Realtime, realtime, realtime — it’s all you seem to hear now with regard to the web. But back in May, it was just emerging as a new trend that looked poised to explode. And one company at the forefront of that was Scoopler, a Y Combinator-backed realtime search engine. Today, being ahead of the curve has paid off, as the service has just raised a seed round of funding from some big name investors.

When we intially wrote about the service (remember, very early on in the realtime search phenomenon), we noted that the presentation of results was impressive, but the results themselves were utterly dominated by Twitter. That really shouldn’t have been all that surprising considering Twitter’s popularity in the space. But the service has since added some new features to make it more robust.

My mother always yells at me when she looks at my pictures on Flickr, saying that I don’t take enough pictures of people. The truth is, I do, I just put most of those on Facebook because it’s a billion times better for pictures of your friends because you can easily tag them. Now Flickr is gaining the same functionality — but better.

Its new “People In Photos” feature is long overdue. With it, you’ll be able to select a picture and start typing a person’s name, which will then scan your Flickr contacts to see who it should add as a tag to the picture. And like Facebook, you’ll be able to draw an outline around someone’s face to show exactly who they are in the picture.

We’ve just learned that Scott Dietzen, VP Applications at Yahoo who worked on key products such as Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Answers, Groups, and Zimbra, has left the company. The surprising news comes on the same day the Sunnyvale company is announcing its not-too-bad yet not-excellent-either third quarter earnings.

Scott Dietzen joined Yahoo with the acquisition of open source email startup Zimbra, where he was President and CTO. Dietzen went on to replace Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo’s former SVP of Communications & Communities, when he left the company in June 2008.

Apple has long been associated with the saying “it just works”. Well, sometimes it apparently works a little too well, to the point of allowing users to delete their entire Flickr libraries in one fell swoop without really meaning to. Oops.

The problem stems from the way Apple’s popular iPhoto software is integrated with Flickr. Recent versions of iPhoto allow users to sync specified albums with Flickr, which means they can automatically upload new photos as soon as they import them into iPhoto from their cameras, and change their captions for both at once. The problem is that iPhoto treats this syncing very literally: if you delete a photo from one of these albums on iPhoto, it doesn’t just remove it from the Set on Flickr — it actually deletes the photo from your Flickr account entirely.

Earlier this year, Polar Rose got some headlines when it applied its nifty photo tagging technology to Flickr, one of the most popular image sharing services on the Web. Cleverly, it used Facebook Connect as a way to identify people that were named and tagged on images hosted on Flickr.

Now the Swedish company is taking it up a notch with the release of a Facebook application that should make it easier for people to discover in which other photos on Facebook, Flickr or 23hq.com they (or any of their friends) appear, whether they’re properly tagged or not.

Snapixel is a relatively new photo sharing service combined with a straight-forward buying and selling platform for stock photography. It’s almost like Flickr got married to iStockphoto and they had a love child!

Yes, it’s yet another photo sharing service. And yes, it’s yet another stock photography marketplace. But both of the services rolled into one website results in a pretty decent combined offering, especially considering the fact that the whole thing was built by a completely bootstrapped venture based out of San Francisco.

Update: the company gave us some free coupons for TC readers! (see below where we discuss account types)

It appears that a few days ago there was a slight change to Flickr’s logo: an addition of a small Yahoo logo to the right side so it reads “Flickr from Yahoo.” In response, many Flickr users have taken to the photo-sharing site’s forums to express their horror at Yahoo’s branding on Flickr.

The underlying fact is that Flickr users, many of whom are techy hipsters, just don’t mix well with “middle America Yahoo” as Bartz put it a few days ago at the unveiling of Yahoo’s $100 million marketing campaign about “Y!ou.” Bartz said to a roomful of journalists and bloggers:

Flickr has long had a way to note other users’ pictures that you think are worth saving. But the “Add To Faves” function is rather single serving, and not very social like the rest of Flickr. Today, the service is launching a new feature called “Galleries” to expand your interaction with others’ photos.

Basically, Galleries allow you to curate up to 18 photos from anywhere on Flickr into your own hand-made gallery. Previously, if you wanted to make a group of pictures surround something, you could only do it with your own. With Galleries, if you wanted to make a collection of the 18 best pictures taken at TechCrunch50, for example, you can easily do that, no matter who took the picture.

Despite having one of the most popular online photo services in the world, Flickr has done things the hard way on the iPhone. That is to say, for browsing photos they’ve made you go through their optimized website, and for uploading you had to do it through email. Both worked fine, but were not as seamless as a native iPhone application. Now they have that as well.

Yahoo’s Flickr app has just gone live in the App Store. After only a little bit of time using it, I can tell that I’m going to like it. The main screen is a fairly mesmerizing slideshow of photos from your contacts on Flickr. There is an upload button that is easily accessible right on the main page, and the upload process is nice and easy. You can obviously name your picture and give it a description, but you can also easily manage what set to put it in, and what tags to give it. And the privacy settings are very clearly displayed on the upload page.

Oh, this just gets better and better. Or perhaps sadder and sadder.

In a post earlier this morning we discussed Flickr’s questionable decision to remove a photoshopped image of President Obama that makes him look like the Heath Ledger (Joker) character from The Dark Knight. In that post we quoted Flickr’s director of community Heather Champ who said “We very much value freedom of speech and creativity” in an explanation about why the image was removed from Flickr. We called B.S.

Now Flickr has shut off further comments on that forum post, which was most definitely not headed in a pro-Flickr direction. In his message shutting off the discussion, Zack Sheppard reiterates how important political discussion is to Flickr:

Political discussions and expression are definitely allowed here on Flickr. We don’t want to squelch political discussion, but if something is in violation of the Community Guidelines or copyright law and it’s reported, it will be taken down whether it’s a kitten, a sunset, or something political.

It looks like this thread has devolved into antics and gone off the rails so I’m shutting it down. The OPs question has been answered here. This image was removed because the Yahoo! Copyright Team received a complete Notice of Infringement.

This is fantastically absurd. Yahoo is quite literally trumpeting that they support political discussion in the very message they are sending to close down a political discussion.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is this – screwing over your users while yelling “the lawyers made me do it!” rarely ends well. Particularly when the lawyers are just being lazy, and free speech rights are at stake.

Flickr really stepped in it this time. And they’ve sparked a free speech and copyright fascism debate that is unlikely to cool down any time soon.

Sometime last week they took down a photoshopped image of President Obama that makes him look like the Heath Ledger (Joker) character from The Dark Knight. The image was created and uploaded to Flickr by 20 year old college student Firas Alkhateeb while “bored over winter school break.” It was also later altered yet again by someone else and used to create anti-obama posters that went up in Los Angeles.

Thomas Hawk has a good overview of some of the other details, but the short version is the image was removed by Flickr sometime last week due to “due to copyright-infringement concerns.”

Searching for photos on the Web takes way too much time. There are simply too many photos to sort through and not enough good ones. Image search is a major priority for all the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing), and they’ve all been tweaking their image search to make it better. But for the longest time, Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo, but separate from Yahoo Image Search) has been my default image search engine because that is where I can usually find the best photos.

Flickr’s been coasting. Its image search hasn’t been updated in a while—until today. But once again it has turned up the awesome on image search.

Facebook has fast become one of the leading photo and video sharing sites on the web. The social network already lets you upload photos via MMS or through Facebook apps on the iPhone, Blackberry and other mobile devices. Today, Facebook is giving users another way to share photos immediately— via email.

Facebook now lets you create a unique upload email address where you can send photos and videos from anywhere you have email access on your mobile device. When you attach a photo or video to an email, you can include the comment to the photo in the subject line of the email. But if there is more than one image or video attached to the email, the caption will apply to all the attachments.

Back in June of last year, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband/wife team that started Flickr, left Yahoo to pursue other interests. We already know what Fake’s new project is, the just-launched Hunch. Now we know what Butterfield’s new project is. Or, at least, what it’s called: Tiny Speck.

Butterfield sent out a tweet tonight announcing that the new company was hiring. The link he sent goes to a page on a site for the Tiny Speck project. Along the top of the jobs page it reads “We’re a new company, founded by four core members of the original team behind Flickr.” It’s no secret that another of those four core team members is former Flickr head of engineering, Cal Henderson, who left Yahoo in April of this year.

So what is Tiny Speck all about? That is still not entirely clear. The word on the street has been that it’s some kind of new social gaming endeavor, but all they’ll say on the site is “We are working on something huge and fun and we need help.”

Earlier this month, Flickr started flirting with Twitter integration by allowing users to link their Flickr accounts to their Twitter accounts. The experiment was only for email uploads, which simultaneously created a Tweet with a short http://flic.kr link back to the photo on Flickr. Now that integration is an official feature called Flickr2Twitter.

In addition to email uploads, Flickr now lets you Tweet out any photos directly from the site. After linking your accounts, whenever you click on the “Blog this” button on any photo on Flickr, your Twitter account will be one of the distribution options. This works for both photos you’ve uploaded and other photos you find on the site. I have a feeling you are going to be seeing a lot of http://flic.kr links on Twitter pretty soon.

Flickr, Yahoo’s photo property, is one of the largest picture sharing services in the world. However, if you were to ask a group of random people how you spell its domain, a high percentage would likely tell you F-L-I-C-K-E-R. That’s not surprising, but it’s undoubtedly longstanding a headache for Yahoo. And now the people who own Flicker.com are looking to capitalize on it.

If you visit the site, you’ll see that it now exposes its traffic stats in the lower right-hand corner. It’s a blatant attempt to make money, at the very least from advertisers willing to throw links on the page. Or presumably to get someone to buy the domain.

As the world watches the violence and post-election protests escalate in Iran, startling images from the streets of Tehran are disseminating through various social media. Many of them are tagged #iranelection, a hashtag which started on Twitter but is spreading to Flickr and elsewhere.

Since it is difficult to find photos in the sea of Tweets using the same #iranelection tag I’ve been using Twicsy, an image search engine for photos posted to Twitter which we wrote about yesterday. If you search “iranelection” or “tehran iran”, dozens of images from the protests will pop up. (Photos after the jump).

Shutterfly, an online photo sharing and printing site, is adding video capability to its photo sharing sites. Shutterfly is using video hosting site Motionbox to power its video sharing service. So when you upload a video to your Shutterfly Share site, it will also be stored in your Motionbox account. If you upload to Motionbox directly, you will be given the option to post your video to your Shutterfly Share site.

Users can also share videos to social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Blogger can upgrade for unlimited video storage and HD-quality playback. The free accounts are a little limiting for storage—you can only upload ten video clips. For $30 per year, you can have a premium subscription which allows higher file size limits, unlimited video downloads and HD-quality playback.

Watch out TwitPic, Flickr is finally waking up to the power of letting users share links to their photos over Twitter. Flickr members can now sign up for the Flickr Twitter Beta, which allows them to link their Flickr and Twitter accounts (using Oauth) to their send out a Tweet whenever they upload a new photo via email. Here is an example from a Twitter employee (see screenshot), which then links to this photo on Flickr.

Photo-sharing on the Web keeps getting more popular as people transfer more of their digital photos from their the black holes of their computer hard drives to social networks where their friends and family can actually see them. Although Facebook Photos has emerged as the largest photo-sharing service in terms of users and is one of the fastest-growing of any size, it is still not the largest by the sheer number of images that it stores.

That honor, for the moment, goes to ImageShack, which currently hosts 20 billion images, I’ve confirmed with the company (for more background on ImageShack, read this post). Facebook holds 15 billion photos, according to a spokesperson there. But it should catch up by the end of the year. Facebook users are adding photos at a rate of 850 million photos a month, compared to 100 million photos a month by ImageShack users. Good thing Facebook just fixed its storage architecture to be able to handle the bigger load.