Flickr's Mobile Site Gets Smarter: Shows Photos Taken Nearby

Frederic Lardinois — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:58:40 -0800

Flickr, Yahoo's popular photo sharing site, just released a nice update of its mobile site. If you have an Android phone or an iPhone (updated to the 3.0 firmware), you can now see images that were taken close to your current location. The new mobile site makes good use of some of the new APIs in the iPhone 3.0 update. Specifically, it looks like Flickr's mobile site now hooks into Apple's Core Location service right from Safari. Typically, developers could only access this from their own, native apps, but now, web apps are also able to access location data.

]]> It's All About Geotagging

Flickr, which hosts a rapidly increasing number of photos, is increasingly using location as a means to organize photos. Earlier this year, for example, the company announced that it now hosts over 100 million geotagged photos and in order to make this data more accessible, Flickr also unveiled a new 'nearby' page on its web site, which displays a map with images that were taken close to another photo.

Flickr's mobile site is also becoming an increasingly valuable asset to the company. Last December, Flickr announced that traffic to the mobile site had increased by more than 50% over the last year, and it has made various smaller updates to the site since then. As smartphones become increasingly better at taking pictures and surfing the web, it is good to see that Flickr is bringing these two worlds together nicely on its mobile site.

]]> Discuss

Yahoo Placemaker: Extract Location Data from Any Text

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 20 May 2009 11:30:47 -0800

At Where 2.0 today, Yahoo announced a new product in its already impressive lineup of geo technologies: Placemaker. Placemaker is a new open API from Yahoo that helps developers to make their applications and data sets location-aware. Developers can feed Placemaker any kind of structured and unstructured data, including feeds and web pages, and the app will analyze the text and extract location data from it. This, could, for example, allow news organizations to easily tag their content with location data and create hyper-local products based on this data.

]]> We talked to Tyler Bell, the product lead for the Yahoo Geo Technology Group, yesterday, and in the interview, he stressed that Placemaker, which will be open and freely available today, should be considered a 'geo-enrichment tool.' Placemaker can take virtually any type of written content and will try to extract geographic information from this.

Global Coverage, 21 Languages

While this might seem like a simple task at first (just look for references to 'San Francisco' or 'New York City'), Placemaker actually uses very sophisticated analytics to disambiguate which of the 39 Springfields in the U.S. a text actually refers to. To do so, Placemaker, will, for example, also look for colloquial names for bridges or references to streets and local sights in a text. As many texts obviously contain references to more than one place, Placemaker will often return more than one location per text, though it will try to determine the location.

While Placemaker's database covers the globe and will work for texts in 21 different languages (including texts using double-byte character sets in Japanese, Korean and Traditional Chinese), it will - at least in this first iteration - work best for texts in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

Opening Up The Deep Geo-Web

Yahoo is trying to make this service as open as possible, and there is, for example, no formal rate limit. As Bell told us, Yahoo wants to help developers to open up what he called the "deep geo-web." In many ways, this new tools also fits in with the general strategy of moving away from a "web of pages to a web of objects" that Yahoo announced yesterday.

GeoPlanet for All

In addition, Yahoo also announced that, starting today, it will allow developers to download and use the full data set of Yahoo's GeoPlanet. The GeoPlanet data, which contains information about millions of placenames in multiple languages, also forms the basis of Placemaker's geographical knowledge.The GeoPlanet data will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

According to Bell, Yahoo is looking forward to seeing what developers will do with this data. Placemaker is definitely an interesting addition to Yahoo set of geo tools like FireEagle and GeoPlanet, and we are also looking forward to seeing how developers will make use of these newly available tools and we are hoping to see more of Placemaker in Yahoo's own tools as well.