ReadWriteWeb

"If Engineering at Etsy has a religion, it's the Church of Graphs," Ian Malpass writes on the Etsy Code as Craft blog. And how is Etsy fulfilling its religious obligations? With a Node.js daemon called StatsD, which the company has made available on GitHub. StatsD listens for messages on a UDP port, conducts its counting or timing, and then sends the info off to graphite for graphing.

It's based on a Perl daemon of the same name created by Cal Henderson for Flickr.

The battle of the mobile social photo apps has been taken to the next level today, high-profile but trailing startup PicPlz just made three big announcements that pose a big challenge to crowd-pleaser Instagram and the slew of other startups in this market. Not to mention Flickr.

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.

We wrote a post yesterday calling into question the financial viability of Flickr, given another blogger's rough estimates of its annual revenue, Yahoo's struggles and the recent news that Delicious is going to be shuttered or sold.

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.

When an internal announcement leaked out of Yahoo last month that it was "sunsetting" popular social bookmarking service Delicious, that service's users flew into a panic. Yahoo quickly backtracked on the plans and the service remains up and running, if minimally supported.

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.

Here's a twist. Yahoo is launching a native Flickr app for Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 later this month that leverages Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.

The app connects Flickr data with Windows Azure via an API. Using Windows Azure, Yahoo is able to optimize the images for the Windows 7 environments and on the Windows Phone 7 devices.

For example, let's say someone is using the Flickr app on a Windows 7 tablet device and decides to view one of their albums. The app makes a call to Windows Azure, which computes the context for the way the image should be viewed on the device.

It has only been a couple of weeks since its last major update, but today Flipboard, the social magazine for iPad, has released yet another new version of its app into the iTunes App Store. This time around, Flipboard has added support for Google Reader and Flickr, among other improvements, including navigational changes and better content sharing features.

Approximately 2.5 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook every month and 1.2 million photos are served up every second - statistics that point to the importance of Facebook as a site for sharing pictures. And although the emphasis has been on sharing, it hasn't been necessarily on the quality of photos shared.

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.

Earlier this summer, we posed the question of whether or not native mobile applications would eventually be made obsolete by the mobile Web. Many agreed that the power of the mobile Web and cloud over native apps may be an inevitability, but according to a survey released today, four out of five app developers say their customers prefer a native experience. With this demand from customers, which features are they looking for most in a mobile experience? Here are some results from the survey that may surprise you.

NASA today joined the Commons on Flickr. Thanks to this, NASA will now begin to share a large variety of pictures from its vast collection of images on Flickr.  Currently, three image collections ("Launch and Takeoff," "Building NASA" and "Center Namesakes") are available on Flickr. All of these images are published without any copyright restrictions.

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.

Polar Rose, a Swedish-based facial recognition startup launched in summer 2007, is shutting down its consumer-facing service that allowed users to tag people in photos anywhere on the Web. Last spring, the innovative company introduced facial recognition to popular photo-sharing site Flickr by way of a third-party browser plugin. With the plugin installed, Polar Rose users could tag their Flickr photos with the names of their Facebook contacts and then alert those friends on Facebook that they had been tagged. It also organized Flickr photos into pages by person and could recognize people automatically in later uploads.

Unfortunately, this and all other end user-focused services are being terminated as the company switches its focus to its series of facial recognition products. Says Polar Rose's Thijs Stalenhoef, the service was "fun while it lasted."