FlickrFan: Dave Winer's New Photo Viewing Software
Long-time inventor Dave Winer has released an early version of his new Mac software called FlickrFan tonight. Though there are some kinks in it at launch, the service leverages a number of APIs to do some very cool things.
FlickrFan is basically a screen saver program that will display high-resolution images from any Flickr account, recent Associated Press photos or any other RSS feed with media enclosures (so Flickr tag streams or Photobucket feeds should be no problem). Presumably this is only the beginning. The software is run off of Winer's all-too-unwieldy OPML Editor, but FlickrFan looks much easier to use.
Users can easily schedule downloads of their photos, to back up their Flickr accounts locally for example, they can drag and drop photos to a desktop folder for upload to a Flickr account, there's link sharing via Twitter and a shared-photos feed for every user.
Flickr RSS feeds only make 20 items available at a time and Winer doesn't seem to have figured out how how to get around that. I hope he does, perhaps they'll work with him on it - it's a pretty big buzz kill.
The sharing is clunky - you have to go through the "events" page in your account to share a photo that you've seen in your screensaver. Maybe I'll get used to this, I don't know. Hopefully Winer will stick with the app and make it really nice to use - it's not there yet but the potential is big and you can feel how close it is. Podcasting News says the big picture here is that HDTV is the new platform. That sounds good to me.
Winer and Robert Scoble are encouraging people to set FlickrFan up on a Mac Mini connected to a big screen HDTV and that does sound like a lot of fun to me. Scoble has said that he'll do a live streaming video demonstration of FlickrFan from his cell phone tonight.
Particularly given the Bhutto assassination today, there's a lot of particularly moving AP photography coming through FlickrFan right now. Hopefully the bugs and burps in the service will be worked out soon - or at least as soon as Winer can unglue himself from coverage of the news on CNN. It's definitely software I'm glad to have on my computer.
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It looks to me like the software is working pretty well for you, but you say there are bugs. What are they? It is a beta and we're in the first hours of its public release. That there might be problems comes as no surprise to me since I'm a veteran developer (a term I prefer to "chronic" -- what exactly does that mean?)
I think 20 pictures is a good number for Flickr feeds, we accumulate the pictures over time in the screensaverpics folder. That's how RSS works, imho.
marshall you might want to mention it's mac only
For the PC inclined: http://code.google.com/p/slickr-dotnet/
It works.
ok - re-read, it's in the first line, im a lamer.
Laterally related:
Personally that sorta thing holds my attention for about 35 seconds. (I speed type ... really.) But front.of.mind at the moment is the LJ images "mashup" JWZ came up with, well, years ago ... prolly before "mashup" was in our lexicon. (I wish the popup version was bigger ... it doesn't fill full-screen.)
Credit to the devil himself: the guy knew how to drill to the base of things.
I've tried FlickrFan and it works! :D I'll inform you if I'll encounter bugs in the future.
Elisha
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Elisha, that's great!!
It occurs to me that Marshall might be missing something key, the sub-folders accumulate photos over time.
In early test versions I had it download 1000 pictures in the first few hours so that you couldn't possibly miss that the point is wide variety.
Marshall try letting it run for a week, and then sit down in front of it with a friend who doesn't know much about this stuff, and just start talking. You'll find your eyes gravitate to it, but it's different from TV.
There's a reason why people who work in news organizations point their screen savers at folders full of wire photos.
Everyone at AP does it. That's how I stumbled across this idea, I was hanging out waiting in a friend's office at a newspaper in South Carolina, and he had this screen saver that started displaying pictures of current events. I was hooked in two seconds.
Marshall, to review this and write about the software is to miss the point. It's about the photos.
And please don't use the word chronic -- that's a word that's used for sickness. It's a bit of s curse man. Not very nice, and not likely to work too well for you if you recall that what goes around comes around. I thought we had a cordial relationship. :-)
Ok Dave, chronic replaced with "long-time." I follow what you're saying about the photos and I think I clearly communicated how cool I think it is. I also think everyone will want to know how the software works in the hands of a user, too. I think it's kinda clunky - but I wish you nothing but the best with it.
"Not very nice, and not likely to work too well for you if you recall that what goes around comes around. I thought we had a cordial relationship. :-)"
The smiley face does little to hide the fact that you're threatening to stop being this guy's friend if he doesn't change the wording of HIS pre-review of your new software so that it's more to YOUR liking.
Talk about integrity.
James, a smiley means "no big deal" and we'll be buds even if you don't go easy on me. I don't know who you are and why you're so angry, but I wish you the best, whoever you are. :-)
It's basically pictures used as a tv screensaver. I keep waiting for Ashton Kutcher to jump out of the bushes with a 'gotcha'. Content from news sources is interesting, but other than that I guess I'm simply not intelligent enough to understand what the big deal is.
I presume its a desktop app. Why is it so different from regular blog readers(desktop/browser based), that can pull of different kind of media(images, text, audio, video?
Pointcast lives!
Now we just need to get this hooked into more devices. Sounds like the perfect thing to run on your Chumby or if you want to go mass-market, get it running on a wi-fi enabled LCD photo frame.
http://everwas.com/2006/01/wi_fi_enabled_lcd_picture_frame.html
FlickrFan is a great Mac software........It works very well
What's the big deal here?
http://tinyurl.com/22xmzh
This is pretty forgettable stuff. There's nothing here even remotely groundbreaking. Seems to me that it's more of Winer's huffing & puffing over his latest mediocre output.
BTW, did you get a load of his bullying you on the use of "chronic" ?. i've read his blog outbursts from time to time and the guy lays into people awfully hard and in really personal terms.
Using alpha software to demo alpha software...sounds like a job for Scoble!
http://mike-mcgrath.wordpress.com/2007/12/28/demo-or-die/
What is it doing thats new? You can already subscribe to photo RSS feeds in iPhoto and use that as a screensaver. I am subscribed to my Flickr contacts RSS feed and have it as a screensaver.
The application and the concept seem quite underwhelming. What exactly is "new" here?
Maybe Silicon Valley is really running out of ideas.
I was at the Le Web Conference in Paris a few weeks ago and watched Dave's presentation. You can see the video here: http://my.vpod.tv/leweb3, Day 2, J2-06-Evolving Innovation.
At the Q&A, someone said that Google's RSS reader already does not. I don't know if this is so. Dave and everyone else in the audience seemed surprised.
Then a woman got up and asked about the environmental impact of applications like this. Her question was in response to Dave's statement that showing pictures is what your TV should be doing when you are not watching it. She said your TV should be off.
I was really surprised at Dave's response to her legitimate question, especially now that we are concerned about appliances using too much power. He brushed off her question as being just one of personal choice and refused to answer her follow-up question.
Two things...
1. FlickrFan's implementation is pathetic. Very very old-school. Too old-school. Everything it does can be easily implemented and work with Front Row's engine easily.
2. Dave Winer wasn't the first to come up with this. Bill Bumgarner published a working prototype a while ago, at http://svn.red-bean.com/bbum/trunk/Flickr%20Feeds/
I guess that posting 5000 useless posts for the past 10 years and wasting your time twittering all day has its benefits... Sad to see him waste the potential media coverage on such a lousy app any 17 year indie Mac developer can do in 2 days.
Sounds like Dave's version of Ginger. Slickr already does what poor Dave claims to have created quite a while ago and does it quite well.
Want AP photos? Just point Slickr at the AP photos feed. This definitely should not take 4 months to code.
Verdict? YAWN or FAIL. You pick.
Dave, try something truly groundbreaking for a change.