One app we didn't find - and one that brilliantly appropriates the Flickr API in a delightful, infectious user experience - is Noticings. Part game, part geotagging app, part photoblog, Noticings asks users to upload geotagged photos of interesting artifacts to Flickr. Users tag the photos "noticings;" those photos are then imported, analyzed, and scored, with extra points being awarded for those who post every day in a given week, who post photos of lost objects, or who post the first pic from a certain neighborhood. It is, as the site states, "a game of noticing the world around you."

"Noticings is a game you play by going a bit slower and having a look around you. It doesn't require you change your behavior significantly or interrupt your routine. You just take photographs of things that you think are interesting or things you see. You'll get points for just noticing things, and you might get bonuses for interesting coincidences."

We find the concept charming, a less boozy version of Foursquare, and a more friendly-competitive version of Flickr or Twitpic.

So, with all the other photo-sharing services out there, why choose Flickr to build a game around? It's a question of scale, according to the site. "We know other photo-sharing services are available, but we're on Flickr, so are our friends, and it really does have the best location API for the sort of thing we want to do."

At the moment, the game seems to have a small user base and a largely international one - which means this game is wide open for early-adopting Yankees to go Team America all over the place! Also, anything that gets geeks outside gets our vote. What do our readers think? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to include a link to your Noticings profile if you're playing already.

Flickr has organized these third-party apps into a "garden," complete with user favorites, tags, descriptions and screenshots. The App Garden represents a significant evolution from the former "services" section on the user side, and the revamp includes new features for developers, who can now use the Garden as a tool to help users discover their products. Read on for details and a few spotlighted Flickr apps we thought were fun.

"When you click on one of your apps," Pachenko continued, "you will be taken to the owner view of your app page. This page is where you tell the world about your app - provide a description, link to a website, set screenshots, and add tags. When you're ready, change the privacy setting to public. That will make your app visible to other users and allow it to show up in searches."

Now, for end users, here are a few apps we picked from the Garden that we think you might like.

Bubblr Makes Comics

Make comic strips from your or others' Flickr photos with this fun, simple application from Barcelona-based shop Pimpampum. The app allows users to search for photos by user or by tag, string the pics into strips, and add captions, thought bubbles and speech bubbles. Creations can be shared via a user's blog, Delicious or email.

Flickr For Busy People Speeds Up Skimming

This delightful time-saver shows a compact grid of photos uploaded from a user's contacts during given time periods between 30 minutes and 8 hours prior to the current time. Below each user's avatar is the number of photos uploaded, and the avatars can be clicked to display (or hide) an array of thumbnails to quick digestion of the day's pics.

Suggestify Geotags Photos

This app lets users geotag other users' Flickr photos by suggesting a location to the photo's owner. That geotag information is stored with Suggestify until the photo owner approves or rejects the suggestion. If approved, the photo is geotagged and the user who suggested the geotag is credited with a special tag on the photo.

Flogr Turns Flickr Pics Into Photo Blogs

Flogr is a PHP/MySQL-powered photoblog interface that displays a main photo page with EXIF data and Flickr comments, a customizable thumbnails page of a user's recent pictures, a slideshow component, a tag cloud and an about page showing the Flickr user's profile. Users can also determine which photos are displayed by telling Flogr to only include images with certain tags.

Flickriver Surfaces Interesting Photos

This app is focused on delivering a seamless, quick viewing experience with minimal visual distraction. Users can choose to check out interesting photos filtered by user or by group. They can search for photos or simply browse to discover the most interesting photos on a given day. Flickriver also includes a keyboard-operated slideshow mode. Better still, Flickriver offers a dynamic badge for bloggers to showcase their images.

There has been quite some buzz around OpenStreetMap lately, especially in the mobile sphere. Given that developers often have to pay a lot to use maps from commercial vendors like NavTeq or Tele Atlas, OpenStreetMap, which is offering its maps for free, is becoming an increasingly interesting alternative, especially as the quality of the maps continues to improve.

Right now, for example, you can buy Roadee, a basic OSM turn-by-turn navigation app for the iPhone for a mere $1.99. Waze, which just released its own mapping and turn-by-turn naviation application, sadly doesn't feed any of this data back into OSM, even though these two services could really benefit from each other's expertise.

Making Flickr Smarter

As for Flickr's integration of OSM, the company does a nice job at extracting interesting information from the OSM database when an image is tagged with an OSM ID. Thanks to this, Flickr can now understand if a building is a railway or subway station, for example, or if a certain place is a historic building, a farm, or a forest. Flickr only supports a small sub-set of all the tags that OSM currently supports, but as the Flickr team points out, OSM is still a moving target and it would be hard for Flickr to keep pace. After all, they still "have this little photo-sharing site to keep running."

Dartmouth computer science professor and forensic imaging specialist Hany Farid is convinced that photo manipulation isn't just a 20th century phenomenon as employed in a Polish Microsoft ad last month, but rather something that has existed since at least the 1860's. He cites an image of Lincoln as being a composite of the President and of another politician's body.

Says Farid in a recent issue of the IEEE Spectrum, "Even as experts continue to develop techniques for exposing photographic frauds, new techniques for creating better and harder-to-detect fakes are also evolving. As in the battle against spam and computer viruses, it seems inevitable that the arms race between the forger and the forensic analyst will continue to escalate, with no clear victor."

Farid points to abnormalities in quantization (or image compression) and multiple points of light as telltale signs of image tampering. As services like Picnik and Fotoflexer continue to power the editing features in common photo sharing sites like Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa, it will be interesting to see how many forgeries are actually detected should the law pass.

Photo Credit: Art Comments (Lead Image), Hany Farid's "Photo Tampering Through History" (Inset)

In order to choose contributors, Picasa lets you access your Google contacts, and you can invite individual contacts or groups that you have already set up in Google Contacts (think: co-workers, family, etc.).

Sadly, you won't be able to use the Picasa desktop software to upload images to these albums if you are an invited contributor - only the actual owner of the album can. Also, if you use Internet Explorer, you can only upload five photos at a time.

New Desktop Features

On the desktop, Simplify Media's application now also includes a Photo Viewer, which replicates the iPhone app's functions on your desktop, including the map view. One nice feature for Mac users is that the latest version of the desktop tool also allows you to connect iPhoto to these remote libraries and view them right from within iPhoto.

Your PC as a Media Server

As Simplify Media basically turns your computer into a media server and doesn't store any data in the cloud, it is important to note that your computer needs to be running in order to use the iPhone app. This is probably the biggest drawback of Simplify Media's line-up of apps. However, this is also what makes the applications possible without running into copyright issues or making the storage unaffordable for the company.

If you just want access to all of your pictures without using a lot of space on your iPhone or iPod Touch and you don't mind paying a small monthly fee but you don't want to keep your machines running 24/7, also have a look at Phanfare's Photon app, which we liked a lot when we first reviewed it.

Note: if you are already using Simplify Media on your desktop or laptop, make sure you update to the latest version to get access to the photo features.

About the Photo

The posters that popped up across the country were based on Alkhateeb's photo, but had the TIME magazine logo and branding removed and had added the word "socialism" at the bottom. Alkhateeb wasn't responsible for these changes - a yet-to-be-identified person is behind the posters' creation.

In fact, you may be surprised to hear that the Obama/Joker image wasn't even meant to be political commentary, according to Alkhateeb. That's quite ironic given that it has now embroiled him in this intense political debate. Instead, says the college student, he was just messing around after discovering an online tutorial that explained how to "Jokerize" photographs using Adobe Photoshop. It seems that Alkhateeb doesn't particularly care about politics himself, having chosen to abstain from voting in November since he felt his state (Illinois) was already sewn up and decided before the polls opened. His views on Obama aren't particularly one-sided either. Alkhateeb favors the democratic viewpoint on foreign relations but tends to side with Republicans on domestic issues.

In a recent L.A. Times profile on Alkhateeb, it's reported that the photo generated over 20,000 page views during the time it was hosted on the photo-sharing website Flickr.com. However, as of last Friday, Flickr removed the photo from their site. Why? Alkhateeb says he received an email from the company stating it had to be taken down due to "copyright infringement concerns." (Apparently, TIME magazine wasn't too happy seeing their brand associated with this sort of political commentary.)

What About Free Speech?

But isn't this sort of political commentary, political parody in fact, protected as a form of free speech? Noted photographer and blogger Thomas Hawk thinks it is, citing a precedent for fair use (Folsom v Marsh) which states "if you produce something that is transformative, and not derivative, then it's fair use." Although Hawk isn't a lawyer, he may be right on this one. Says Corynne McSherry, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that defends digital rights, Alkhateeb has a strong fair use defense if he was ever sued. "You really want to think twice about going after a political commenter," she noted.

This wouldn't be the first time Flickr got involved with political censorship. Hawk also blogged about how the site deleted the account of a user named Shepherd Johnson after he made critical comments about Obama in the Official White House Photostream back in June.

So is this yet another case of Flickr engaging in censorship? Or are they legitimately protecting themselves from these "copyright infringement" claims? (Flickr won't comment on this since a company policy prohibits them from discussing issues surrounding one particular user.)

What do you think about this issue? Share your thoughts in the comments.

In September of 2008, Expono went live with its site and made the bold choice to go with 100% cloud computing. Other sites like SmugMug have done this with great success and it feels like a growing trend. The lower cost and ease of scaling made cloud computing a sensible choice for Expono and the company set about building its incredible array of features. Those features, combined with the company's talented and ambitious team based in Oslo, Norway, make Expono a potential contender in an increasingly crowded media sharing marketplace.

You can go here to view a complete list of Expono's features. It's an impressive list, if not a little overwhelming, and you simply need to have a look for yourself. Here are a few of the main features we like:

Custom Location in Maps:

Geotagging has become a pretty popular thing to do with photographs. It's just interesting for us to see on a map where a photo was taken. It gives viewers added perspective, helps the photographer better organize their collections and could even help businesses attract customers. Expono has a feature that lets users drag a pin, place it on a map where the photo was taken and give that place a name for future reference. It's a simply but useful tool and a nice feature.

Language Translation:

Expono has not forgotten our Spanish-speaking friends and allows English-Spanish translations. The company is frantically working on translation to other languages like Danish, Russian, French and Hebrew and is actively searching for help translating other languages.

Full Quality Photo Sharing on Facebook:

Expono allows users to share full quality photos and activities and connect on Facebook. It looks pretty straightforward and easy to do:

"Simply go to Facebook Settings on Edit Services menu, press the "Connect with Facebook" button and follow the instructions. It takes 10-30 seconds!"

"After your accounts have been connected, you will be able to tag your Facebook friends on your photos like any other contacts you already have in your address book. With your Facebook friends now on Expono, you can add them to your contact groups, give them access to the photos you want them to see and tag them on your photos.

Face Tagging and Sharing to FriendFeed and Twitter:

Expono has extended its integration with Friendfeed and Twitter that allows interaction between users of those services:

"Earlier we had automatic photo uploads announcements to Friendfeed and Twitter every time you uploaded new photos to Expono. The functionality allowed our users to inform their followers and subscribers about newly uploaded photos in a innovative way. Now we have extended that to include direct sharing of public album and photos right from the Share menu, giving your subscribers and followers access to view your full quality photos with just 1 click."

Basically, you connect your Expono account with FriendFeed or Twitter, tag your friends' photos, add them to your contact groups and give them access to the photos you want them to see.

See what Expono's small but loyal group of followers are talking about on Twitter and also on FriendFeed.

Oh, did we mention Expono's context aware media RSS that allows users to enter a URL into your Wii Opera browser URL field, run it fullscreen and watch a slideshow on your TV? Don't forget authenticated RSS feeds, GPS support, photo editing, iPhoto photocasting, EXIF and IPTC support and much, much more. We also like that Expono takes your privacy very seriously.

This hungry startup (a core team of six, including Co-Founder and CEO Magnus Jonsson) means business when it says there are other exciting things in the works. Expono team member Daniel Bentes hinted at the company's interest in a developing a mobile site, similar to Flickr's new mobile site, that uses Apple's Core Location service right from Safari. Bentes says, "this kind of location awareness will be the future of not only search and discovery services, but even ad-based and paid content, giving even more value to viewers and readers alike. As of now, Apple's Core Location is the prime example of this ability". He adds that the company "...would like to implement the same kind of functionality on Expono.com for the coming iPhone version. But would REALLY love to implement it on the main web version as well, enabling this functionality to an even broader audience".

Like we said, there are other sites out there that do similar things. But when you combine all these things together and they are done well (in this case they did a great job), you get a very powerful and useful tool that just may be worth forking over your hard-earned money for. If you don't want to take our word for it, check out what our friend @CleverClogs had to say about Expono over on Friendfeed. She is quite knowledgeable and discriminating about such matters. You might want to also go to the Expono Customer Support Community on Get Satisfaction to see what others are saying and to throw in your own two cents.

Be sure to read the Expono blog for even more information and follow the company's Twitter updates @expono. The service is still in Beta, but you should have no problem getting an invite if you sign up at Expono.com.

Users can now share posted content on their Twitter accounts using a simple web-based sharing button or via email/mobile using a unique "2Twitter" email address. Although all uploaded content is tweetable, new content uploaded via the web is not auto-tweeted. Mobile uploads are only sent to Twitter if the user's 2Twitter email address is used.

Once a Twitter account is added to a Flickr user's account as a blog, the "Blog This" function will allow that user to tweet about any image with a short URL and a 116 character limit. The title of the image is automatically included in the tweet. The "Blog This" icon is located on the Flickr photo page and doesn't appear in a user's photo stream.

Here's what the function and resultant tweet looks liked when I posted a photo from my own account:

And here's a tweet I sent about an image and design from another user, ThisIsStar.

Sadly, the resultant tweet doesn't indicate that the image is from another user; we can see this causing some confusion, especially when users are in a hurry. Hopefully, the generator of the tweet will edit the included text to reflect ownership accurately, e.g., "Check out this awesome design from @thisisstar."

So, what will this mean for other services designed to post images to Twitter? While the new Twitter-posting capabilities at Flickr are exciting, they do present a few conflicts and redundancies. If Flickr wanted to kill other image-tweeting services, they should have allowed users to choose to auto-tweet about new batches of photos without having to select each pic individually after the fact. As it stands, only Flickr's mobile upload function truly replaces services such as Twitpic and yFrog.

With regard to services such as FriendFeed or PixelPipe that have been shuffling links to our newly posted Flickr photos over to our Twitter accounts automatically, the new Flickr function doesn't really help consolidate users' efforts or save their time. Auto-tweets from third-party aggregators such as these are still the only way to tweet new images from the web without taking extra steps.

However, the redundancy issue will rear its ugly head for mobile uploads to the 2Twitter addresses. For example, if I uploaded from my device right now using a 2Twitter address, it would post to Flickr and Twitter first. Then a FriendFeed post would be generated automatically. That FriendFeed note would then get pushed to Twitter. This is clearly too much noise, but Flickr doesn't give me the necessary incentive to completely turn off FriendFeed's Flickr integration.

Although these issues mean, from our point of view, that the feature still needs improvement, it's a great way to share already uploaded content from a wide range of sources.

Today the White House launched an official collection of photos depicting Obama's first 100 days in office on Flickr. The Creative Commons Foundation asks why these photos are licensed as Creative Commons Attribution (meaning you have to credit the source) instead of being in the Public Domain free for use in any context, as data created by the Federal Government usually is.

The answer to the question? The photos aren't Public Domain because Flickr doesn't offer Public Domain licensing as an option. That's a shame for every photo publisher, not just he White House. Creative Commons licensing makes it really easy for people who want to re-use photos to do so quickly and easily by allowing content creators to communicate their conditions for re-use ahead of time. If you just want to get your photos out into the world with absolutely no restrictions, though, Flickr doesn't offer that option. Or, if you're a government agency that wants to publish photos on the best photo sharing site on the web and make them Public Domain like you ought to - you're out of luck.

We're going to guess that the White House will be added to the list of selected partners participating in the Flickr Commons, where organizations like the Library of Congress have photos posted under a special "no known copyright" license. That won't solve the problem for the rest of us, though, and it's probably not a scalable solution for every government agency that would like to publish to Flickr.

Hopefully Flickr will be prompted to change its licensing options; other users have asked for Public Domain as an option for some time. We've asked the company for comment and will update this post if we get a helpful reply. Flickr's support for Creative Commons has been fabulous. The next logical step is to support publishing photos to the Public Domain.

UPDATE: Since posting this we've been pointed to an active conversation on Flickr about Public Domain, where we found a link to site co-founder Stewart Butterfield's explanation four years ago for not offering Public Domain as an option.

Derivative Works

While the highly restrictive BY-NC-ND license is the most popular CC license on Flickr (33%), the second most popular license (29%) is the BY-NC-SA license, which allows for derivative, non-commercial works, as long as the resulting work is licensed under the same license. In total, according to this study, about 63 million images on Flickr can be used for creating derivative works like films, photo montages, or animations.

Growth is Slowing

The growth rate for CC-licensed images on Flickr is slowing, however. The growth rate has slowed down from 13% in April 2006, to 4% in November 2008. Currently, the growth rate is holding stable at 4% per month.

Make Creative Commons Your Default on Flickr

If you want to make sure that all of your photos are covered under a Creative Commons license, just head to the Privacy & Permissions tab in your Flickr account settings, where you will find a Defaults for new uploads section. From there, you can change your default license. If you never changed it, it will currently mark all your new uploads as "all rights reserved."

Note: If you want to "Rock Flickr Like a Champ," have a look at this post.

As we reported last week, Photobucket is highly dependent on MySpace for a large share of its traffic. Keeping this in mind, it makes perfect sense for Photobucket to try to reach out to a wider audience across the Internet by giving its users more and easier options to share their content.

Making Sharing Easier

While posting from Photobucket is now significantly easier, it should be noted that this is not a solution that auto-posts your images directly to a selection of different social sites. You still have to individually post your images to every site separately, so this is not a replacement for services like Tarpipe or Pixelpipe.

Mobile Traffic Up

In its announcement, Photobucket also points out that traffic to its mobile site tripled during 2008 and continues to grow. Given that Photobucket's users trend towards being younger than those of other photo sharing sites, this makes perfect sense, but it is also a good indicator that there is still a lot of growth left in the mobile photo sharing market..

Is This Enough to Gain Back Market Share?

Overall, these updates, which also include a new 'live slideshow' feature, look like they are putting Photobucket in the right direction. The company has lost a large amount of market share in the last few months and is under a lot of pressure from Yahoo's Flickr. These new features will allow it to become more visible outside of MySpace, though we will have to see if this is enough to make a difference in the long run.

Declining Traffic from MySpace

Last July, Photobucket still got 54% of its traffic from MySpace, but last month, that number had declined to 38%. In the U.S., MySpace has now been surpassed by Facebook as the most popular social network and given how strongly Photobucket is tied to the fortunes of MySpace, we can only assume that this negative trend will continue for Photobucket.

According to Hitwise, neither Flickr nor Google's Picasa (the number two and three in the market) get more than 6% of their traffic from social networks - instead, these services tend to rely more on traffic from search engines.

From the inception of video support, Flickr has relied on the Yahoo! Platform Video Team. In addition to making sure video was a success on Flickr (both in standard and HD flavors), they have helped develop video-related projects such as the Flickr Clock, a unique and ever-shifting view of the videos constantly being uploaded to Flickr's servers. There is a post about their contributions here.

So, go check out the clock and take a couple of 90-second video breaks. We will leave you with an example of what can be done with a good camera, a good lens, and HD video support.

Flickit is different. It's a beautiful little app that offers a simple - yet rich - Flickr uploading experience. Or as Lifehacker puts it, "the free Flickit application is [Flickr's] truest friend on an iPhone or iPod touch." We couldn't agree more.

While Flickit's functionality can be found in other apps, the look, feel, and usability give it something special. It has an aesthetic that matches the iPhone, with big chunky buttons and stylish animations. Long story short, Flickit just feels like an iPhone app.

And like the iPhone, it's easy to use. How easy? The IKEA-like instructions should provide a clue.

Once you've installed Flickit and logged into Flickr, you'll start with Flickit instead of your camera. Shoot photos directly from the app or grab pictures from your existing camera roll. Select a photo with which to work and you can edit title, description, and tags, add it to a set, choose its visibility, and geotag it with your current location. Press upload and you're done - fast. And it's all thanks to Flickit's streamlined uploading engine.

Downside? Flickit is an upload-only utility. So you're not going to be browsing your photos from it. That's unfortunate because given how they handle the upload process, we'd love to see how they handle viewing.

Want to give it a try? Download Flickit for free.