The alpha was intended for review by a few of our users, before we release it more broadly next week for comments.

so it’s not yet ready for daytime, much less primetime (ie: TechCrunch). There are a number of improvements that will go out in code pushes planned once per week for the next several weeks, including a code push by end of day Friday.

A couple of the things that are in this redesign:

1) For sharing: many many clean up UI features, including visible and not so visible things like a flash based rendering alogrithm for each photo.

2) For viewing: 10 Channels, hundreds of sub-categories and thousands + tags, with a combination of algorithm and editorial (human beings) editing and programming – you’ll be able to see what’s good, what’s recent, what and who’s popular and active Channels (like Travel, Sports or News) or anyone of hundreds of categories (Lebanon or kayaking) now, and soon, for each tag.

3) we reduced the real estate devoted to ads by about 40% (no banners and sky scrapers anymore). early reception is that the new ads are better for users and marketers.

and a couple of other things. but then I’d be running on in your comments.

They used to call this “keywords for search”. Now they call it “keywords/tags”. To see this, simply go to the image upload feature.