ReadWriteWeb

Yahoo and Getty Images announced a partnership today which will allow Getty to contact Flickr users and offer them to add their images to Getty's collection. Getty would then license these images and offer them to its clients. A notworthy aspect of this program is that the photographer on Flickr simply has to wait to be contacted by Getty. There is no way to directly submit photos to this program.

Cooliris' PicLens is, without a doubt, one of the prettiest browser add-ons currently available. When we first reviewed it in February, Josh Catone called it 'nifty' and 'gorgeous.' Both of these adjectives still fully apply to PicLens, but since then, the company has added a large number of new features. These include a stronger emphasis on displaying videos and integration with Amazon, as well as support for a few more photo sharing sites.

Last year, we told you about PutPlace, an online application designed to help you manage all your digital media. PutPlace isn't just your usual file backup service, though - it also provides web access to your files while allowing you to track where you've stored those files online. That's because in addition to setting up files and folders to be backed up, you can also add "web places" to the PutPlace service, which lets PutPlace track where your files are online at web storage sites like flickr, for example.

Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we explored Yahoo's ongoing troubles, reported on Firefox 3's record-setting week, covered a new "universal edit" wiki offering, and checked out some Mobile Web apps. On the trends side, we looked at what could disrupt Google search, explored the issue of 'info overload', analyzed lessons from Flickr, polled you about IM clients, and interviewed VC Brad Feld.

Yesterday, the unfortunate but none-too-surprising news about the departure of Flickr's co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield broke out across the web. In light of Yahoo's recent troubles, not to mention the small but notable list of other resigning Yahoo employees, some users who have relied on Flickr's service for years are starting to wonder about its future. Is it time to look for an alternative?

In June 2005 Yahoo! acquired upstart Canadian photosharing web site Flickr and the web hasn't been the same since. Yahoo, on the other hand, didn't change nearly as much as everyone expected it to. Pre-CEO Jerry Yang told then-Business 2.0 writer Erick Schonfeld six months after the deal "I look at Flickr with envy, it feels like where the Web is going."

Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield have now cashed out and officially left the company. Though Yahoo! doesn't appear to have internalized many of the lessons of Flickr, it's not too late for the rest of us to look at those same key lessons for inspiration in our work on the web.

Searching around for an image for a blog post is one of the most frustrating procedures of blogging. It could take hours to find that perfect image. These are hours, minutes, and seconds that most of us would rather not waste. Normally, one might head to Google Image Search, but there can be legal issues to using it. Instead, why not try out Flickr image search tool Compfight.

You may have heard of Greasemonkey, the Firefox extension that lets you customize the way a web page displays using small bits of Javascript, but are you using it to its fullest potential? There are hundreds of scripts available for installation from userscripts.org, so it can be difficult to know which ones are must-haves.

A couple of weeks ago we held a competition, asking you to tell us what web 2.0 apps most excite you currently. We had a great response, with 113 comments. I decided to list each web app mentioned in a spreadsheet and count up the most popular. What surprised me was the number of web apps that got at least one mention: 161. No doubt some of those were left by the developers themselves, but many were left by seemingly passionate users. The most popular were the usual suspects: Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed, Google Reader. The full list after the break...

Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. This week we brought you 'The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients', we explained why Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web's Future, we analysed the latest developments in MySpace music and Flickr, and we peeked into the future of the Chumby - the Wi-Fi video and widget displaying device. There's also a bit of April Fools fun, web geek style!