Getty Images, one of the world’s largest media licensing companies, has partnered with Flickr to add a broader selection of pictures to its online catalog. Getty will hand-pick a number of Flickr members to participate in the program, with a goal of acquiring thousands of images in the next few months.
Getty editors will use a set of tools jointly developed by the two companies that will enable them to easily scan through Flickr photos to find the best of the crop. Each selected member will have their images licensed through a special Flickr-branded section of Getty’s site, and will receive portions of the licensing fees collected by Getty (there is no set payout structure - each selected participant in the program will need to negotiate their own deal with Getty).
Flickr members will likely try to do anything they can to become a part of the program, which stands to offer them both wide exposure and compensation for their work. Unfortunately, there’s currently no way for a Flickr member to apply to become a part of the program - they need to be “discovered” by Getty’s editors. It’s also hard to tell how lucrative the deals will be for photographers, as Getty has yet to form any partnerships.
Photo sharing site Flickr is one of the leading lights of Yahoo - but cofounders (and husband/wife team) Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield won’t be around to keep driving the product forward. They are both joining the mass exodus of executives from the company.
Fake officially left last Friday. Butterfield (who still officially runs Flickr) will leave on July 12. Kakul Srivastava, the director of product management for Flickr, will take over Stewart’s role as general manager of Flickr. Sara Wood will take over Kakul’s previous position.
From what we hear, neither has imminent plans to work on any new projects, but I suspect we haven’t heard the last from either of them.
Butterfield and Fake created Flickr in 2004. It began as a photo-sharing feature of a gaming project, has since blossomed into one of the premier photo sharing sites on the web. Yahoo purchased Flickr for $35 million in March of 2005. In June 2007 Yahoo shutdown Yahoo Photos, making Flickr their exclusive photo sharing website. Today Flickr hosts over 2 billion images.
Photobucket, acquired by Fox Interactive Media in May 2007 for $300 million, is releasing their API to the public today and will allow third party developers to build photo/video storage and visualization to their applications. Adobe, AOL, FotoFlexer, Intercasting, RockYou, Slide and Snapvine are being announced as launch partners. API documentation is available at developer.photobucket.com.
Previously the API was released only to signed business development partners, and had limited functionality. Functionality includes log in via OAuth, album creation and editing, content uploading, content sharing via email, search and metadata access (tags, titles, descriptions, etc.).
Photobucket is also promoting third party services on their API, at gallery.photobucket.com.
Flickr has had an API available since late 2005, with hundreds of third party applications built on the base service.
Complaints against video on Flickr range from slowing Flickr down, lack of community consultation and video diminishing Flickr’s photo focused purpose.
We’re interested in what you think, do you support video on Flickr? Poll below or leave a comment.
The puppet version of Shel Israel graciously kicked things off for us by announcing the new feature in the Flickr Video below.
The product is not a YouTube clone by any means. The Flickr team, led by Director of Product Management Kakul Srivastava, spent considerable time debating the feature set and user experience internally before launch.
The goal is not to have people upload long videos or clips of copyrighted material. To reinforce that, videos can be only 90 seconds in length and 150MB in size (however these limitations may be changed later, Srivastava says).
In a phone prebriefing, I was very critical of the length limitation. But the team then brought me in for a demo and I was sold. The short clips are a perfect compliment to event photos, in my opinion.
Videos are treated the same way as photos and are placed alongside those photos in albums and the main stream. Videos can also be tagged (and geotagged) in the same way as photos.
The video player itself is extremely clean, so videos look like photos on pages that include them. Videos can also be embedded, of course, as we’ve done above.
Another great feature is the ability to play the videos from the thumbnail screens as well as the permanent page for the video.
Flickr video also differentiates itself from YouTube by only allowing pro users upload videos (it costs $25/yr to be a pro user), although both free and pro users can view videos. As with photos, videos can be made public or private. They can also be shared/embedded individually or as part of sets. But like YouTube, Flickr is providing an API for programmers to create services that access videos hosted on Flickr.
Other standard Flickr features are also available for video, such as search by tags and descriptions, uploads directly from camera phones, and various licensing options.
With this launch, video sharing sites that have focused on privately shared videos should be worried. These include Motionbox, Viddyou, and Vimeo, among others.
Update: The Flickr blog blatantly rips off our puppet schtick:
Game Neverending, the first project from Ludicorp and the foundation for Flickr, has risen from the dead.
The MMOG is a role playing game focused on social interaction and object manipulation. Game Neverending is said to be “lighthearted and humorous” with no way to win or no given definition of success. Objects “could be combined to create other objects, but any given object only served a questionable amount of purpose.” The first prototype went live in 2002 and closed in 2004.
The tools behind the game were used as the foundation for Flickr, and the .gne file extension in Flickr is a legacy from Game Neverending.
Game Neverending is using Flickr account details for login; if you’re already logged into Flickr you’ll automatically be logged into the game when visiting the site.
(thanks to Richard Giles for the tip)
In mid 2005 I profiled YouTube for the first time. As Steve Rubel noted, the best way to describe it was “like Flickr, but for videos.” At the time few people saw the massive upside for YouTube, which was built completely on freely available Flash technology from Adobe. Flickr seemed like the far more interesting product.
Just a few months earlier Flickr had been acquired by Yahoo. And given how slow things were moving in 2005, few people thought YouTube would have the kind of success that Flickr had seen. But just a year later YouTube was suddenly worth $1.65 billion, and users were frustrated that they could upload their vacation photos to Flickr, but not the videos.
Yahoo has long promised to bring video to Flickr. In May 2007 co-founder Stewart Butterfield told us that users would be able to upload videos “soon.” This was reconfirmed in August 2007. But now, nearly three years after Yahoo bought them, and on their fourth birthday as a company, users are not able to upload videos to their Flickr accounts.
But rumors are flying that Yahoo intends to integrate video into Flickr very soon, perhaps in the next three weeks. Part of the delay may have been a long internal debate about how to make Flickr Video special and distinct from what YouTube already offers. They apparently have come to some product decisions, and will be making an announcement soon.
Yahoo PR and other employees are still dead quiet on the subject (I asked every one of them at the party tonight), but the buzz is growing and the leaks haven’t been totally contained. Get ready for Flickr Video. It’s coming. Really.
I was at Flickr’s fourth birthday party tonight in San Francisco with a few hundred Flickr fans, tech geeks, press and Yahoo/Flickr employees.
At some time around 8 pm Dan Farber, the new Editor in Chief of CNET, says, “huh, I just got an email that says, according to [blogger] Robert Scoble, we bought Revision3 for $58 million.” Uh-oh, I thought. I’m in San Francisco, an hour away from my computer. We’re going to be very late to this story.
I asked Farber if it was true. He said if it was this was the first he’d heard of it. A few moments later, after a couple of phone messages back and forth with his team, he said CNET had posted on the rumor (he was joking with me, but I couldn’t read him and thought he was serious). I emailed our team to look into it and cover the story, pulling Mark Hendrickson away from dinner and back to his computer.
I then called someone at Digg, who said something along the lines of “it’s complete bullshit.” After that call I did two things. I told our team to back off the story, and then promptly lied to Farber and said that Digg confirmed the rumor - Revision3 had definitely sold to CNET. Farber (damn him) didn’t bite - he typed a message or two on his phone, then looked at me and said “no, we didn’t.” At that point I laughed and told him what Kevin really said.
Scoble, meanwhile, sheepishly retracted his original Twitter message and the whole ordeal came to a end.
My guess is that 7 or 8 people between CNET and TechCrunch had their evenings at least partially throw into chaos over this. But my only disappointment was that I couldn’t trick Farber into writing a post on CNET that they had acquired Revision3, when it was nothing more than a figment of Robert Scoble’s imagination.
Online image editing startup Picnik has announced that users will now have full access to all of Picniks editing features for free.
Tools now available to all users include advanced edit tools, special effects, additional fonts and shapes. The service will be ad supported, but those wanting an ad free experience can sign up for Picnik Premium for $24.95 a year.
Why the change? This is how Picnik spins it:
We want to make everyone feel like a photo editing superstar. Picnik is already the world’s leading online photo editor, but there are still a lot of people living tragic, gloomy lives believing that powerful photo editing tools cost hundreds of dollars, come in unopenable boxes, and are impossible to use. By offering an ad-supported version of Picnik, we can make much richer, deeper, and ultimately better photo-editing functionality available to more people around the globe: Photo editing awesomeness for everyone.
The more likely reason: they can afford to do so due to the money they’re getting from Yahoo for the Flickr deal, and in the face of increased competition (both existing and future) Picnik needed to offer more. Still, Picnik was a good package before this announcement, and now it’s better again.
See our February 2007 review of online Photo editing sites here.
Some users aren’t happy at the prospect of a Microsoft takeover of Flickr’s parent company, Yahoo. To protest, they do what Flickr users do - upload images.
In this case, the images are all anti-Microsoft, and there’s some really creative stuff. The group has, so far, 917 members and 123 photos. What’s your favorite? Here’s mine.
In fine Flickr tradition, users are protesting against the latest change at Flickr, Tuesday’s 
The goal is not to have people upload long videos or clips of copyrighted material. To reinforce that, videos can be only 90 seconds in length and 150MB in size (however these limitations may be changed later, Srivastava says). 
Game Neverending
I was at Flickr’s fourth birthday 
