital pictures from computers and camera phones, put together photo albums, and post pictures to blogs, among other things. One of the main reasons for Yahoo to buy this website was the traffic score that was higher than Y! photos as per the comscore.
I would like o give a lot of credit to Yahoo here for recognizing the true potential in technology and talent and go ahead with the million dollar Flickr purchase.
It was quite surprising from the business point of view that yahoo gave a choice to their users to export pictures to other photo sites (competitors), instead they could have just transferred the same to flickr.
One more issue was that Yahoo photos provided unlimited photo storage. Flickr on the other hand offered a capacity to upload up to 100 MB per month with a viewing limitation of 200 of its most recent photos. However, with a Flickr pro account the photos will always be available for viewing. Nevertheless, we must be willing and able to adapt, as users of new and established platforms, when sites evolve to compete globally.
What made Yahoo do this?
There can be a number of reasons why Yahoo took the step of rolling back in its most popular photo-sharing site.
Managing two photo sharing sites
For a very long time after Yahoo! Inc. purchased Flickr photo sharing service, there was intense speculation over how will they manage photo sharing sites. There were conclusions that the good features of Yahoo! Photos and Flickr would be merged into one consolidated photo sharing website under the Yahoo! banner.
Yahoo continued to support both Photos and Flickr over the past two years, reflecting the different audiences of the two sites.
Yahoo Photos was a more conventional photo-finishing site, full of family snapshots, while Flickr has attracted a passionate fan base of amateur and professional photographers who use the site to share digital photos online, and for whom printing is largely an afterthought.
According to data from comScore supplied by Yahoo a year ago, Yahoo Photos counted 30 million registered users, who had uploaded 2 billion photos as of June 2006.
To my knowledge Yahoo couldn’t have merged Flickr and Photos as they both appeal to a completely separate set of audiences.
Comparison between the two
Flickr offererd almost the same tools as Yahoo photos. One area in which Yahoo! trumped Flickr, however, was prints. While Flickr has started to offer some printed products, such as photo cards via a partnership with Moo, Yahoo! Photos offers a full range of photo prints via the mail and for in store pick-up at Target department stores. I would guess that this might be an important feature for many users, especially since Yahoo! Photos generally caters to an older audience, which Yahoo! will need to move over to Flickr.
Because Flickr had tools that allowed users to embed metadata -- tags, EXIF info, etc. -- directly into photos, Flickr images tend to be easier for photo search engines to index. Yahoo! had no choice but to make this move,
So what does this all mean? At one time, Yahoo! Photos was the place to share photos online, and it still hosts many more photos than Flickr (about 2 billion versus 500 million), but Yahoo!'s homegrown property was never able to match the buzz that Flickr created.
A smart move?
Well, I would not agree to any reason why Yahoo should have closed the Y!Photos as I think these two services has completely different user base.
Having run similar services makes one more innovative and test the waters, while keeping one safe service that is familiar to many who look for stability over innovativeness.
I don’t think Yahoo realized that these two groups of people exist are not fully interchangeable
It would have been a smart move if they moved Flickr to be the innovation platform and Photos a stable platform. The two groups of use are needed. Those in the perpetual beta and innovation platform are likely to jump to something new and different if the innovation gets stale. The stable platform users often are surprised and start looking to move when there is too much change.
Overall this closure will not affect Yahoo’s international users, they might soon get out while its going good. Flickr has soared among a younger demographic, and merging the two competing properties was inevitable. Everyone expected it when Yahoo! bought Flickr in March 2005 (the way we all expect del.icio.us to eventually kill off MyWeb), it was just a matter of which site would eat the other.
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Posted On
Sep 27, 2007
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What is AJAX?
If there is anything about the current interaction design that we can state as ‘fascinating’, it has to be an Ajax application. Ajax is a dramatic departure from the traditional page-based model, which requires an entire Web page to be reloaded for the information to be communicated between the client and the server.
While seemingly simplistic, AJAX opens doors for Web-application developers that had previously been shut. It relies on nothing but the built-in browser internals. No extra software needs to be distributed to users, making AJAX an attractive option for companies that are concerned about the security and logistical implications of distributing installed software to users.
If we look at the Google Suggest, check out the way suggested terms update as you type, almost instantly. Another very fine example is the Google Map, Zoom in, Use your cursor to grab the map and scroll around a bit. Again, everything happens almost instantly, with no waiting for pages to reload. Isn’t that amazing?
Google Map and Google Suggest are two fine examples of the new approach to the web applciations that is called at AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML).
Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:
• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.
The classic web application model works like this: Most user actions in the interface trigger an HTTP request back to a web server. The server does some processing — retrieving data, crunching numbers, talking to various legacy systems — and then returns an HTML page to the client.
What AJAX Does And Why You Should Consider Using It
AJAX is a new technology that relies on JavaScript. The JavaScript code that AJAX employs allows it to perform to the point that there’s very little perceptible delay with the user interface. This means that the user experience is far more enjoyable since users don’t wait for page updates and refreshes.
AJAX can just about solve the postback delay issue if your applications can simply update the portion of the page that needs to be updated. Easy, right? People have been trying to solve that for years with IFRAMES and other technologies. But none have worked nearly as well as AJAX, which is built on JavaScript technology.
AJAX allows web applications to perform partial page updates. Only the page elements that need to be updated are, thus providing a far more responsive page refresh mechanism. And if a web application developer is judicious in how pages are designed, there is almost no perceptible refresh delay.
AJAX can save bandwidth
Traditional Web applications deliver a tremendous amount of redundant information, particularly if pages are coded in old-fashioned HTML laden with tags. In such sites the amount of structuring and presentation markup required may be nearly as significant as that required to serve up the textual content of the page. However, following an AJAX design pattern, applications need to download page layout and structure items just once, and then update new data as needed, which could significantly reduce the application's bandwidth footprint per user session.
Companies using AJAX application
Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach. All of the major products Google has introduced over the last year — Orkut, Gmail, the latest beta version of Google Groups, Google Suggest, and Google Maps — are Ajax applications. (For more on the technical nuts and bolts of these Ajax implementations, check out these excellent analyses of Gmail, Google Suggest, and Google Maps.) Others are following suit: many of the features that people love in Flickr depend on Ajax, and Amazon’s A9.com search engine applies similar techniques.
These projects demonstrate that Ajax is not only technically sound, but also practical for real-world applications. This isn’t another technology that only works in a laboratory. And Ajax applications can be any size, from the very simple, single-function Google Suggest to the very complex and sophisticated Google Maps.
AJAX the future of web application
All major browser platforms now support AJAX, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, Netscape, Opera and Safari. There's also a move toward standardization of XML HTllJthe core component of AJAX.
Performing targeted information updates, or micro-updates, can substantially reduce network loads, in addition to faster interaction with live data. Benefits can be measured through total bytes transferred, total download time and steps/seconds to complete a task.
The increasing relevance of AJAX is most obvious when looking at high-profile offerings, such as Google Maps and Salesforce.com, but what isn't obvious is that it's quietly making inroads in large and small companies. Its rapid adoption signals a shift in the way enterprises will build and deliver future Web applications.
The biggest challenges in creating Ajax applications are not technical. The core Ajax technologies are mature, stable, and well understood. Instead, the challenges are for the designers of these applications: to forget what we think we know about the limitations of the Web, and begin to imagine a wider, richer range of possibilities.
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Posted On
Sep 01, 2007
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Ready or not, Web 2.0, a new generation of web-based services, is changing the way people work and the way records and documents are created, used, and shared. One of the most interesting tools of Web 2.0 are the Mashups.
What are Mashups?
Mashup is web application that combines data from different sources to create one entirely new and innovative service. They are a trademark of the second generation of Web applications informally known as Web 2.0.
This new kind of Web based data integration is soaring all over the Internet these days. The main reason for the popularity of Mashups is the emphasis they lay on interactive user participation and the manner they aggregate the data in. A Mashup website is characterized by the way in which they draw content from outside of its organizational boundaries.
If you not convinced with the data integration definition to Mashups let me give you a good insight as to what makes a Mashup?
The term “Mashup” was borrowed from a pop music scene where a mashup is a new song that is mixed from the vocal and instrumental tracks from two different source songs (usually belonging to different genres)
So how does a Mashup looks like?
The finest example can the ChicagoCrime.org Web site, which was the first mapping mashup that gained huge popularity among the press. This Web site mashes crime data from the Chicago Police Department's online database with cartography from Google Maps.
Some of the very prominent Mashups genre are Mapping Mashups, Video ad photo Mashups, Search and Shopping Mashups, News Mashups and many more.
What is a Business Mashups?
In this era of technology and competition as business world races to catch up with the Web 2.0 applications like wikis, RSS feeds and widgets, the next big thing has already entered and starting to catch on fast: mashups.
Business Mashup is the combination of two or more applications into one new changed application that is customized for ‘business' specific needs.
As the social networking and the Web 2.0 trends came in, it’s the consumers that tend to adopt the business community. The same can be applied for mashups.
(Above image explains the leading Web 2.0 trends in Business)
Companies have realized that introducing their firm to mashups can help increase a professional influence, mashups is a new generation web service that is constantly changing the way we all work and the way records are created, used and shared.
So we can say that it is the business sphere where mashups will likely have their greatest impact. I think it has already starting to happen.
We should give credit to apps like Google Maps, del.icio.us and Flickr, who have made users started to think a lot about remixing the web. In the figure below is a classic example of a mashup - a Twitter Map. This mashup uses Twitter and Google Maps APIs to create a new application, which literally puts Twitter users on the map.
Another fine example of Mashup is a site called HousingMaps.com. The site offers house listings combined with Google map.
Some of the most publicized mashups include Weather Bonk, a mashup site that combines Yahoo! Traffic with Google Maps and various weather feeds that come up with one page featuring live traffic cams and a weather map customized by location. Another popular site is 1001 Secret Fishing Holes, a mashup of Google Maps with a variety of database feeds from sources like the National Park Service, campgrounds and wild life refuges.
Another area where mashups are high is the e-commerce site. Mashups can combine your web traffic data with the marketing data feed of some other company (example: leading provider of marketing, credit, and purchasing information), by mashing up the two, you can look for trends like who visited your site. You can also use mashups like mapping application to trace your web visitors. Interesting isn’t it.
What should business do to utilize mashups and effectively communicate with customers?
Mashups can be of immeasurable use to any business organization, if applied and used in an effective manner.
Following are the different genre of mashups and how companies can use them effectively to communicate with customers:
Mapping mashups
This era of information technology where people collect an abnormal amount of data about things and activities, companies and web developers can mash all sorts of data onto maps and build a huge amount of user-base. Some companies already versed with mapping mashups are ChicagoCrime.org, Secret Fishing Holes.
Video and photo mashups
The photo hosting and social networking sites like Flickr with APIs that expose photo sharing has led to a variety of interesting mashups.
A lot of news companies and sites can make use of such mashups by rendering the text in photos by matching tagged photos to words from the news.
As these content providers have metadata associated with the images they host (such as who took the picture, what it is a picture of, where and when it was taken, and more), mashup designers mash photos with other information that associates with the metadata.
Search and Shopping mashups
Companies can use combinations of business-to-business (b2b) technologies or screen scrapping to aggregate comparative price data. Consumer market places like eBay and Amazon have already released applications to facilitate mashups for accessing their content.
News mashups
A lot of companies can use technologies like RSS to distribute news feeds related to various topics. Feed mashups can help companies aggregate a user’s feed and them over the web, creating a personalized newspaper that caters to the reader's particular interests. Some companies already using feed mashups are Diggdot.us, which combines feeds from the techie-oriented news sources Digg.com, Slashdot.org, and Del.icio.us
Therefore, companies should make use of mashups bring together information from various sources on the Web into a dashboard-like view.
Future of Business Mashups
It appears that business mashups are certainly cool, but not companies have realized their efficiency. The growth has been steady but it still needs an explosion. Reason being that lots of people still create it for fun but very less for business.
Secondly even though Internet companies are trying to expose their services in the simplest possible way, the applications are still not made simple.
There are services like Yahoo! Pipes, Teqlo and Dapper who are working to simplify the process of creating mashups, but I think it will likely remain a fairly technical exercise only done by enthusiasts.
However, I wont deny stating that we will see companies and products taking ideas from many mashups and creating applications with the combined functionality. For example, taking ideas from the best mashups (like Cloudalicious) and creating a set of tools for bloggers and marketers would be very useful. So mashups will, I think, become the labs of the web - where rapid prototyping is done by enthusiasts, which gives rise to more integrated offerings by web companies.
Please let us know what your favorite business mashup is and give us your take on where business mashups are heading.
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