ReadWriteWeb

We love site-building and story-telling applications, and social webizens love sharing their content - particularly multimedia content - in new and compelling ways.

YouTellYou is a fun and simple tool that allows users to grab, annotate, tag and share their pictures in an online magazine-type format. Users can pull in photos from Smugmug, Facebook, Flickr or one's own computer, then go to town in a frenzy of sequences, captions and true pictorial story-weaving.

Facebook has just added a new photo uploader tool to their Prototypes directory, the "labs" section of the social network where new programs are released for testing prior to their public rollout. The uploader dramatically improves on what was previously one of the worst experiences on Facebook: adding photos. Despite the fact that Facebook hosts over 80 billion photos and adds around 2 billion more each month, the process of adding new photos to your profile was cumbersome, slow and buggy. Even Facebook itself admitted there were problems saying that most users found the tool "functional, but only just." They also discovered that a significant percentage of users couldn't even upload photos due to technical issues. Because of these complaints, the company finally decided it was time to revamp their uploader for good.

Google just announced a new product in Google Labs: Google Image Swirl. Image Swirl introduces a Wonder Wheel-like user interface for Google Images. The new search interface combines the Wonder Wheel experience with Google's ability to find similar images and discover faces in these images. Instead of just showing one image, the Image Swirl interface displays a stack of photos. Clicking on this stack opens up a Wonder Wheel with related images clustered around the original photo.

We had almost forgotten about Orb, the media-sharing software that lets you stream video from your home computer to your iPhone or any other internet-connected device. In fact, the last time we had even looked at the application was November of 2008 when the company announced an update to their iPhone application which allowed you to stream live TV over the 3G network. At that time though, the desktop software portion of the Orb product was PC-only. As in Windows PC-only. Today, that has changed. Orb for Macintosh has finally been released so Mac OS X users can now stream their media over the net, too.

Flickr, the ever-more-popular photo-sharing service, has a five-year history of apps built on its API. From the interesting to the useful to the pretty to the downright silly, these applications make up a colorful and varied ecosystem around the service itself.

Flickr has organized these third-party apps into a "garden," complete with user favorites, tags, descriptions and screenshots. The App Garden represents a significant evolution from the former "services" section on the user side, and the revamp includes new features for developers, who can now use the Garden as a tool to help users discover their products. Read on for details and a few spotlighted Flickr apps we thought were fun.

When 20-year-old college student Firas Alkhateeb posted a picture of President Obama decked out in Joker facepaint to photo-sharing website Flickr, little did he know that he was going to be the catalyst for a major policy change in how the Yahoo-owned company will handle copyright infringement claims. However, that's exactly what happened. Thanks to massive outcry from the online community, Yahoo's legal team allowed Flickr to put the photo's web page back up. Not the image itself, mind you, but the photo's page...along with all its accompanying metadata like date posted, tags, and most importantly, user comments.

You may not know it, but most of the images in Wikipedia are actually hosted on its sister project, Wikimedia Commons. If you find a favorite image on the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, click through and you'll quickly find yourself at its original page at the Commons project. With over 4.9 million freely-licensed media files, it's a treasure trove that supplies nearly all of the photos for Wikipedia.

Now you can annotate images from Wikimedia Commons in a fashion very similar to Flickr. The big difference with the new feature is that annotations can be added by anyone, and no account is necessary. While they don't show up directly in Wikipedia yet, a new version of the system that will appear in the free encyclopedia is under development.

We have invites, click through to get yours!

Earlier this year, a company called Face.com brought facial recognition technology to Facebook by way of an application called Photo Finder which scanned through untagged photos and identified the people within them. Now, using the same facial recognition algorithms that made Photo Finder possible, the company is introducing Photo Tagger, an app which scans through select online albums to automate the tagging process.

ThisMoment is a new media-sharing site (see our previous coverage) which lets you post photos and videos in a slideshow format while also sharing them across the web to sites like Facebook and Twitter. Part microblog, part social network, and part sharing platform, thisMoment's goal goes beyond simply providing a place to store and share your media. In other words, it's not just a Twitter clone with pictures. Instead, this beautifully crafted site is designed to allow you to share media that has meaning to you - the special moments that will in turn create a "digital reflection" of your life.

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.

Are you an iPhone-equipped world traveler? If so, then you're going to love Postino, the latest app from AnguriaLab. This mobile application lets you take iPhone photos and turn them into postcards which you can send to your family and friends. And no, they don't mean "e-cards" (although Postino supports those, too) - they mean actual, printed out, physical cards sent through the good ol' fashioned snail mail service.

Despite the number of add-ons available in the Firefox ecosystem, it can still sometimes feel like there are only a few truly good ones out there. That's why when we find one that's actually worth using, we get excited. The latest add-on getting installed into our small but critical collection of extensions is Pixelpipe's new drag-and-drop uploader. This utility lets you upload media directly from your computer or the web to any of the 75 plus services you've configured at Pixelpipe.com.

This morning, Face.com announced that they're bringing advanced facial recognition technology to Facebook by way of a new application called Photo Finder. Using proprietary facial scanning algorithms, this application scans through your photos and those public photos belonging to your friends in order to identify and suggest tags for the untagged people within them. The results of these scans are highly accurate - almost frighteningly so - and should lead to some interesting discoveries as the app spreads through Facebook when it finally becomes public.

Limited invites available, click though to learn more!

Over the weekend, some Facebook users began to experience issues with their photos. Some photos weren't displaying at all while others only displayed a "question mark" graphic when you tried to view them. As it turns out, the issue was caused by a failure on the drive on which these photos were stored. The outage affected 10 to 15 percent of photos, which, given the site's current status as the top social network worldwide, is a hefty number. However, a recent post on the Facebook blog assured users that their photos were safe, backed up in several locations, and would be restored soon.

The internet is a visual medium, so it's no surprise that visual bookmarking services are becoming increasingly popular. The newest one we've discovered, called Enjoysthin.gs, takes the cake so far.

Enjoysthin.gs lets you share all kinds of media, from images to videos to quotes to audio you call in and record from your phone. The interface is beautiful and the site is a real joy to use.

Oh no! Your mom just joined Facebook and what's even worse, she wants to be your friend. More and more people are finding themselves in this situation today and unsure of what to do. Friending mom and dad, the boss, or other work colleagues opens up the details of your private life for the whole world to see - and you might not be entirely comfortable with that. What's to be done?

There is clearly no dearth of slideshow services on the Internet. Some are intricate like Animoto, and others, like Slide, are mostly geared towards the MySpace and FaceBook crowd. PhotoPeach takes a more minimalist approach and focuses purely on the actual pictures without using flashy effects and themes. This is great if you just want to showcase some of your latest photos without the distraction of themes and sound effects.

Has this happened to you? You receive a message on Facebook that you've been tagged in a photo, but when you go to look at the photo you discover that it wasn't you at all, but some sort of product, service, or cause that a marketer is trying to promote. According to news from AdAge, this is the latest in guerrilla marketing efforts making its way through Facebook right now. It's so slimy, we hesitate to even mention it here, lest we give anyone ideas.

Microsoft today announced a new photo sharing product, Microsoft Live Photos, which integrates very nicely with Microsoft's Windows Live Photo Gallery desktop photo application, and is yet another product in the long list of Windows Live services that Microsoft introduced today. In many respects, Live Photos clearly competes directly with Yahoo's Flickr, though while it has a lot of Flickr's features, its focus is more on sharing pictures with a small group of friends or family than with the whole Internet. We have been using Live Photos for about two months now, and our overall impression is extremely positive.

This historic U.S. election already fulfilled its promise of change even before the final ballots were cast. Never before had we seen the internet used so heavily in the political campaigning process. From Twitter debates to YouTube videos to Facebook and iPhone applications, the candidates, especially President-Elect Obama, used the tools found online to reach out to the modern-day voter. In addition, news organizations and other sites across the web enhanced the election process by encouraging citizen participation. The impact of these efforts made voting once again feel like a true participatory experience.