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David Newman › Likes
@griffingranberg I murder every feature. I've done 10,500+ favorites since July. You add no value either, I read ur feed, so shouldn't talk.
Chatsohbet, Roberto Bonini and David Newman liked this
@scobleizer I don't read my feed, because I know how little value I add <g>
- Prolific Programmer
from IM
You add 6000x more value than Griffin does. I read your feed too. :-)
- Robert Scoble
@scobleizer I'm sorry to hear that, scoble… my feed changed to http://hasandiwan.info/atom..., incidentally
- Prolific Programmer
from IM
@griffingranberg @hdiwan was never relevant, I know him intimately :)
- Prolific Programmer
from IM
Some Thoughts On Email After Dealing With 500 Emails - http://www.avc.com/a_vc...
Zu from AOD, Thomas Power and David Newman liked this
Do what you do best and make it available to the rest. http://www.poynter.org/column... Databases and the build out of @TexasTribune.
David Newman liked this
Thank you to my 50,002 followers. Look through my followers here and compare to my Twitter followers and what do you notice? I see fewer spammers. Fewer bots. Fewer social media experts. Thanks for joining me on FriendFeed! It has been an awesome two years!
Aron Stevenson, Thomas Power, Louis Gray and 81 other people liked this
YAY!
- Jannifer @wordsforliving
Down with bots, spammers, and social media gurus! Up with geeks! A big thumbs up on behalf of my fellow FriendFeed fanatics.
- Dennis Jernberg
I love geeks and FriendFeed has them in droves.
- Robert Scoble
from iPhone
are u going somewhere ;p
- ciw
You're welcome ;-) A question though, where do you think we geeks will congregate next? I'm thinking that since Facebook now owns the Friendfeed devs, FF will eventually starve to death... hopefully not.
- Roberto Teixeira
But I notice a lot of users interact on FF via Twitter not directly on FF. Also FF faces tough competition from the likes of Posterous and Tumblr which offer more functionality with similar ease of use as FF.
- Roger
Roberto: Not so long ago this very FF post from scobleizer would get something about 300+ likes and 150+ comments. Sadly, FF users are surely looking elsewhere.
- Arvind
FF is ok, but its not the be all and end all Robert.
- Micky
Arvind: yup. Foursquare! :-)
- Robert Scoble
from iPhone
Friendfeed wins
- Ashish
I too think that friendfeed is still a winner... people that left just filtered themselves out of my conversations. They are no longer discoverable here to me. Their loss (imho)
- Chris Heath
Your welcome :). Friendfeed really really is awesome
- alfred westerveld
Yes Robert and Friendfeed is massively technically superior - Makes it even sadder that the platform here's being ignored by the new owners.
- Jim Connolly
Robert - I love the community and friends here on FriendFeed. I am so happy I was on FF in early 2008 and got to experience it's wild and wooly growth path. Chatting with you and all these cool geeks is really fun. I've learned TONS from you guys and I truly appreciate the friendship too! :)
- Susan Beebe
I agree, way less marketing gurus and spammers =)
- Brodie Beta
In my experience, I've been using ff more rather than less since the fb aquisition. I don't see why I would migrate to another community ATM. To me, Friendfeed is king. :) King of social media, that is.
- Friendfeed's Francisco
Me, I'm sticking with FF for the foreseeable future. I'm even going to do my part to promote it, at least to my (right now) 1K+ Twitter followers.
- Dennis Jernberg
Friend Feed is the Future Robert and you just may be our Faithfull leader! :)
- Warren Daly
Word.
- Gary
Thank you, Robert. I have learned quite a bit from you-and you have created/moderated some tremendous discussions/issues. Best wishes to you and your family.
- Harold Cabezas
zachary check their subscriptions against their subscribers and you might have an answer there
- ffcode
yup! there is a decline...don't know what friendfeeders are upto...foursquare might not be the complete answer
- ffcode
I'm still here. I tried doing the Google Reader thing. While it's a great reader, I think it SUCKS as a social platform. I still use it, but I don't expect as much out of it as I used to. FriendFeed and posterous are what I like best for what I do. Facebook is getting a little chaotic for me. I've made lists, but I think I need to start pruning... LONG LIVE FRIENDFEED!
- Kimber Scott
U do like normal folks like us, who does have a life, like having hobbies such as movies, taking pictures, making jokes and listening 2 old radio jokes on the Internet lol...and wondering why spell check doesn't work somedays
- polou/indigo_bow
Has it really been 2 years? OMG that was fast.
- Elliott Ng
ROFL! No bots; just wait! The bots are coming, they always come.
- Brandon Smietana
In twenty years I would be surprised if the bots were not more human than the humans. "Statistical Natural Language Processing: When Humans Fail the Turing Test", coming to a research journal near you!
- Brandon Smietana
Flickr Co-Founder Caterina Fake on the Value of Viral Loops [Exclusive Q&A] | The Penenberg Post | Fast Company - http://www.fastcompany.com/blog...
Iván Abrego, Kol Tregaskes, Daniel Rowley and 15 other people liked this
"In 2002, Caterina Fake (her real name) was developing a video game with her husband, Stewart Butterfield, when they decided to drop photos into instant messaging--akin to adding pictures to conversations, they thought. The idea blossomed into Flickr, which launched in February 2004. Initially it didn't proliferate. But once they added "tagging" it exploded--it was well-timed to make the most of the growing popularity of digital cameras and the ever-expanding blogosphere. Bloggers used Flickr as a photo repository and others gravitated to it so they could share pictures. The site that began as an afterthought to Fake's and Butterfield's multiplayer game matured into the fifth most popular site on the Internet, generating revenue by charging a fee to heavy users who wanted a place to store their multitudes of photos. A year after launch, the formerly debt-ridden couple sold Flickr to Yahoo for $40 million. Fake's latest venture is Hunch, a service that combines artificial intelligence with Web 2.0."
- Thomas Hawk
from Bookmarklet
Thanks, that was a good interview. I've was always curious about the origins of Flickr. It was a nice acquisition for Yahoo. Wonder what it's worth now?
- Michael Fidler
last year Mark Evans suggested $4 billion. That feels high to me though. http://thomashawk.com/2008...
- Thomas Hawk
A P/E of 25 sounds a little bit high, but it all depends on the current market conditions. The estimate was made before the recession started, so what it would be worth today is anybody’s guess. Give or take a billion, it’s still a lot of money. Isn’t Facebook the largest repository of images online? Thanks for the link!
- Michael Fidler
Facebook is Michael, and certainly Facebook's valuable. The thing with Flickr's images though is that while they are not the world's largest repository of images, they are certainly the world's most organized large repository of images. The geo tags, the tagging, and also the high quality photos are unmatched anywhere else on the web.
- Thomas Hawk
I think Stewart and Caterina probably could have made out far better had they waited longer to sell, but as she says in the article, who knew. Hopefully they were paid in cash not restricted stock though. Yahoo's stock price is down about 50% since they acquired Flickr.
- Thomas Hawk
I wondered whaa happen to she + Stewie* I had High Hopes for c0ol stuff coming out of her Web2.0 Brickworks? Yahoo! thingy too but nothing ever came to be*
- Billy Warhol
Nothing ever did come of that Billy. The rumors are that Stewart and her are not a "couple" anymore. I believe Stewart's living in Vancouver and she's living in NYC. She's working on Hunch now. I've tried Hunch myself and was very unimpressed. It seemed sort of pointless. Stewart is working with Cal Henderson and others on tinyspeck which I believe is a new internet based game. Daniel Burka, who was the lead designer for digg recently joined the company as well.
- Thomas Hawk
Billy, you should join the DMU group on Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/dmu/ You're a flickr institution.
- Thomas Hawk
is this only me who sees rather yet another amount of bubble-era money as spinal cord to this story? era of cheap loans is gone for foreseeable future - now try to rewrite this story with all consequences...
- A. T.
SF Magazine was the first reputable place I saw that Flickr was profitable. http://www.sanfranmag.com/story... That was earlier this year in May. I suspect for most of their history, at least at Yahoo, that they have not been profitable. I suspect even still that Flickr makes very little money for Yahoo. But it's value isn't in it's profitability today. It's value is in having...
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- Thomas Hawk
I do think part of the reason why Flickr is so low on Yahoo's radar though is that they do kind of view it as less than significant due to it's lack of profitability. I think that's too bad. I feel like Yahoo Senior Management really could care less about what happens with Flickr and as such are complicit in the customer unfriendly practices the site engages in.
- Thomas Hawk
I suspect though that there will be longer term value to the organization of Flickr's collection of our images for search. I think that was actually the great hope of flickr when Yahoo acquired them in the first place. Remember it was the search team at Yahoo that bought Flickr not the photos team. I think they probably still see a hope in that, they are just lost and wandering in the...
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- Thomas Hawk
and someone should definitely explain to flickr support that flickr would not exist without us all collectively. The condescension and disrespect with which staff treats customers is appalling. One thing I thought was interesting in this article was how when Flickr started Caterina would personally welcome everyone to the community. In fact play a role as a host. How much more that...
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- Thomas Hawk
right, that's because Google cares about the user experience. Just imagine what they could do with Flickr were it under their own roof. It really is a shame that Flickr ended up at Yahoo. Also Stewart and Caterina's $40 million would be worth a hell of a lot more money had they sold it to Google. ;)
- Thomas Hawk
stock photography could be huge as well. Flickr could have been bigger than Getty. The stock photography industry is a $2 billion industry. It's huge. So much money there, if managed correctly. Flickr was seriously considering launching their own stock product or possibly acquiring a stock photo agency itself to feed Flickr images into. Instead they did the deal with Getty which made no sense at all if you ask me. Totally gave away the store there.
- Thomas Hawk
they were trying to acquire a stock agency which would have come with a staff and done just that for a while. They totally could have done it. I think it's more a lack of vision thing, but there were probably also lawyers objecting to the image clearing issues. Afraid that someone would screw up and an image would not be cleared, it would be used, and Yahoo would be seen as the deep...
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- Thomas Hawk
gapingvoid: In terms of consolidating my all-over-the-pace career, this might be my most important blog post this year: http://bit.ly/k7aF2 - http://twitter.com/gapingv...
Jannifer @wordsforliving, David Newman, Shannon Clark and Andres Montano liked this
The new billion-dollar opportunity: real-time-web curation - http://scobleizer.posterous.com/the-new...
Kartik Agaram, Daniel Rowley, Kol Tregaskes and 20 other people liked this
Posted via web from scobleizer's posterous
- Robert Scoble
from Posterous
I wonder if anyone is working on a good curation system for the real time web. So far I haven't seen one that puts it all together.
- Robert Scoble
I don't quite get it... Does a curation system create a topic and then you are able to drag in bits and pieces from other sources?
- Nicholas Orr
Congratulations on your son, Robert! Is it true he is RSS? Just to clarify, are you saying that this is a service and a client/reader that allows all your tweets, photos, posts, and all the comments from all of those show up in one place?
- Susie Wee
redeye: nope, Gist is great for keeping track of people. An important part of curation, for sure, but not the important parts.
- Robert Scoble
I also didn't get it. Is that something like your post in friendfeed and then all related content from all the other services (photos, videos, facebook comments...) are like comments threaded under?
- Martin Adamek
Susie: yes, our new son's name is Ryan Soroush Scoble.
- Robert Scoble
thinking about it some more - kinda sounds like Google Wave + Robots...
- Nicholas Orr
Nicholas: except I haven't seen a really great publishing tool in Google Wave yet. Certainly nothing that comes up to the quality of Tumblr or Posterous. And I haven't seen a great Twitter reader in it yet either.
- Robert Scoble
Martin: right. Except my curation tool would NOT have a forum turned on underneath like FriendFeed does (by default). It would be optional. FriendFeed got so close it isn't even funny!
- Robert Scoble
Yeah true - I was really thinking about the concept of a wave and it's replay/edit abilities - they seem like good things to have...
- Nicholas Orr
Robert, you're not trying to centralize things that can't/shouldn't be centralized are you (as in conversations) ;-)
- Alexander van Elsas
Alexander: hmm, I'm trying to get one place to post all my thoughts on what's coming across my screens. So far the industry hasn't given me that.
- Robert Scoble
I understand the need. You can already post in one place, but the problem is that not everyone follows you at that one place, right? I personally kinda like that conversation is distributed and hard to catch. It's like real life. Before you know it we will have aggregators that aggregate other aggregators that....
- Alexander van Elsas
Alexander: actually I don't know of some place that lets me put everything I do into one place. Not nicely, at least.
- Robert Scoble
I've seen a few dozen real good Real Time curation tools over the years. Onespot had one geared towards the blogosphere. Nowpublic, I think it was, has a tool geared towards journalists trying to decipher the twitterstream
- Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
@Robert. You are right (FF got close). That is what all these services you mention attempt. Waste of energy and duplication. It would be better if you would simply own a place on the web where you can do all that. Anyone connected to you would (if you grant them access) see your flow of information as soon as you are connected. #user-centric-web.
- Alexander van Elsas
Maybe it could be a relay - whatever comment is made on FF is made on your thing and vice versa, except your thing relays to FF,Facebook,Twitter,RSS,etc :) As Alexander says, unless people actually connect your thing the people wont see anything. Some people only know one thing..
- Nicholas Orr
@Scobleizer You are right on the Money. We need the 6 things that we like from the 6,588,555 things Check this out:... http://post.ly/5sPB
- Vasu Srinivasan
Released that yesterday -- http://docs.40twits.com/ -- not all that you describe but a lot of it. More coming in River2 possibly today. We had a good start in Radio, which I think you used.
- Dave Winer
Seems like this could be solved with a fairly simple web application that can post a selection of tweets, liked items, etc. to a blog API as a draft entry.
- Ankush Narula
Billion dollar opp is at http://www.pmex.net because gold and silver are the only thing in life that matters.
- James
Remember Shepherd Johnson, That Guy Who Had His Flickr Account Nuked After Posting Comments Critical of President Obama? - http://thomashawk.com/2009...
Arijit Das, Russell G, Robert DeBord and 20 other people liked this
Unsatisfied at having his first thread locked, user Johnson opens a second thread objecting again and complaining that he’s already tried to contact Flickr privately but that they won’t respond to his private correspondence: “Yeah, Zack, I tried getting in touch with flickr staff via the method you suggested. And nobody will talk to me. Heather never called me back. Like I’ve said before, this issue is not going to go away until we can come to an understanding. Why don’t you contact me or have another flickr staff member contact me, this is getting ridiculous. -Shepherd “ So what does Flickr do next? They lock his 2nd thread complaining that nobody at Flickr will communicate with him and then indefinitely boot him from the help forum. Using typical condescending Flickr parent/child language, they call banning him from the Help Forum a “time out.” What a crappy way to treat your customers. Especially a customer that lost a bunch of their photographs.
- Thomas Hawk
Unfortunately JiLLL that's where the photo community largely resides today and so we have to put up with it I suppose. Still, having a monopoly ought not exempt you from good customer service. Deleting a users account, ignoring him, then locking his threads and banning him from the help forum are not the way Flickr should be treating their users. I'm not sure what it will take to change that there. Maybe they really just don't care.
- Thomas Hawk
I am using Smugmug. I don't see any reason to put up with this.
- stephenkaus
I use Smugmug as well. For that exact reason. I'm not putting up with this. If the community Is having trouble with one site, i have two words to say: MOVE PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Roberto Bonini
This is getting really, really stupid. I don't get flickR. I do like it, though. But I think I've stopped liking *them.*
- Anthony Citrano
The site flickr is actually great. I think the problem is with the people administering it mostly. Maybe what it needs is some sort of change in control/change in staff. I'm not sure. I'd think that Yahoo would want to do more with it than abuse customers. I think SmugMug's a great place for hosting photos, but it lacks the community platform that Flickr has.
- Thomas Hawk
I really wonder if Flickrs problem is Yahoo doesn't know what to do with it. Yahoo's main business is selling advertising but they haven't been able to do that on Flickr. Fee based services are not a Yahoo priority and as such I wonder if Flickr doesn't get the financial attention they need to get quality employees.
- ChiliMac
I don't think Flickr makes much money for Yahoo at all. It was only recently that they reported finally being profitable. But all the more reason not to delete accounts willy nilly. Why pay money for a staff to delete accounts at all? If you don't like someone or something they produce then simply ignore them and block them. Why pay people to go through the volumes of content and censor...
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- Thomas Hawk
Thanks for bringing us these stories, Thomas.
- Spencer
I wish I didn't feel the need to write them Spencer. That would be best of all.
- Thomas Hawk
Luke, they are called the Flickr Cabal. They are actually an organized group of sycophants whose only aim in life would appear to be to defend Flickr at all costs. Flickr staff celebrates them there. They have their own little private group on Flickr. It's actually pretty pathetic. People come to the forum looking for help and they end up insulting them and blaming them for any flickr...
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- Thomas Hawk
Flickr is getting sickr.
- MiniMage, enterRUPPted
So who's going to write the “Is FlickR A Cult” article? I don't think I have the courage. ;)
- Anthony Citrano
I like the Flickr community. I am just not down with the current administration. Can we have new ones? :-)
- Mathew A. Koeneker
@Mathew: relax, dude, we just had an election. ;)
- Anthony Citrano
I am glad that you caught my dry wit. ;-P
- Mathew A. Koeneker
@Luke The negative tone thrown towards Shepherd in the forum is just amazing. They completely ignored the point he was making: Flickr had ignored his private attempts at communication, so he was once again resorting to a public forum. And then Zack just tells him to continue with private communication (which will be subsequently ignored), and we all return full circle. As was stated so often, from a customer service view this is just abysmal.
- Nils Sandin
Ah, voting and democracy, what a concept ;-)
- Nils Sandin
@Luke: I share your perspective here; best way to "vote them out" is by directing our dollars elsewhere.
- Anthony Citrano
So, say I don't renew my membership next March. What are some viable options?
- Mathew A. Koeneker
Update: http://friendfeed.com/thomash... Now Yahoo apparently are threatening to call the cops on Johnson.
- Thomas Hawk
One might think that Yahoo has had enough problems in recent years that they would not want to go down this road.
- pitlord
I would like to also know the viable options to Flickr.
- Jannifer @wordsforliving
I'm giving SmugMug a try - I really like it so far.
- Jannifer @wordsforliving
SmugMug is great and again I use it lots but it has advantages and disadvantages when put against flickr, lack of community being one. One big advantage is that a pro account pretty much lets you customize your site as much as you want to create a distinctive look, although the one annoying aspect for me on SmugMug is you can't have a photo in multiples galleries without duplicating the...
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- Russell G
Why do people get pissed at Microsoft? I have a new Dell/Vista. Nothing but Office 2007 on it. Crashes when I try to open Outlook. Sigh.
JECO Photo, John B. Osborne, Ahad Bokhari and 39 other people liked this
Nothing on it? Or a bunch of stuff installed by Dell on it?
- Sam Pullara
Sam: there's all the usual stuff installed by Dell. I need a Windows 7 DVD! :-)
- Robert Scoble
Don't you have the latest RC candidate Robert? That should work I would think.
- Altan Khendup
i say use linux and thunderbird
- Sunny (The Geek Lord)
Robert, why don't you use Thunderbird ? it's free, lightweight and it has lots of plugins https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US...
- امیرعباس
Microsoft needs to take control of their own support - Dell support sucks, and drives me away from Microsoft.
- Jesse Stay
Have a client with a win 2003 server. It's needs OS re-installing. They've lost disks. Apparently MS don't offer OEM 2003 support anymore. the product key with the COA (obviously) doesn't work with the evaluation versions I was told by Dell to download from MS site. a third call to Dell support, and they 'find' some disks in stock after all. It was a whole day wasted though chasing around in circles.
- Ian May
Three new motherboards later and I couldn't be happier with my Dell. Srsly.
- A Mitchell
I've had more than my share of issues with various Linux distributions, too. Not sure who I should hate for that.
- Jeff Harbert
I use Gmail these days. Outlook is nasty expensive bloatware, that I can't personally justify the cost of, and with Gmail, none of the sync nonsense required either. I do back it up locally, but not had to use that yet.
- Ian May
Thunderbird sounds good but I think Opera client is worth a try 2 is so much nicer & with the browser 2.
- polou/indigo_bow
hello robert
- Ramazan Çekiç
Thunderbird is wonderful! I installed it on the fly (IMAP) during the last great Gmail outage with no issues
- 1001 noisy cameras
I think its just outlook... never could get that be very stable on any machine, not since they loaded it up with so many things.
- Matt Ellsworth
Yeah, Linux is no better. Why, I remember Ubuntu crashing on me just last year. Not the OS, mind you, but gdm, so I was logged out. Or was that 2007?
- Bruce Lewis
It's all the crap that these companies put on new PCs that is so tiresome. it's time wasting too, removing it all.
- Ian May
Dell was good some years ago. Now they are average. Deinstall Vista. Choose XP. My new Dell is working stable since I did that.
- Wulffy
ThinkPad, Vista and OpenOffice = works like a charm for me
- Ronald
oh come on guys - Thunderbird is no Outlook, long way to go still
- Iphigenie
I don't like Outlook as 1. I can't justify the price. 2. it's slow. 3. it's bloated eye candy 4. I don't need it.
- Ian May
does a new commercially bought PC with Windows and Software installed crash more than a commercially bought PC with linux or mac OSX? I'm not sure, perhaps it would be because typically there's way more installed and customized that can go wrong on first run. On the other hand my commercially bought HP with Linux could not be registered online or updated ("sorry, your serial number is...
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- Iphigenie
ok Kittyburgers. I used to use Outlook, but these days I simply don't need it. I prefer Gmail, and there's no darn sync nonsense. That is the main reason I moved away from local email.
- Ian May
Stop buying Dell. The load it with crapware. My latest Lenovo was great. And my Velocity Micro.
- Jeff (Team マクダジ )
from iPhone
that's cuz we all know your old generation is pretty much computer illiterate
- The Real sofarsoShawn
my curent annoyance with MS is the helpful search technology they have added and kind of forced on me - by default it indexes too much, uses too many resources, and gets in the way... and i cant remove it...
- Iphigenie
Learn how to use a computer, Scoble. Obviously you're doing it all wrong.
- John Hardy
LOL! Try cleaning out your data file if you haven't, should do the trick..
- Ahad Bokhari
Try having 40 Dells in a classroom that are never consistent. Then add 200 online students with GOD KNOWS WHAT home systems. Can you say IT exec turned CompApps prof turned HelpDesk technician? LOL!
- Brenda Rothaupt
They release products with extended beta's and once 60% of the "bugs" are worked out they charge you the 160$ for the service to continue. The people are getting educated this won't be in the future!! cs ostini
- Christopher Scott Ostini
The Predictioneer's Game, by game theory master Bueno De Mesquita comes out in a couple of weeks - http://www.amazon.com/Predict...
David Newman and Carmine Gnolo liked this
Fabulous visualization: "the billion dollar gram." http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visuali... as @jgonn put it in email, "testing the relative weight of the world"
David Newman, Brian T. Edwards, Mark Interrante and Carmine Gnolo liked this
All the San Franciscans are amazed at thunder on Twitter now. They have such sissy weather: fog, sun, fog, sun, fog, fog, fog.
David Newman liked this
Microsoft Apologizes for Photoshop Trainwreck - http://mashable.com/2009...
Jason Theodor and David Newman liked this
The new way to LOOK LIKE A DORK w/iPhone http://scobleizer.com/2009...
David Newman, travispuk, Dennis Jernberg and 6 other people liked this
haha, tweeted about that a few weeks ago. The concept of augmented reality is great, but the idea of watching myself and others look like idiots while trying to grasp reality looking through a mobile phone at it is funny. The world will never be the same again :-)
- Alexander van Elsas
Good stuff
- sean percival
Yeah, augmented reality with an iPhone looks silly. You have to hold your phone out, for one thing. There's at least one company (Microvision, a maker of heads-up displays for the military http://www.microvision.com/) that makes what looks like eyeglasses or sunglasses but which are really stereo/3D HEDs/monitors optimized for AR. That, in my long-held opinion, is how it will catch on.
- Dennis Jernberg
RT @macaby I took this photo of Ted Kennedy at DNC08, which happens to be a yr ago today. RIP, Sen. http://www.flickr.com/photos... (via @nerdette)
David Newman and Cathryn Hrudicka liked this
@JetBlue Thx for the $599 pass & the friendly customer service while I was buying it ♥♡❤♡♥♡❤♡♥♡❤♡♥♡❤♡♥♡❤♡♥♡❤♡♥♡❤♡♥♡❤♡♥♡❤♡♥♡❤♡♥♡❤♡♥♡❤♡♥♡❤♡♥♡❤
David Newman liked this
Dave Winer: "Any url-shorteners out there that support the same functionality as tr.im, please post a comment here." http://www.scripting.com/stories...
Rafael Noboa Rivera, Robert Scoble, David Newman and Josette liked this
RT @anildash: Hoping to convince CNN that grabbing Facebook usernames is called "Facesquatting" so they'll to say it on-air.
Eric Geller, David Newman and Roberto Bonini liked this
Noteboek on Vimeo -- coolest video I've seen in a long time. Thanks Jared Spool for sharing this! - http://vimeo.com/4116727...
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David Erickson, Faethon Koussouris, Cem Ozkaynak and 78 other people liked this
Really excellent.
- Michelle McCormack
White Stripes!!
- Michelle McCormack
That is one impressive notebook. Crazy dutch.
- Mitch
Amazing! I am envious of this person's creativity. :)
- Cheryl Jones
I want one. For real.
- phil baumann
Take on Me Noteboek: http://www.youtube.com/watch...
- David Newman
If only my notebook started as fast or shutdown as quick!
- Shivanand Velmurugan
I like the face scan! :)
- dafire
very clever!
- Kevin Eklund
Cool!
- Tony C
Wow. This one merits a triple-like button.
- Eric Johnson
Already put this on Twitter, but everyone should read. Law of unintended consequences - http://www.wired.com/techbiz...
Sumit Chachra, Bill Romanos, Susan Beebe and 29 other people liked this
Excellent reading.
- Warner Crocker
Very good read: did none of those people have any critical thinking skills, or just didn't choose to use them?
- Ginger Kenney
This piece was a glimpse at what happens when the Emperor's Clothes are woven algorithmically.
- Tom Guarriello
I read this in the print edition. I can almost not believe it myself. But, I think the reasoning behind it was just the greed was too great, and formulas are too easy to fall back on, and use as justification. I mean, hey, if some smart mathematician guy says it right, how can it be wrong? It was easy enough to use this formula to convince those among us that don't want to put the time into researching all the "What-ifs?"
- Danielle Closs
Read print version too. It was a more geeky version of drinking the Kool Aid, but it was Kool Aid nonetheless.
- Karma Martell
The imputation of greed as the metastasizing agent strikes me as facile, especially inasmuch as the argument being made seems to be directed at the ostensible failure of unfettered markets. What is left out of the Wired article (unsurprisingly) is the role played by regulation in fomenting an abundance of risks which the market almost certainly would not have created on its own.
- Eliot Frick
The regulatory system failed, largely because the foxes bribed the watchdogs at the hen-house, i.e. the rating agencies paid to rate these assets ignored real facts or simply refused to examine bank records, and guaranteed these investments were AAA. A bar of lead sprayed with paint was sold as pure gold. Isn't that the assay's fault?
- Phil Boiarski
I am always surprised when people ask "why didn't they question X, or couldn't they see Y"? The point is that the people who overlooked the evidence were benefiting from how things were going, and many of them still are. I suspect that the relative wealth of many of those responsible for all this has gone up - not down, even if the absolute figures look like a loss.
- Robin Barooah
Exactly Robin. The people in Madoff's funds never questioned him, even though they noticed none of the big trading houses traded with him. Just saw the piece about him on 60 Minutes. I think the phenomenon is called "Perceptual defense." You don't see what you don't want to see. And with a mathematical formula, it's just that more difficult, because it's in symbols to begin with:-0
- Francine Hardaway
As my friend @davidsherr says, nationalize DTCC - then it would be simple to know whether or not someone like Madoff had ever traded. All trades go through DTCC.
- Cliff Gerrish
"The regulatory system failed, largely because the foxes bribed the watchdogs at the hen-house." Agreed. So are we all to infer that more regulation will somehow solve this? "When buying and selling are regulated, the first thing to be bought and sold is the regulator." - P.J. O'Rourke
- Eliot Frick
Not more regulation, Eliot. Better regulation. Good enforcement can't be bribed.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
I find the exponents of increasing the power of government have always dismissed appeals to the historical failure of same to accomplish the aspirations of said exponents with the same trope: "They all did it wrong. We're going to do it right this time."
- Eliot Frick
Anyway, "good enforcement" which "can't be bribed" strikes me as a function not of the efficacy of the regulations, but the moral compunction of the regulator. Which seems to me a pretty powerful argument for the diffusion of power, not its condensation.
- Eliot Frick
Correct, Eliot. You need more enforcers and better regulations, not more regulation and fewer enforcers.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
The thing that is lost is that all of these things are processes. Enforcement is a process. It's not like you build up an organization like the FBI and then you are done. You have to constantly be monitoring them and rebuilding them. It's a constant process. One which we definitely have hamstrung in the last 20 years.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
I'm not clear how "diffusion of power" is tantamount to "more enforcers and better regulations". I am suggesting that the quality of the regulations will never eclipse the ability for human depredation to subvert those regulations (no matter how many regulators you throw at it). For an object lesson, see software piracy.
- Eliot Frick
Just because you can't stop something doesn't mean you shouldn't try. It's like the practice of medicine. We can't stop you from dying, but we sure as hell can slow it down a bit.
- Victor Ganata
Victor, agreed. I'm not arguing for anarchy. I'm saying that there are structures under which power can be diffused which should be explored as a alternatives to the greater centralization of power in governmental regulatory bureaucracies.
- Eliot Frick
Flickr User Asks Flickr to Check if Her Self Moderated Account is OK, Flickr Responds By Deleting the User’s Account Without Warning - http://thomashawk.com/2009...
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Bryan Villarin, Mark Shoemaker, 1001 noisy cameras and 30 other people liked this
Another Flickr account permanently deleted without warning. Her crime? Asking the Flickr staff to review her account to make sure that she had her moderation settings set up correctly.
- Thomas Hawk
direct thread in the Flickr Help forum here: http://www.flickr.com/help...
- Thomas Hawk
The problem is that there's no real alternative to Flickr: A community this big combined with an infrastructure that just works (most of the time at least)...
- Holger Eilhard
Thomas - this is starting to get out of hand. Is this the year that Zooomr really starts to go mainstream because of Flickr's folly?
- Damien Franco
WTF? I guess now's the time to start manually archiving our Flickr accounts, as tricky as that'd be. :(
- Tyson Key
Something's definitely wrong with flickr and has been for some time now. BTW, notice that a staff member named heather responded in that forum thread and said "I'll look into this when I get into the office this morning and respond to you".
- Yuval Atzmon
With a name like 'flashergirl77', I'm not thinkin' photography, I'm thinkin' something else.
- David Wilson
Yuval, the response will probably be "We decided to close this thread"... :(
- Holger Eilhard
Hmm, what did the "Urination" thing mentioned in Flickr's reply have to do with anything? I'm puzzled...
- Tyson Key
David, certainly her photostream is of the adult variety. But the point is that this sort of stream is allowed at Flickr if you self moderate your images and label them as "restricted" which she in fact did. She was playing by their rules but to be safe wrote them to make sure and they just deleted her. That's not right.
- Thomas Hawk
Oh I totally agree, I was just taking the opportunity to make a joke about her choice of username ;)
- David Wilson
I posted an update to my story from Heather Champ on my blog post. They are now calling this one a "mistake." Convenient since it's gotten a lot of attention. Part of the problem though is that Flickr doesn't have a way to undo account deletions. Once they do it it's done with no possibility for retrieval for the "mistakes" that they seem to make over and over again. That's not right either.
- Thomas Hawk
Flickr has now apologized, http://www.flickr.com/help...
- Jake Rome
Pity that they can't restore her account back now Jake.
- Thomas Hawk
Thomas I don't understand why they can't restore her account. Surely there's a backup? Why isn't there an intermediate step -- suspension rather than deletion?
- Karoli
Karoli, you are preaching to the choir on that one. People have been asking about that for years. Check this out. If you search for "censorship" and "mistake" in the Flickr help forum you get 93 threads returned: http://flickr.com/search... You'd think that they'd figure out by now that putting these deletions into some sort of temporary state rather than permanent deletion would make more sense.
- Thomas Hawk
it's also interesting how many of the threads regarding censorship or mistakes in the Flickr forum have been locked or closed by Flickr.
- Thomas Hawk
I can understand that Flickr doesn't keep backups of all user data, because even though storage space is cheap these days, we're talking about peta or exa bytes of data. A better solution would be a temporary state prior to permanent deletion.
- Rene, Pro Button Pusher
Rene, they don't even have to keep backups though. All they need to do is simply change the account to a private account. This way nobody but the owner can see it. It effectively removes it from the system but allows that to be reversed for the "mistakes" that they make. There is no reason why they can't do that.
- Thomas Hawk
There has to be better procedures that Flickr staff can and should take. This is just another feather in the cap for how dumb they can be over there. I love Flickr, but can see why so many have jumped to SmugMug and other services that proclaim that they won't treat you the same Flickr does.
- barl0w
Then there must be some sort of way to persuade Flickr to do that in case of investigations of possible violation for an account? When Heather mentioned that there is no Job Well Done Flickr forum it may be useful to raise this through Flickr Ideas?
- Rene, Pro Button Pusher
"Deleting" an account shouldn't even be a tool in their box. The proper procedure any sane company would use is to disable or make private the account, notify the user explaining their offense, and give them some time period to either correct the problem or otherwise challenge the decision.
- Eric P
@Eric P I completely agree. It boggles the mind to think they can just wipe away years of community, participation, and work. I've downloaded all of my photos from their site. While I plan to continue using it, I've curtailed my community activity there since I can't trust them to respect me enough to allow me to make an argument for keeping an account I pay for.
- Karoli
How Would You Feel if Your Flickr Account Were Permanently Deleted? - http://thomashawk.com/2009...
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Richard Soderberg, Tjeerd Jan van der Molen, Katy Pearce and 122 other people liked this
I would feel like giving Flickr people a good kick´n the nuts !!!
- Jose Villar
Wow, and they don't ask first?
- Jen Kuiper
Truly sad and disappointing.
- Carmen wBabby
How much will this bad publicity hurt them?
- Rob Sellen :o)
This reminds me as to why I need to grab a backup of my flickr account and also keep it backed up somewhere else, like zooomr. some of the photos on flickr are the only ones i've got after a drive crash...it shouldn't be zero sum, particularly with a Pro account. why couldn't they just lock it from public view and give her time to at least download her pics?
- Karoli
Rob, unfortunately not much I'm afraid. Flickr staff has over the past few years taken a holier than thou approach to almost every issue like this. It's been a sort of attitude of if you don't like it then leave. Flickr would do well to take these issues of censorship much more seriously. They are entrusted with one of the single most important online cultural jewels that exists today. It's unfortunate that they do not.
- Thomas Hawk
Flickr is congenitally dumb. There are simple ways to handle these issues and they just dont seem to get it. I had a run in with Flickr recently and was not impressed with the way they handled it.
- Mel Buckpitt
best start using sommat else. ;o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
Karoli, I'm thinking the same thing. I have 2 years worth of photos on flickr, that I can not find on any of our harddrives. I'd hate to wake up one day to see they closed my account and all my kids baby pics are gone forever.
- Anika
Terrence on their staff is pretty much consistently one of the ones doing much of the censoring. If you even mention his name in the help forums you can be censored or banned. They call it finger pointing there.
- Thomas Hawk
Rob, using someone else isn't the answer. Rightly or wrongly the community today is largely at Flickr. It is also where the world's most significant organized collection of photos resides. I think pressure needs to be put on Flickr rather to change. To operate with more humility and to give much heavier thought into when such drastic action must be taken.
- Thomas Hawk
Pissed off
- Michael Fidler
I agree... but I meant...like a second place to store..like karoli did. ;o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
And even if drastic action like account deletion must be taken I think Flickr owes it to it's users to back up the data before permanently deleting it and even allow the user and opportunity to get their content off of Flickr's servers. They do not do this today. It's just delete and all of your photos, contacts, comments, faves, etc. are gone.
- Thomas Hawk
using someone else isn't the answer, but redundancy never hurts. i use flickr for the community and also for a place other than my hard drive to store photos. There really isn't an excuse for Flickr to delete those photos with no pathway for me to recover them.
- Karoli
I'd be livid
- RAPatton
Karoli, indeed, redundancy is very important. Personally I'm not so concerned about all of my own images. I've got them all backed up. But a lot of other people do not. But my own stream has thousands and thousands of community comments on my photos that are emotionally very significant to me. I can't actually see Flickr deleting my account but it would kill me if I lost them and it pains me to see them do it to other people.
- Thomas Hawk
you use firefox? if so..grab the "scrapbook" add on... the you can capture whole pages. :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
I'd be angry, and probably never use them as a host again, certainly never get another paid account.
- Grant Bierman
This is really sad, especially for a paid Pro service and for something there is no undo. I am using a flickr group so my blog readers can showcase their pictures, maybe I should start looking for alternatives to flickr. This is such a horrible way to treat paying customers.
- 1001 noisy cameras
I would be really really angry. This really sucks. But I just can't believe that the files "went away". If the government came in and seized someone's Flickr account that had been "deleted", you can be sure that they would be able to "dig" those pictures up.
- Laura Zickus
yeah lets see what sort of influence they have then :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
Yes it sucks to lose all of the comments (I'm sure she has all of the images) but perhaps she should build her own website and do whatever she wants to there.
- Mattb4rd
why it is so important to have own space or somewhere you OWN.. :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
certainly flickr had every opportunity to try to tell a different side to this story, but instead they just referred to the woman who'd lost her account as the "offended party" OP and locked the thread effectively killing any sort of conversation or protest over this action. Sadly this happens frequently there with no repercussions whatsoever.
- Thomas Hawk
I would be a little miffed, but since I don't have alot up there, I wouldn't be too peeved.
- Christian (Simply X)
In the light of this disgraceful situation, is there any way to download a complete backup of all of one's Flickr metadata? Especially comments, keywords and geodata? This should be accessible to 3rd party apps, correct?
- Neil Creek
use firefox scrapbook add on.
- Rob Sellen :o)
Neil, I'm not sure the API allows you to export things like faves and comments. I'd doubt that it does.
- Thomas Hawk
that scrapbook captures everything...as a page.
- Rob Sellen :o)
Rob, that's a cumbersome and time consuming way to do things when one might have hundreds of photos on Flickr. Not to mention wasteful, when all the other guff unassociated with the image would get captured as well. Geodata wouldn't be captured this way either.
- Neil Creek
why would it? can you not have a long page with lots of the pics on with all the comments on them? I dont and never have used flickr..so i dont know....just trying to help. :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
I'd be happy if they deleted my account, but only if they gave me back a prorated amount of what I paid for it. I've gotten so many nasty and immature comments on my photos at flickr. I'm very tired of the vapid community there. Zooomr is way ahead in this department, if nothing else, but it's what matters most, to me anyway.
- scherbi: bottom dweller
OP generally means "original poster".
- Anika
Thanks for the suggestion Rob :) Unfortunately Flickr doesn't work that way.
- Neil Creek
sorry not a help. :o(
- Rob Sellen :o)
I would be so unbelievably pissed. So much time and work.
- Alex Carpenter
Flickr also deleted the account of Spanish National Treasure - Qwurky (aka David) of Barcelona. The Spanish version of Honoré Daumier, he is a wry observer of the human condition and a satirist who poked his sharpest Photoshop barbs at his own artful self-portraits.
- David Newman
Guess I should download a backup of my Flickr archive and not assume it's a good backup?
- sean808080
This is totally garbage. If you're a paid user, a Pro account holder, you are a paying customer. Deleting without warning, is just harsh. But again, don't use Flickr as a backup... you clearly want to use it as a showcase, and it shouldn't be the only place your images are kept...
- Colin Charles
from twhirl
I'd be livid!
- Jeff P. Henderson
"I think the best solution is host your own version of Flickr then you can't be shut down". What would your "own version of Flickr" actually do -- just host pictures?
- Brian Sullivan
There must be more to it than that. Heather has pictures of herself in her photostream. If the whole exchange was saved, why are Heather-the-admin's comments the only ones shown in the post?
- Kevin Fox
I would CRY!!!!!! This is SOOOOOOOOOOOO WROOOOOOOOONG!!!!!! AUUUUUUUUGHHHHHHHH!
- Susan Beebe
This sucks. Does this mean the pix of lolcats (thjat I didn't take) will be deleted too. If not - isn't that discriminatory?? -[
- Chris Loft
Things similar to this have been happening on flickr regarding accounts from other countries as well. A large number of people boycotted flickr for a year or so, but nothing has changed. Many people tried to go to another service, but never found anything as good. I agree with Thomas that somehow the staff needs to be held accountable.
- Rachel Lea Fox
Why is Flickr so popular? Is it all because of the community, or is there something else? Smugmug (and even Picasa) seem much nicer to me.
- Paul Buchheit
I am thinking of switching after reading this post... Flickr's draconian behavior is unacceptable! A paid account can be deleted without even contacting the user first?! whoa!! Not cool... really poor customer service
- Susan Beebe
Paul, I believe it has everything to do with the community. I've made friends, found photography I never would have, and the rooms often provide challenges that I never would have found. Oh, I also use smugmug - but I use it in different ways.
- Rachel Lea Fox
I really do like Flickr, but I would never use them as a reliable storage facility. From their TOS: "5. FLICKR'S RESERVATION OF RIGHTS Flickr expressly reserves the right to immediately modify, delete content from, suspend or terminate your account and refuse current or future use of any Yahoo! service, including Flickr pro, if Flickr, in its sole discretion believes you have: (i)...
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- Kevin Fox
Social Media networks Fascism SUCKS. I had My Twitter account suspended all of a sudden. I had over 500 followers. I put in a support ticket, but got no response from Twitter. We Netizens have no rights when it comes to Social Media Networks. VERY BAD
- Igor The Troll יִצְחָק
Smugmug and Picasa are for sharing photos with your friends, who already care enough to look. Flickr helps people discover your photos. A musician in Brazil used my photos in his CD liner notes, and a physics textbook might use one in their new edition. Part of the joy of posting photos is seeing feedback, and Flickr provides an opportunity for that. The others just let you post your photos.
- Seth
Thomas: What are the procedures or guidelines at Zooomr for such infractions that would cause Flickr to hit the Delete button?
- Nils Sandin
I use flickr for sharing with strangers. If I just wanted to share with friends, I'd use Smugmug (or maybe Picasa).
- Amit Patel
I'm not a fan of Flickr. So - Why not boycott Flickr for a week (just one week): no uploads, no comments, no favorites, nothing! - Or leave Flickr there are plenty of alternatives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
- Philipp Mertens
Terrible PR for Flickr. I don't use Flickr and don't particularly like there UI, but have been tempted for the social aspect to the site. I think I;ll find an alternative, but they are so big I doubt they'll care about losing 1 or 2 users.
- Alistair (alpinefolk)
Nils, Zooomr doesn't censor or delete accounts except in very rare cases. Childporn is the only example where I've ever seen it happen. But this isn't about Zooomr and I'd rather not the conversation go in that direction. Zooomr's a nice site. So is SmugMug. But no site has as large a community and audience as Flickr. Nor is any other site likely to in the future. Flickr is not just about storing photos there. Photos can be stored almost anywhere.
- Thomas Hawk
The thing is it's about the community and audience of Flickr. That's just where it's at for better or worse. Flickr though ought to be thought of as more than just a business by Yahoo. It should be regarded with the cultural significance that I really believe it is. Flickr is the single largest well organized collection of images on the internet today. It's the largest community in the world built around serious photography and not just image hosting. Flickr needs to be there.
- Thomas Hawk
But there needs to be outrage when they do stuff like this I believe so that they don't just keep doing it again and again. Flickr has talked about having a way to reverse photos deleted for years, something that would be simple to build and yet they just won't do it. They talked about doing this after they made the "mistake" of deleting one of their most popular user's photos over a...
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- Thomas Hawk
@Kevin. Kevin I do hope that there is more to it than just this. And I'm sure Flickr may try to put some sort of spin on this if it gets large enough like they did with Rebekka in the link above. But anyone can read through that help forum thread and they had every opportunity to respond but instead just chose to shut the conversation down. I suspect this will likely turn out like Rebekka's case to be another unfortunate non-reversable "mistake," if they own up to it at all.
- Thomas Hawk
Gosh! That ain't good!
- Neya
Flickr doesn't need your business, and they know it. They can do what they want, when they want, and even if they lose a few $25 accounts, who cares? They know enough people will stick around regardless. Flickr has never really impressed me, and there are definitely better photo hosting/sharing sites out there.
- Dave Roth
There has got to be a better way to handle this, why not block the photos in question, talk to the flickr account user and settle the issue. I have family pictures on flickr that go back to 1904, the people who took them are all long dead. why I have pictures on multiple applications
- Kim Landwehr
Ugh, bad form from Flickr. I didn't know they did stuff like this... :(
- Tyson Key
on reddit here: http://www.reddit.com/r...
- Thomas Hawk
Lots of people post other peoples pictures and screenshots. I'm sure they will re-instate. Probably. Reminds me of when Scoble got his Facebook account shut for running the Plaxo script.
- james rock
from twhirl
Raises the never ending issue of whether a machine can determine fair use or how quickly folks will demand clearer brightlines - certainly a great opportunity to figure out attribution & where "value" originates ...
- Scott Moskowitz
I'd feel sick
- Shey
Hello, BBB? Or better yet, a lawyer. This kind of thing does not add up at all. I feel disgusted by this, especially after paying for Pro, myself.
- Chris Charabaruk
i would be irate. but it wouldnt be the end of me. i have 3x backups w/ 1 copy off site. and nothing could ever stop me from taking pictures.
- Plug1
@Chris, the BBB can do nothing. They are allowed to do this to you in their TOS. Allowed, but shouldn't in my opinon. @james rock. The thing is that Flickr says that they *can't* re-instate accounts. Once your photos, comments, etc. are gone, they are gone for good. They should fix that too.
- Thomas Hawk
I cannot arrive at a informed opinion on this just from the comments posted in this thread, but it is very interesting to me. I'm reading a lot of assumptions and I still have questions like; Was she in violation of the Terms of Service for paid accounts? Was her account deleted due to copyright violations or was it due to content violations (porn or whatever).
- Mattb4rd
Mattb4rd. Her account was admittedly of an erotic nature. Both the shots that she took and the shots posted of her. But that's why Flickr allows you to self tag your photos as "restricted," which she was doing. This way they are hidden from everyone on Flickr who hasn't signed up to see restricted content. I suspect that there is more to the story as well but in typical Flickr fashion rather than discuss it Heather simply killed the thread on the issue.
- Thomas Hawk
And the other question: did the photographer in question actually complain? I mean there's no chance they could find these images at random, so someone must have complained. I suspect Flickr lives in terror of a copyright lawsuit of the kind that kills online services, and I bet there are industry bodies out there waiting for an excuse case. It doesnt excuse the abrupt way they go about...
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- Iphigenie
Anyone from Flickr is of course perfectly welcome to chime in at any time and tell a different side to the story. In fact I think that they owe the community at the very least some sort of response over this rather than simply shutting down the thread the way that they did. Then again maybe they are just hoping that this will blow over and go away.
- Thomas Hawk
Joelle, even if this is a copyright issue and someone complained. The correct way to handle this would be to mark the disputed photos as private temporarily and enter a discussion with both parties. This would shield them from any liability. Instead they just delete accounts without any appeal process or recourse, and not just the disputed photos, your *entire* account.
- Thomas Hawk
I totally agree with you on that one - they dont seem to have a process to handle things gracefully, and they really should, because it must happen in some form every day!
- Iphigenie
One extra-large FAIL for Flickr coming right up!
- Michael Forian
I am late responding to this thread so apologies if it is out of context. Deleting someones account in a "its gone for good" way immeadiately seems extremely unfair. Freeze the account, have direct dialogue with the account holder, ask them to remove what ever is in breach of the T&C's then unfreeze if they correct whatever it is that caused the freeze. If no suitable compromise can be found then continue to freeze the account.
- Rob Brammeld
There seems to be more and more reports where if the particular online services you subscribe malfunctions in any way it is difficult for the user (often a fee paying user) to get a quick solution or even in some cases even be able to raise the issue with someone. My broadband provider for example. I recently had a problem with my uploads (as were other users of the service) and the only option available to me as call a premium line and pay £££ per minute to raise and seek a solution to a problem.
- Rob Brammeld
Thomas: Last summer TWiP interviewed Heather. Any chance the guys over there would want to bring such censorship topics up with her in an open forum or interview? Or provide a contact to Heather directly? E-mails and locked forums don't get very far with her, it seems.
- Nils Sandin
@Rob: We don't know that Flickr didn't have a direct dialogue with this user because Flickr has clammed up. The issue then is; should the community have access to the private communications that may or may not have occurred between the service and the user? Even if the user were to divulge portions or "all", discerning parties not directly involved would still be left with raised eyebrows.
- Mattb4rd
Terrifying thought.
- susan mernit
It's sad the Heather doesn't even have the common courtesy to respond to e-mails from the premiere photography podcast. In my post, I didn't mean for the public to contact Heather directly, but instead that TWiP or others who do know her contact details to do so. But as your wrote, it wouldn't seem to help.
- Nils Sandin
The scary thing is that I perceive fee paying as giving me rights to an SLA and a process, which is one of the reasons I use a pay for service for, say email. But when the T&Cs are a bit too broad which means they can just terminate everything saying you breached the terms, with no process or option of appeal, then what is the point of paying?
- Iphigenie
Is there any other photo service offering unlimited space at a comparable (read: ± $5.00 USD) price point? Perhaps if there was some direct competition at that level, we might see less nastiness out of Flickr. Would Google purchasing Yahoo! help make Flickr less evil, too?
- Chris Charabaruk
It's not just the storage, though, it is the community. I get some connections and feedback on my photos, and that is due to the large number of people
- Iphigenie
I would be terrified to find my account deleted. I guess it's time to fire-up Fusion and try Downloadr - http://lifehacker.com/5125257... to backup all of my pics.
- bch12
I wonder if it's a Yahoo culture problem, I see similar sorts of attitudes with respect to delicious
- Andy Davies
The issue isn't so much the photos - I don't even keep the high res versions on Flickr. It's the 20,000 faves and 10,000 comments I've left over the years, as well as the countless thousands I've been fortunate enough to receive and the many bloggers who've used my photos and linked to me. That Flickr would take such a drastic action with no warning or recourse is simply unconscionable.
- Eric P
I think Apple or Google should buy Flickr, Delicious, and/or Zimbra. Yahoo doesn't really give these services the love they deserve.
- Glenn Batuyong
And Thomas is right. With all due respect to Zooomr, Flickr is just the 800 lb gorilla in this space. I'm a member of a half dozen photo sharing sites all valuable in their own right, but none come close to the reach that Flickr has. It has the largest audience, community, and it's increasingly the place you need to be to get "discovered". Jumping ship doesn't seem like an option, and I don't see Flickr being unseated in the foreseeable future.
- Eric P
It's also clear that Flickr is fairly set in its policies regarding censorship and deletion and seems unwilling to change them. They cannot, at this juncture, be unaware of the user complaints in these areas. Which begs the question of why do they insist on these draconian policies?
- Eric P
@Nils I doubt getting TWiP involved would help anything at all, as those guys are just as guilty of causeless summary executions as flickr is. It would be way too hypocritical for TWiP to call flickr out on this, as they're just as evil.
- Dave Roth
Wow, first time I heard TWiP called evil! Any comments, Scott, Frederick, Alex?
- Nils Sandin
I think TWIP is the best photography related podcast on the internet. Certainly there is a debate about moderation in any group on Flickr. I have no problem with private groups on Flickr choosing to moderate comments for any reason at all. I happen to admin an "uncensored" group there and things can get very ugly very fast there for better or for worse. But I think moding a group is a far cry from deleting a user's account without good reason or warning which I think ought to be the core issue here.
- Thomas Hawk
There's a difference between moderating a group (public or private) and the Flickr staff essentially shutting down discussion about their deletion and censorship policies. It's like speech in China - you're free to talk about anything except stuff that makes the government look bad.
- Eric P
Eric, one of the truly odd things is that you are not even allowed to mention Terrence's name in the help forums. You can mention Heather's name but no one is allowed to mention Terrence's name, even though Terrence seems to be involved in an awful lot of the protested cases of censorship. I just don't get that. Flickr closed the thread I'd opened the other day about my five censored images. They close threads down almost every time they become critical of them.
- Thomas Hawk
Scott, Flickr will be dethroned by services like FriendFeed, but it will take 3 years. FriendFeed has better social networking features than Flickr, and provides a place where people can establish an audience regardless of how/where they host their photos. It just doesn't have the user base yet.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
Bruce - think you are right that FriendFeed might replace the social part of Flickr. I see so much more Flickr photography since friendfeed. I love that I get to see my friends favorites, I never have time to go sift through it on flickr.
- Rachel Lea Fox
I'll kick their servers i guess
- Murat Bişkin
I will say that FF has taken a chunk of my time away from Flickr and is very social like Flickr is. I'd love to see more and more photography tools built into FF over time. I also really like the fact that I've seen very little censorship on FF as in none. If you don't like something you just hide it. Easy enough. If you don't like a person, you just hide them as well. Or a service. I really appreciate the censorship free environment on FF.
- Thomas Hawk
I think Friendfeed is too diluted to ever really replace Flickr or any sites like Flickr - there's no sets, not tags, no way to search for photos, no groups centered on certain photographic subjects, techniques, or equipment (and no easy way to add particular photos to rooms, should someone create such rooms). FF would need a major feature overhaul to really work for that purpose.
- Eric P
Also Friendfeed doesn't really have to deal with censorship because other sites already handle it. It won't show Flickr photos marked restricted, for example, because they're not in the RSS feed. Which excludes 90% of the nipples on Flickr.
- Eric P
I could also, if I was so inclined, upload my art nude photographs to a public Smugmug gallery and have them come up in people's feeds as great big thumbnails. I'd wager that people wouldn't be too happy with that and start clamoring the FF developers to do something to block nudity. Eventually it'll be a real issue, and then and only then we'll see how FF addresses censorship.
- Eric P
Eric, if you did that people would just use the Hide feature and/or move you out of their home feed. As for tags, I don't have any inside info, but it's my hunch that FriendFeed will implement them some time in the latter half of 2009. Other sites will implement feeds that pass through tags/keywords that specify equipment, techniques, etc. Filtering noise is a core FriendFeed function, so it won't stay dilute long.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
Maybe Eric. It will be interesting to see if/how FF deals with censoring images if/when that becomes a problem. So far here it seems that the community is pretty responsible. But certainly having the ability to use the hide functionality greatly empowers the user to get rid of things that they don't want to see. Flickr doesn't have that sort of functionality.
- Thomas Hawk
"Hide" is wonderful, but it still winds up on your screen before you can click it, a no-no for people surfing at work and can get in trouble. Which is why so many places on the net have some form of flagging and filtering of such content (which is what Flickr does). It's not a big problem yet but I do see Friendfeed having to deal with it sooner or later.
- Eric P
This was so handled improperly and unprofessionally and with total disregard to ALL of us as users. Everyone who feels this way should, at the very least, leave a comment stating such at her retribution post here: http://bit.ly/18d2Ct This copyright bullshit is going way too far.
- Ian Maffett
this is ridiculous
- mjc
I'd be enraged. So high-handed, it makes you wonder why you pay them? That kind of poor behavior is that of a fat bureaucracy, not a private sector company.
- Rick Cogley
Heading up to henry hunans for lunch with my friend John Stevens. My favorite restaurant in SF.
David Newman liked this
Say hi to Marty
- David Newman
Marty's special is awesome!
- Thomas Hawk
Santa Monica Pier Pacific Park’s Weird and Confusing Photography Policy - http://thomashawk.com/2009...
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Kol Tregaskes, Penguin, Michael Fidler and 17 other people liked this
Thanks, man, appreciate the write up! Let's see what happens....
- Anthony Citrano
I've heard from other people that have had trouble on this pier as well. When we did our Photowalk there in 2007, Noel Kleinman was telling me about this policy before as well. We tried to be somewhat discrete shooting actually on the Pier, but whatever the policy actually is it's pretty lame if you ask me. The Santa Monica Pier is a very public place and people should be able to shoot whatever they want there.
- Thomas Hawk
great shot of that neon sign by the way Anthony.
- Thomas Hawk
Wow, who knew? What is the matter with these people? Are they sure they want to be in public? That photowalk in 2007 was a blast. I was taking pics all over that pier. Can you imagine visiting LA for the first time, catching a shot of the family at the pier and having someone tell you that you'd done something you shouldn't? What a crock.
- Karoli
Thanks again Thomas - glad you like the shot! LA Weekly is doing something tomorrow, I'm told, and I'll try reaching the Pier's Management on Tuesday. I e-mailed their PR person already. Doubt they'll be in on Monday... [oh no, I forgot that replacing the image breaks the flickr embeds.. arrrgh]
- Anthony Citrano
It's a policy....who ever follows policy?
- tpy
@tpy: ha, we can debate the merits of disobedience once we *see* this mysterious policy... ;)
- Anthony Citrano
I don't understand it, and I live hear. I t just doesn't make sense.One of the SM DA lives the other tower and I know his roomate. I might ask him about it, because this is a joke. Did you take any pictures of the pier on your Last trip here?
- Michael Fidler
from twhirl
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