My son discovered Flickr today from Paul Mayne on Vimeo.

What's so great about CC photos? For one thing, they are an incredible boon for follow-on creativity. Creativity, the good people of Creative Commons argue, always builds on the past. In a read-write world on the web, the less we're slowed down by standard copyright when it isn't applicable (when we want to share our work with people freely) then the more our photos, music and writing can serve as a platform for explorers who would go further regarding the topics we've engaged with and published on.

Flickr, on the other hand, is a great place to post photos for posterity. And it's a great place to find photos to illustrate written work, like the photo I posted at the top of this article. That's a photo of people celebrating a Portland Timbers soccer win, by Flickr user Frozenchipmunk. (Probably not that person's real name.) I always start my Flickr searches at http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/, the page for photos licensed as "by attribution" and without "non-commercial use only" limitations. I publish my own photos with a CC license, too, here.

Creative Commons, the organization, was founded in 2001 and it sure was well timed. The ensuing tidal wave of self-published multi-media content would have suffered substantially if it had no options but the dominant default copyright regime.

I wish Flickr was more encouraging of people to apply CC licenses to their photos, but traditionally the site was used extensively for personal pictures not intended for re-use. That so many photos are published CC on the site is an incredible asset for the future of creativity online.

Below, a photo I took of Portland's Chinese Classical Garden. Go ahead and re-use it, I only require that you credit me for taking it. Thanks, Creative Commons!

There's also a new feature for all Flickr users called Photo Session, which lets members browse photo slideshows in sync together over the Web. Users can chat and doodle on photos during a Photo Session. It supports all major desktop browsers, iPhone and iPad.

Shoot and Share

Flickr has had a native iOS app for years, but the filters are new to the Android app. Photo apps that add various shades of brown are a hot commodity. Facebook, a huge hub for photo sharing, is building one, and Apple is building filters straight into iOS 5.

Of course, the photo filter app to watch is Instagram, which released version 2.0 last week, but it's iOS only. Though Instagram received a huge overhaul in the latest update, there's still no word on the conspicuously absent Android version. Flickr's app targeting Android capitalizes on that missing spot in the Android world where Instagram should be.

You can download the Flickr Android app from the Android Market.

Photo Session

Photo Session is a neat feature sort of like Google Plus Hangouts, only they're for sharing photos in person. Users can view the same slideshow over the Web and chat and draw on photos using built-in tools. It's a nice way to create some virtual togetherness, but it doesn't seem to fill an existing demand for a service like this.

Are you a Flickr user? What do you think of the new features?

The game is an imaginative journey through the minds of 11 giants that is somewhat fun to play, but will probably require a little explanation. We spoke with Butterfield about Glitch.

So far, 27,000 people have played the game, accumulating around 34 million minutes of testing. Glitch challenges multi-player online games like World of Warcraft on one end of the spectrum and virtual reality plays on the other.

But not by much. Glitch is using a similar gaming model and a business model that has worked for "games" like Second Life, which makes $100 milion a year by selling virtual goods.

Players can create add-ons and virtual goods for others in the game; it's got in-game advertising only for the sale of virtual items. TinySpeck will release an app for the iPhone, which Butterfield says will take players out of the game. He said that they are making the API available to developers so that players in Glitch can play in other games, which sounds compelling.

Butterfield pitches it as culture building. "We provide raw materials and a stimulating environment, but it's the players who bring the infinite world alive, shaping it with their imagination," he says.

Glitch is actually the offspring of an idea that Ludicorp - the company that created Flickr - thought of at the very early days of that photo-sharing community. In fact, says Butterfield, he took the most important piece of the Glitch model from his experience at Flickr.

"Flickr was unique and different," says Butterfield. But there are similarities. "Chief among them is the importance of communication, and creating a space where people can build relationships. that can be more powerful than any individual feature we could offer them."

Glitch definitely sets the stage for that. Inside this non-violent interface are multiple areas for chatting. Characters encounter other characters, usually dressed and looking like alien wood sprites on acid, and engage in dialogue in real-time. There are dozens of prompts that gear you to interact with other players and elements in the game. You can talk to trees, and you can pet pigs.

I've only played the game for a couple of hours, but I have enjoyed it. There was a significant amount of downtime before they launch this afternoon, but I saw how someone sitting in an office cubicle would be enticed to don an artificial personality and entertain and amuse his friends. I see its similarities to a community built around sharing.

You can play a TV show for other characters, and you can give people beans, planting tools, and other things, like a special magical purple fruit that makes you see purple for about a minute.

The actions create points, and the game is set up so that a character must interact in order to keep is mood at high levels. Points are necessary to buy items needed to create opportunities for building community and for success in the game.

Conversations flow very easily when the world is purple and you are dressed like a nymph, while chickens walk by asking to be "rubbed."

If there is great fun in this game, it will be in how everything flows and changes in a way that a normal life may not. And if Butterfield's philosophy holds true, maybe that experience can create culture, in the same way that Flickr created a community around photo-sharing.

You can see for yourself by visiting the game when it opens later today.

Screen shots come from images given by Glitch and from capture of real-time play.

Heather Champ says that today was her first day working at 2BKCO, the stealth mobile social software startup that Fake announced in June that she was working on.

How did they do it when they built community so successfully together before? "Flickr's community team was all about enabling a vibrant community that created value for itself and helped keep their own members in line," says admirer-from-a-distance Evan Hamilton, Community Manager at customer service platform Uservoice. "The fact that Caterina is gathering folks who worked with her at Flickr is a great sign. Whatever Caterina is up to, she's taking the community aspect seriously, as more startups should be. Can't wait to see what it is!"

Me too.

The influential Flickr Community Guidelines that Champ lead the creation of (eg: "Don't be creepy.
You know the guy. Don't be that guy.") remain one of the most important documents that new online communities should read.

"I've never met Heather, but she's an inspirational figure in our space," says Maria Ogneva, Head of Community at enterprise micromessaging service provider Yammer. "She is a great example of living and breathing her passion. As the community manager for Flickr, Heather embodied the notion that the community comes first, and that it wouldn't be the same without each individual member. Her passion for her community and for the art of photography is apparent and infectious."

What will Fake and Champ bring the world next, together? Time will tell, but they will have a lot of eager people waiting to see what it is when they're ready.

Geofencing is a term typically used to refer to the drawing of a line on a map where some kind of pre-determined action is triggered, it's most established in the business of transporting goods in trucks and triggering tracking actions when those trucks enter into certain geographic zones. Flickr's new privacy geofences are something everyone is likely to enjoy using though. I, for example, have already set up a geofence around my house prohibiting anyone but my approved contacts from seeing the photos I upload from home. Thanks, Flickr! Update: Turns out I got that wrong, the photos are subject to my previous privacy setting - it's just the location of my house that's now more private due to the geofence. That's cool too!

The Flickr implementation of this feature lets you search for a spot on a map, then determine how big the area you want to refer to is, set the particular privacy setting for that zone apart from your account-wide default setting, then name the geofenced area. You can then choose whether or not to apply this new privacy setting to all the photos you've uploaded from that location in the past. Update: As commenters graciously pointed out, I misunderstood this announcement a bit - it's actually the location of the photo that is subjected to a new privacy setting, not the photo itself. Good to know, effect is similar but a little different. I thought this was like Google Plus or Facebook privacy settings - it turns out it's not quite the same.

Flickr says it has 300 million geotagged photos uploaded to its databases already. This is the kind of feature that could really help more people feel comfortable geotagging their photos. Facebook really ought to enable this feature as well.

Right: Where did I eat this wonderful dinner of grilled asparagus with shallot pepper and salmon? None of your business, unless you're a member of my friends and family group!

Heck, Twitter and everyone else ought to do this. I don't geotag my Tweets because so many of them are posted from home and my exact address gets transmitted to all my followers. Dear Twitter, would you please set up a feature like this and let me draw circles within which I would like my location obscured to the neighborhood level? Please? Almost two years since launching, Twitter's location feature has been a big disappointment relative to its potential and I can't help but think that the lack of clear controls for users is a big part of that.

There was a time when concepts like this might have felt super-geeky, or not of general interest to a lot of people. With the rise of smartphones and the growing sophistication of users, I think that time may well have passed.

You can visit this page on Flickr to try setting up some geofences for yourself. The official announcement just went up here.

Such are the questions being tackled by a new startup called OpenPhoto.me, an open source project being built by long-time photo sharing guy Jaisen Mathai. OpenPhoto.me is a photo sharing app and it's a platform for other apps: it pushes all your photos, tags and comments into cloud storage that you own, on Amazon S3, Rackspace or Dropbox. Then you can grant any photo app access to those photos as you see fit.

"This is the culmination of many things I've done over the years and it solves many of the problems I've experienced myself," Mathai says. "I haven't wanted to put all my photos and data up on Flickr knowing that someday I won't be using Flickr anymore. I built this, then it turned into a service other people could use, then something that other app developers could build on top of."

"If you look back and see the platforms that proceeded today's silos, those that are still around now are because they are open." Mathai argues. He contrasts that openness with the selective and partial Application Programming Interfaces that photo sharing services like Facebook and likely iCloud offer developers. "In my vision for OpenPhoto.me, every application developer has the same level of access as any other app developer. I'm no different from any other app developer, I don't have more access than others. That's extremely important for the end user because that means they get the best of breed options, not just what independent developers are able to build with partial access to the data in a silo system."

Not everyone agrees that there's a strong need for a service like this. "It seems
like Flickr, SmugMug, 500px, etc. are meeting folks' needs," says photography blogger Aaron Hockley of PicturePundit.

"On the self-hosted side, I don't see a real demand for a self-hosted photo service. What might make more sense and be a better use of money and time would be to build something that could provide real, feature-rich photo hosting and sharing through a CMS such as WordPress. Even amongst the folks that choose to self-host their blogs, they often go with a hosted photo service. I don't see them (myself included) switching to a self-hosted photo service that wasn't part of WordPress."

Hockley might not see this as a desirable service, but I do. I'd love to see cloud storage of photos and their data made easy - and in a way that bakes sharing in. Right now I take most of my photos with Instagram, then push the ones I want to save over to Flickr. Do I really feel like Flickr is a forever kind of solution? No. I'd much rather they be saved on my WordPress install or in bulk cloud storage I pay for monthly - with connections to other services enabled and exercised as I see fit.

Left: The first hosted data locker from the Locker Project went live today. Photos and their data from OpenPhoto.me could live very nicely in just such a system.

Mathai says he's been talking to the people at The Locker Project, a prominent open source project aiming to let everyday people capture and control all their data from around the web, then offer access to that data to apps built to run on top of it. His vision and theirs seem compatible to me, too. Recognizing that what used to be "data exhaust," the data that gets thrown off from our everyday experiences online, is in fact a valuable platform for innovation and ought to be controlled by those of us whose activities it is a consequence of.

Do you want something like that for your photos? I do.

NPR music podcast All Songs Considered just released a show about breaking up with your favorite bands. It got me thinking about favorite web apps or services that I've broken up with. So in the tradition of Internet era music, I'm going to directly rip NPR's idea and breakup categories.

In this post I tearfully discuss past relationships with MySpace, Last.fm and Soup.io. I finish with a love story that has a happier ending: Flickr. I'd love to hear your own tales of web app woe in the comments.

I admit it, I broke it off with MySpace and hooked up with Facebook. Despite the fact that Facebook is loose with my privacy and takes away things I want from it (like third party widgets and tabs).

But MySpace brought this on itself. It became garish and trashy over time. All of my friends hated it. Even its corporate parent, News Corp, wants MySpace out of the house now. It's sad how MySpace declined after those party days of 2005-07.

Remembering The Good Times: Last.fm

I used to have a ball with music streaming service Last.fm. We'd sing together and dance the nights away. Last.fm would constantly surprise me with new music, bringing a joyful smile to my face. It even tracked my music listening (our pet name for this was "scrobbling").

Then Last.fm latched onto a big shot called CBS and it stopped surprising me as often. That's ok though, because new subscription music services have come along to take my breath away. My current favorite music squeeze is MOG, which lets me pick and choose which albums I listen to. Last.fm never did that.

(I still "scrobble" with Last.fm though, for old times sake.)

It's Not You, It's Me (Apps/Sites We Grew Apart From): Soup.io

This particular story breaks my heart, because I so wanted Soup.io to become popular. It's a lifestreaming service very similar to Tumblr and Posterous. Of the three, I felt that Soup.io had the best features. It still does, in many respects. My favorite feature is the full-text import of content from third party services (like Last.fm and Goodreads). Aggregating your content from all around the social Web is so much easier - and works better - in Soup.io than in Tumblr and Posterous.

Yet, this year I moved to Tumblr. Why? Because of its slickness and its far superior social network, which I admit I wanted to tap into. I feel so shallow, like I dumped a smart and quirkily cool nerd for the prom queen. Shame on me.

App or Website You'll Always Stand By: Flickr

Here's a 'happily ever after' story, to cheer you up. Despite having Yahoo as its parent (which has a reputation for not being able to look after its children), Flickr has been a mainstay for me over the years.

I'll always have a soft spot for Flickr, because it guided me into the new world of online photos back in 2004. Over the years Flickr has continued to host my photos, despite other sites like Facebook trying to woo me away. To this day I pay to be a premium member of Flickr - that's how much I love it.

(note: the lead photo of this post is from Flickr user crimfants, who photographed himself after a 1991 breakup - "It worked out for both of us," he concluded.)

So there you have it, 3 sad break-up stories from my life on the Web and 1 happy story. Thanks again to NPR All Songs Considered for inspiring me to write this.

Which web apps or services have you broken up with; and why?

While Yahoo has said that it is "absolutely committed" to social picture sharing site Flickr, the same might not be said for the folks at the top of the company. Today, Flickr head of product Matthew Rothenberg announced that he would be "stepping away from Flickr," the third such departure since Flickr co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake left in 2008.

Can Flickr hang on in the photo sharing realm or will other niche social photo sharing services and Facebook - the biggest photo sharing site on the Internet - take its place?

A number of products at Yahoo have been on shaky ground lately, with the company announcing last fall that it would shutter Delicious, MyBlogLog and Buzz. Now, as Facebook continues to dominate social photo sharing on the Web, and photo sharing apps like Instagram and PicPlz take off, confidence in Flickr's ability to stay afloat could be waning as well.

Professional photographers may also be abandoning the site, as it has had troubles lately with censorship and even accidentally deleting thousands of photos and telling the owner they were gone forever.

Does Rothenberg's departure spell serious trouble for Flickr? It could, but it doesn't sound like it does for Rothenberg himself. "And yes, I know what I'm doing next," he later tweeted, "but not announcing it just yet."

PicPlz, which is lead by former Imeem music community head Dalton Caldwell and funded by leading VCs Andreessen Horowitz (who bailed from Instagram to invest in PicPlz instead), just announced the following: public availability of its Application Programming Interface for other apps to use its filters and widgets, support for users to publish photos under Creative Commons licenses and new analytics dashboards for brand advertisers using the service. The simplicity of Instagram just got challenged in a big way.

Instagram, the best known (if not the largest) of the many social mobile photo apps on the market, exploded at the end of last year, hitting 1 million users in just 10 weeks. That company doesn't even have a functioning website, but people love it.

PicPlz has a highly functional website. It will also now have integrating partnerships with other services around the web and mobile ecosystem that want to roll-in photo filtering, widgets for display of photos and other features the service offers.

The emphasis that PicPlz puts on preserving original high-quality copies of your photos, combined with the new Creative Commons licenses, means that mobile phone picture takers will have all the more incentive to take their photos for archiving and for free sharing using PicPlz. Creative Commons is a copyright system that allows publishers to communicate to the world the conditions under which reuse of their content is acceptable - like, as long as the original author is credited, or as long as it's for non-commercial re-use. Creative Commons greatly reduces the friction that copyright often adds to media sharing, reuse and distribution.

And the brand dashboards! Instagram may be seeing a notable amount of brand adoption, but PicPlz's new offering of a dashboard showing which photos got the most views over time and other numbers is going to be very compelling.

Put it all together and even Flickr is going to have to stand up and take note. This is a crowded market and startups are innovating quickly. Another competitor, Path, today added real-time commenting to its version of photos-on-your-phone.

Instagram has spread fast because people love it. PicPlz is now built to spread fast, these are smart growth hooks that have been added to the service. Which strategy will work best in the long run? That's a question I look forward to asking in another 3 and 6 months.

A number of people chimed in to reassure us that Flickr is going to be ok. First, former Flickr chief software architect Cal Henderson posted several comments assuring us that costs were lower than estimated and ad revenue much higher. Now today Yahoo PR sent us the following statement from Blake Irving, Chief Product Officer at Yahoo. Irviing says the company is absolutely committed to Flickr.

Blake Irving
EVP, Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!

Irving said roughly the same thing in 140 charecters a few minutes ago. You might recognize that avatar as the same one who freaked out and promised to fire whoever leaked the internal slide deck disclosing the company's plans to "sunset" Delicious. I hope this is all for real. If Flickr were closed, or had less instead of more energy put into it, that would be a real shame.

Would Flickr survive the hemorrhaging at its parent company Yahoo? That was the next logical question. Today Flickr power user Thomas Hawk did a little investigation of how many $25/year paid Pro accounts and thus how much annual revenue he estimates Flickr contributes to Yahoo. Hawk's methodology seems reasonable, if generous, and led to the conclusion that Flickr probably brings in around $50 million in annual revenue. Minus expenses, the profit it brings Yahoo is probably negligible. In other words, Yahoo has little economic incentive to support, maintain or grow one of the biggest photo sharing sites on the web and the place many of us pay to store our photos online. That's cause for concern. Note: Former Flickr chief software architect Cal Henderson responds in comments below, saying that Hawk's methodology is "deeply flawed" and that advertising makes up a large amount of Flickr's revenue. So take the following with a grain of salt now that we've heard that from a former insider.

Put all the numbers together and you get about $50 million in annual revenue. "How profitable is Flickr?" Hawk asks after discussing hosting, office and staff costs, "Your guess is as good as mine. I suspect that after you back out all the costs on their revenue though that it's not a meaningful or significant number for Yahoo."

As we wrote last April, when Flickr's epic community manager Heather Champ left the company, Facebook has long been larger and now sees almost an entire Flickr's-worth of photos (3 billion) uploaded to that social network every month.

As we wrote yesterday when discussing Facebook's crushing Google Reader in future of news reading, it's clear though that Facebook has come up with a winning formula: emphasis on effective user experience, easy and meaningful social interaction, casual gaming and multi-media reading and writing, not just subscription like Google Reader offers.

Facebook isn't just photos like Flickr, it isn't just newsfeeds like Google Reader. It isn't just video like YouTube. It's a whole lot of everything, with really easy publishing of updates and leveraging a big social graph holding it all together as glue.

Should Flickr users be worried about their photos? In the short term, maybe not - but in the long term, something's going to need to change. Either we all start storing our media in easy-to-use cloud systems, or we bend our knee to the mighty Facebook, or we come up with systems that make transfer of our digital assets between institutions as easy in the future as it is to move our financial assets between financial institutions today. (Look what Dave Winer made today, along these lines.)

What's wrong with the internet, though, if millions of people can pay $25 per year to store a visual catalog of the world and that's not good enough, financially?

Button photo posted on Flickr, under Creative Commons (one of the coolest things about Flickr), by user Poolie.

Adding support for Google Reader was one of the top user requests for this popular iPad app, which recently won Apple's editors choice for "iPad App of the Year," Flipboard Co-foudner Evan Doll told us today. And we can safely say that Google Reader users, whether casual or power users, will be happy with the addition.

You can now do nearly everything in Flipboard that you can with Google Reader's own Web app at google.com/reader, except for sharing items with a note, searches or managing subscriptions. While those features may or may not be added in the future (user feedback will determine this), you can, however, star items, share items, see what posts your friends have shared, see a post's likes, and, assuming a post has comments, read and reply to them from within Flipboard. You can also toggle a setting which will mark posts as read as you actually tap on them to read them (the default) or as you flip through pages, scanning headlines and text.

In Flipboard, feeds are shown to you in a magazine-style layout instead of Google Reader's inbox-like interface. In fact, perusing feeds like this may very much remind you of the experience you've enjoyed previously via Feedly, the Web browser extension which also "magazine-ified" Google Reader.

Introducing Live Previews

But the way Flipboard has approached the magazine-like design is quite a bit different than how Feedly does things. Instead of having to tap a link ("read on Web") to view an article from an RSS feed on the originating website, as you did in the past, Flipboard has implemented live previews.

With this new feature, the article's website actually loads below the magazine-style interface and you can drag the website up using your finger to see the site in full. You can then browse that site as you would normally - clicking from post to post, reading or leaving comments, etc. And good news for publishers - this live preview registers as a pageview on backend analytics systems whereas before, on the desktop, those pageviews were lost as RSS subscribers scanned your content, but never clicked through to launch the site itself.

This same type of navigation (using live previews) is presented for any article tweeted or shared on Facebook from one of your friends, assuming the RSS feed is one Flipboard has a record of. And yes, it parses shortened URLs to determine if that's the case. Flipboard's content partners also now have the live previews as well.

Flickr Added, Too

In addition, Flipboard has added Flickr to its list of services supported, which looks great on the iPad. Flickr users can browse photos, tap to view individual items, favorite photos, read and leave comments, browse their Flickr groups and pretty much anything else you would do on the Web. (Except, of course, having to click "next," "next," "next" to work through someone's photostream.)

Navigation and Sharing Changes

The overall navigation for all Flipboard sections has been improved in this release. Now, tapping the title of a section lets you navigate through a Table of Contents. Depending on what section you're in, you could use this to quickly change to a different folder of RSS feeds from Google Reader, for example, or an individual RSS feed, a Facebook page you're a fan of, a Facebook group, various friend lists, or even Flipboard's own recommended sections which you may or may not subscribe to.

Also new is a status update button that lets you share an item from anywhere in Flipboard out to social networks like Facebook or Twitter.

Flipboard is available on iTunes here as a free download.

Today, Facebook begins rolling out several improvements to Photos that will make the site much better for sharing high-quality photos. The new features include some UI changes to make browsing and uploading easier, as well as upping the pixel size for photos so that Facebook can handle higher resolution images.

Facebook will support print-quality, high resolution photos, increasing the size of photos stored from the current 720 pixels to 2048 pixels - an eight-fold increase.

Better Viewer for Browsing

The new viewer will make it easier to navigate photos and albums. Rather than going to a new page, photos will open in a light box in the center of the screen.

Easier Uploads and Tagging

In the blog post announcing the upgrades, Sam Odio, product manger for Facebook Photos, notes that the Photos feature on Facebook was initially a small project, run by only two staff members. With the popularity of photo-sharing via Facebook, it's clear that Facebook is working to make the site more photo-friendly. How this will play out for other photo sites, such as Flickr, remains to be seen.

In collaboration with the Internet Archive, NASA already makes thousands of images and thousands of hours of video available on NASAimages.org. There, however, users can't comment on pictures.

"An Opportunity for the Public to Participate in the Process of Discovery"

According to Debbie Rivera, the lead for the NASA Images project at the agency's headquarters in Washington, the agency hopes that this new collaboration will provide "an opportunity for the public to participate in the process of discovery. In addition, the public can help the agency capture historical knowledge about missions and programs through this new resource and make it available for future generations."

NASA plans to release additional photo sets over time.

Lighting up the Sky

Launch of Friendship 7

Construction of Hangar One at NAS Sunnyvale circa 1931 - 1934

Dr. Robert H. Goddard at His Launch Control Shack