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.

Looking to spruce up that bland PowerPoint presentation for your next meeting with possible investors? Or do you need high-quality photographs for your product's homepage or blog? Lifehacker recently profiled Sprixi, a free use image search engine, is an excellent source for finding just the right image to add those finishing touches.

Developed by Sydney, Australia-based company Thirsty Minds, Sprixi crawls Flickr and OpenClipArt.org for images licensed under Creative Commons and implements a user-based recommendation system to produce relevant results. While viewing photos, you can tell Sprixi whether or not an image is a useful result. Based on this data, Sprixi displays the most relevant images as rated by users at the top of the results.

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.

The folks at Boxee have certainly been busy. The streaming media software company celebrated a Windows release, a deal penned with Major League Baseball (complete with instant replay on games) and partnerships with Digg, Tumblr and Current TV. It was evident a year ago that this web TV company would see its share of success, but its greatest achievement is perhaps the product's ability to rally an open-source developer community. This week Boxee announced its App Challenge winners in the video, music and photo categories. Below is a brief overview of the winning 3rd party applications.