"Born out of someone's frustrations with browsing photos on the web through static web pages that offered a meager user experience at best." You just might be glad this person was frustrated. FotoViewr is a great web app that brings the cover flow style to the popular photo sharing site Flickr. Fotoviewr requires no registration and you don't have to give you your Flickr password. All you'll need is your Flickr username and you're good to go. FotoViewr provides users with four different gallery views: Flow, Wall, Horizon, and Floor.

Creating Your FotoViewr Gallery

Simply pick a view and enter your Flickr username. FotoViewr allows you to choose between your Flickr photosets or tags for deciding which images to display. Once you've selected these options, you'll get a nice cover flowesque slideshow of your gallery. While you can't embed the galleries yet, there is a link provided for you to share your creations with others. Even better, you can use FotoViewr on Facebook with the FotoViewr Facebook application.

Flowing Nicely

FotoViewr is off to a nice start with its selection of viewing styles and smooth response. However, image loading times still need a little more work. If you have a huge Flickr photoset, then it will take a while for all the images to load. Be prepared to wait. it would've been nice to switch gallery styles even after you've created a gallery, along with a quicker way to make a new gallery. Hopefully these features will be implemented in the future. All in all, FotoViewr is a service to keep an eye on.

As of launch, the gallery contains 39 approved applications. These range from apps enhancing Yelp! and LinkedIn results to one that provides a code reference for Ruby related searches.

SearchMonkey has the potential to be very disruptive in the search space. It gives web developers the ability to enhance the display of search results without the ability to influence search rankings. Who better to know how to best display content than those who created it? Unfortunately, the search applications I tried out today mostly didn't seem ready for primetime.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the Yelp! application that I installed didn't really enhance search results beyond slapping a logo next to the URL. In theory, my search for the Petite Deli in San Francisco should have yielded a Yelp! result with the deli's address, phone number, rating and links directly to user reviews and photos. The IMDB application (which admittedly appears not to have been created by IMDB) gave me connection errors, and the Last.fm app behaved similar to the Yelp! application for me -- it enhanced nothing.

Did Yahoo! jump the gun on pushing the Search Gallery public? Or perhaps have their gallery approval standards been too low and these apps just haven't been tested thoroughly enough? Or is this a local problem? Let us know your experiences with the new search apps in the comments below. Yahoo! will win no converts with applications that don't work as advertised.

Edit: I eventually got some of the faulty apps to load after repeating my search a few times. As Greg in the comments below noted, this might be a caching issue. That's still something that Yahoo! should deal with, as first impressions are often lasting impressions.