Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog

So yeah… Flickr has launched Flickr Video and the big surprise is that the videos can only be 90 seconds long. Before you start moaning and groaning about it, let’s sit back and think about this.

Didn’t we all moan and groan when we found out Twitter had a 140 character limit?  Now Twitter is a Web 2.0 darling.

Constraint brings simplicity.  90 seconds mean that most likely the video is raw and unedited.  It’s the video that comes from the digital photo camera or from your camera phone.

Constraint can also bring great beauty.  Think of haiku. Think of Twitter.  There is a certain level of clarity in what you say when you have a limit on how you can say it.

I’m confident that if people keep an open mind Flickr Video will be a medium for creativity and expression for many years to come.

While at the Library of Congress, I had the pleasure of helping with the Library’s participation in the Flickr Commons project.

It’s very exciting for me to see that the Flickr Commons project has expanded to also now include 200 images from Australia’s Powerhouse Museum.

These look like they equally beautiful photos.  As described by George Oates from Flickr, these are “wonderful old photos of Sydney and New South Wales from the turn of the 20th Century.”

So enjoy them, be inspired by them, tag them.  Contribute to this AWESOME project.

Also… the Library of Congress is continuing to add to it’s Flickr account.  Go check those out also.  Currently those are additions to the Bain Collection.

(Photo from the Powerhouse Museum’s Flickr account)

The crew over at Flickr have just released a new product, Flickr Places. It aggregates together photos, photographers, and groups around certain geographic areas.

You can type in “Florence, Italy” and seconds later you’ll be flipping through the most interesting or most recent photos for that area. I have to say this is way cool! I’ve already spent two hours tonight just flipping through photos in various parts of the world.

My journeys have taken me to:

• London
• Barcelona
• Florence
• Vatican City
• Shanghai

I have seen some really amazing photographs. Plus I think I have my next 30 years of vacations planned out. :-p

This reminds me a lot of when I was growing up and my dad and I would surf on telnet. It was a game to see how many different Web sites in different countries we could see in an evening. The Web gave me the ability to see a world beyond my own.

I can totally see Flickr Places being used by people all over the world to get excited about areas or places that they’ve never been before and maybe even make connections with people they’ve never met before.

Also… I could totally see someone seeing a place on the news like Baghdad and wanting to see more photos from that location.

Oh oh oh… there’s one things I forgot to mention. Flickr also has this new map view which displays the keywords of what people are taking pictures of in that region.

This week I was doing some research on php and unicode. I put my search terms into Google and just wasn’t getting what I wanted. It was kind of frustrating.

An hour or two later, I decided to try something different. I’d used del.icio.us as my search engine. I found exactly what was I looking for.

It really makes the case that human-powered search may be the direction where things should go. Yahoo was genius for snatching del.icio.us up.

You’ve seen so many other services which want you to enter in explicit feedback about a Web site (digg, stumble upon) but it just doesn’t make complete sense. It’s hard to get a lot of involvement. With del.icio.us, they take advantage of the natural instinct to bookmark a Web page and organize those bookmarks.

Have you used sites like del.icio.us, Mahalo, or ChaCha as search engines? If so, what do you think? If no, what’s holding you back?

One of my favorite additions to this blog has been my sidebar widget for MyBlogLog.    It makes such a huge difference to be able to put the faces with the names of people who read the blog.  It does a lot to contribute to the community feel.

Community is really what a blog is all about.  It’s building a community around a set of ideas.

So… don’t lurk in the shadows.  Sign-up for MyBlogLog.  It will allow you to get to know the author and fellow readers of your favorite blogs better.

My internet connection in my apartment isn’t great so it seems like some Web pages load really slowly.  I’m also frequently in coffee shops sharing sharing wifi with 20 people.

The boys at Yahoo! have developed YSlow, an add-on to the Mozilla Firefox Extension Firebug.  It tests a Web page against a set of performance heuristics that they’ve developed to see if a Web page will load quickly.

I’m really impressed.  I’m adding this tool to my development toolbox.

(thanks Nate K.)

Yahoo! has been posting so many great videos on Web Accessibility. While in London, Web Accessibility expert and W3C staffer Shawn Lawton Henry stopped by Yahoo to talk about the Web accessibility guidelines that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is working on. It’s a great talk. Check it out.

(Photo of Shawn Lawton Henry by Richard Ishida.  Taken at the 2007 @media conference in London, UK. )

My Flickr account translated into Chinese (I think?)

If you haven’t already heard, this week Flickr released seven localized versions of their user interface. It is now available in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Portuguese. This is exciting news.

While Flickr may have some more issues to work out, I have a feeling this will play a huge role in Flickr more effectively attracting a much bigger global audience.

Yahoo! VP (and man who the Flickr team reports to) Bradley Horowitz, referring to the recent announcement, recently wrote in his blog, “Flickr is stupid, and late… but redeems itself.” I think we all can learn a lesson from this.

Isn’t it time that all of the popular Web 2.0 applications start moving in the direction of translating and localizing their interfaces? We should be building our applications from the beginning with the understanding that we at some point will be localizing the UI.

It is a WORLD WIDE Web. It won’t take a long for a Web app to get a world-wide audience.

When will Digg or Facebook follow Flickr’s lead? Back in November 2006, there was a post on the Digg blog about how they were internationalizing their databases by moving to UTF8. There has been no sign of Digg taking any big next steps.