facebook

tl;dr: Surprised by the paucity of real-time geotagged photos on flickr. People seem to upload in batches many hours after the fact. Still looking for a cool real-time geotagged picture feed so I can do some Blinkenlights info visualizations in a web browser near you!

Real Time Average Colour of Geotagged photos of 18 cities after a few minutes

Real Time Average Colour Geotagged photos of 18 cities after a few hours

Since 2007, I have over 50000 21000 (29000 non geotagged) geotagged photos uploaded on flickr from cameras most in real-time or near real time (a few minutes to a few hours after they were taken). I expected in 2010 that there would be many real-time geo tagged obsessive :-) photo uploaders like me. Enough to power a cool Blinkenlights info visualization.

Well I was wrong :-) Based on the info viz (geoTaggedAvg18.html ; github source - tested Firefox 4, Chrome, iPhone 4, Android 2.1 - each dot is the average colour of a geotagged photo uploaded to 1 of 18 cities, there are 24 dots per row and then it wraps around after over 24) that I did in Javascript and HTML5 even in geo-tagging mad cities like New York and San Francisco and Vancouver, people don't upload geotagged photos in real-time to flickr (and I doubt elsewhere but love to be proven wrong, if anybody has a real-time updated photo stream with lat/long and an API that has more photos than flickr, please let me know:roland AT rolandtanglao.com twitter:@rtanglao). They do it after the fact and they don't do many.

Probably because:

• people are concerned about loss of privacy
• uploading with GPS coordinates is too hard
• GPSes are unreliable but getting more reliable every day
• most people upload to social media ghettos like Facebook and Twitpic where most of their metadata including latitude and longitude is lost and/or not available via API instead of "full photos as social object with full-meta-data-preservation-and-APIs-to-get-the-meta-data" services like flickr

Dave Winer has been writing for many years about a social camera. I have been writing for years about how ShoZu + Nokia Cameraphones are killer apps and built-in ShoZu would be a killer app (e.g. Nokia should buy ShoZu).

My current thinking is:

Canon or Nikon's sensors and lens +  Nokia phone with "comes with world wide connectivity and built-in easy to use app for uploading photos and HD video to all popular social sites e.g. flickr, facebook, picasa" + sideload to your Computer and OVI files (i.e. Eye-fi done right, not as an aftermarket kludge - don't get me wrong, unlike Dave I love my Eye-Fi card; it's done well but at the end of the day it's a hack!) for backup in real time using ShoZu-like technology to do it in the background and auto-resume if connectivity lost  =

an awesome social camera that would sell well

The current Nokia solution is Share Online which is:

• a) hard to use 
• b) hard to configure 
• c) doesn't work in the  background and auto-resume like ShoZu  
• d) requires folks to figure out the whole "3G/WiFi don't automatically switch to 3G when I am roaming" dance

As Dave points out if Nokia doesn't do it (and Nokia is the only company with all the pieces including camera hardware and software, ShoZu-like tech, etc) and the biz dev clout to do something like a "Comes with bandwidth" partnership like Amazon did for the Kindle), somebody else will do it e.g. Apple or Google or some social camera upstart.

I have been blogging for 10 years, started Dec 1999 (dreadnet.editthispage.com which sadly died a few years back due to my own negligence) so some  2010 social media long term predictions and gratuitous advice which again is worth what you paid for it

Social Media 2010 predictions and gratuitous advice:

1. Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Tumblr and other walled gardens are over in the long term; an open solution will replace them in 5 years or less.
2. Don't be afraid to use and experiment with the walled gardens but recognize that your stuff can be deleted at any time and unless you have backed it up to an open format like HTML, it won't last forever (most likely scenarios: service goes out of business or your account is deleted for an arbitrary reason). I wouldn't shed a tear if all my tweets were deleted, YMMV. If you have fun with the walled gardens, get your domain and start a blog, videoblog,podcast, etc., you won't regret having an online presence you own and control
3. If you care about your closed garden stuff, back it up to an open format. If you aren't geeky enough to figure this out, ask a geek, there's lots of them, just don't ask me :-)
4. Have a "hook" and nurture and grow it. Not good enough in 2010 to be a jack of all trades social media whatevah :-) You actually need to *know* something. Most people do (they just don't realize it!) so that's not a problem.
5. Don't know why I have to write this in 2010 department: Don't trust reviews or content on Urban Spoon, Yelp (i like the idea of yelp & other aggregators  but in practise most of the reviews are shall we say not helpful), Gowalla, Facebook etc unless you know the person in real life or have read their stuff over a period of time. Most restaurant reviews like most content on the Internet are wildly biased but that's a good thing because objectivity in food reviews is ridiculous.
6. Get your most valued content out of the walled gardens and your email (email rocks but it's not a place for long term knowledge storage and retrieval) and back it up. The best way to back up is to put the content in an open format like HTML on your own domain and backup all the stuff on your domain. Again, ask a geek. And really most people's stuff that is truly valuable is not a lot, myself included :-)  e.g. I bet my best emails, best photos, videos and blog posts for the last 5 years could fit on 1 DVD!

[Disclaimer: I am a friend of Kinzin honcho Michael Fergusson and Kinzin social media marketer Megan Cole]

I love Kinzin's aka "These are my Kids"'s new (well not so new my blog post is late!) "Print Pack" feature. This feature allows you to ship 10 prints for $US 2.50 plus shipping anywhere in the world!

I use it to send 10 photos per month to my family in Belgium and Ontario and also to us. Great idea (which I and probably others suggested to them!)

Digital photos are great but having hard copies is also great. And finally through the Print Pack Feature I have an easy way to do it from flickr (or from your local drive or facebook but I don't store my photos on local drives or facebook).

Feature Request: do the same thing for videos i.e. how about a DVD from my flickr videos shipped once a month for say $5 / month plus shipping?

Feedback on These are my kids:

1. Could we please have it as an independent website? There's no value for me having it as a facebook app (but I can see why it is a facebook app; the community is there, still I'd rather use it using my kinzin login rather than my facebook login)
2. The default privacy settings are to make everything visible in your Facebook feed. I'd prefer the default to be that everything is NOT visible but I concede I am over zealous about the privacy of our child.
3. Adding a photo to my print pack is not intuitive. You can't add all 10 at once, why not? Also I would prefer to have to be able to add photos via a tag e.g. kinzinprintjuly08 to my print pack.

So far so good. The only bug I can see is that I can't seem to update my Facebook status from ShoZu 4.0. Everything else works (e.g. I can see the last few status updates from my 341 ShoZu "friends"). I am sure the ShoZu folks will make it work pretty quickly; it'll be cool to use my unlimited EDGE for updating my Facebook status for free (rather than SMS which would cost me $).

[UPDATE: Mac Skype has a keypad icon which you click on to send DTMF tones which  means i can easily use the Iotum app without paying, cool! hopefully this works on N800 Skype too] 

I tried a conference call to myself on the weekend and it worked fine! I couldn't get it to work with Mac Skype (couldn't figure out how send my phone number, how does one send a DTMF tones in Mac Skype?) but that's Skype's fault and I am sure will be easily remedied. This will be great for impromptu calls.

Question: is this a Lypp competitor? Answer: I think it could be but is not directly!

From "Finally, a useful application on Facebook" — Alec Saunders .LOG:

QUOTE

For North American users, the calls are free. You call our bridge in the 218 area code, and pay only the charges you would normally pay, whether that's airtime on your cellular phone, or long distance on your land line. As Jim Courtney at the Skype Journal discovered yesterday, you can even make the calls from Skype — great if you have an unlimited Skype account.

END QUOTE

It's 2007 and a well funded company like Facebook can't implement secure RSS feeds (RSS feeds served over SSL and protected by HTTP Basic Authentication). Aaargh how many years have we been blogging about the need for secure RSS feeds and that security by obscurity doesn't work? (Answer: since at least 2004) (And I am not impressed by the Facebook Chief Privacy Officer's apologia; sorry the technology exists, 37 signals does it for example with Basecamp so implement it !). If RSS feeds over SSL with HTTP basic authentication are too much of a technological challenge :-), allow the feed URLs to be revoked like flickr does for its guest pass URLs.

FROM » Facebook’s data feeds a data leak? | Lawgarithms | ZDNet.com:

QUOTE

So where’s the data leak? Here’s where. These feeds are public. All one needs in order to view and use them is the feed’s URI. There’s no requirement that a reader or user of the feed be the “friend” of individuals whose data is in the feed, or even that the person be logged into Facebook. Are you following me?

END QUOTE

Up4 (you need to login to Facebook to see it, hello walled garden!) sounds promising! Can't wait for the official blog post :-) on the ActiveState Blog or David Ascher's Blog. Sounds like a great app to discuss at a Vancouver Facebook camp or at BarCamp Vancouver 2007!

FROM Facebook | Up4:

QUOTE

Use Up4 to express when you're open to doing something, and the kinds of activities you're up for. Up for the beach after work? Checking out a show Friday night? Or just hanging out Sunday afternoon?

Use Up4 and others can let you know they're up for it too. Up4 makes it easy to spend more time with your friends.

So... what are you up for?

END QUOTE

Phillip Jeffrey presented on Facebook and Flickr tagging at the UBC Magic Workshop on taging on June 6, 2007. As always Phillip was engaging and articulate! Phillip is becoming quite the Facebook poster boy as he was recently on CBC Radio as well. Go Phillip go!

Facebook - The blockbuster seqel to all the geeky prequels! To paraphrase Tim Bray, I've seen this movie before. Only it's different this time. Unlike UUCP email, profs email, Nortel's Cocos, BBSes, Usenet, The Source, Compuserve, The Well, etc non geeky people of all ages are using Facebook to privately and semi-privately blog, share interests and email each other. Which I think is great! And I love that Facebook is becoming a platform.

But until you can get all your stuff (your status messages, your private messages, your wall posts, your events, your profile information, etc) out like you can get all your photos and all the associated metadata out of flickr using its APIs, I would be careful.

Just like everything else on the Internet, if it's not on a domain you own or control then it could be shut down and removed at any time without any prior notice.

In other words have fun with facebook but recognize that's the stuff on there is ephemeral and ethereal and mostly invisible to Google; if you want something permanent that the world can see whether or not they belong to Facebook, stick it up on a website or blog or wiki or other web app with permanent public URLs on your own domain.