Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Flickr

Facebook Files Lawsuit Against Yahoo!

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 21:30:37 +0000

Last month Yahoo! filed a lawsuit against Facebook that claimed Facebook’s News Feed, ads, and privacy settings infringed on their patents. Today Facebook has filed a countersuit against Yahoo! through 10 of their patents. Facebook said that Yahoo!’s Flickr photostream and their recent activity feature infringes a Facebook patent that is related to generating a personalized feed of stories on a social network. ”While we are asserting patent claims of our own, we do so in response to Yahoo’s short-sighted decision to attack one of its partners and prioritize litigation over innovation,” stated Facebook general counsel Ted Ullyot.

Flickr Starts Disabling Pinterest Pins On Copyrighted Images

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 20:42:24 +0000

Pinterest was recently questioned about whether they would be in violation of displaying copyright images. Now Flickr has updated their website to prevent Pinterest users from “pinning” copyrighted images from Flickr. About 5 days ago, Pinterest wrote a tutorial for website owners to block users from “pinning” them.

“Flickr has implemented the tag and it appears on all non-public/non-safe pages, as well as when a member has disabled sharing of their Flickr content,” stated a Flickr representative in an interview with VentureBeat. “This means only content that is ‘safe,’ ‘public’ and has the sharing button enabled can be pinned to Pinterest.”

Pinterest is a digital pin-board website that encourages people to add websites as bookmarks. It is especially popular for bookmarking products, recipes, clothes, etc.

Flickr To Get A New Design Which Will Make Them Look Like Pinterest

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 04:59:20 +0000

A Flickr redesign was rumored earlier today. The new design will make Flickr look just like Pinterest. Flickr will have a new photo stream design, Justified View, and a new uploading feature called Uploadr.

Flickr head of product Markus Spiering confirmed the changes with Mashable today. The company is going to focus on user engagement with the new features. The Justified View will be going live on February 28th. The photo stream will first be going live with your contacts. The Justified View showcases bigger photos and it lacks text data. When you hover over photos, you will see tags and other information.

The new upload feature Uploadr will be live in March. It lets you drag and drop photos from your computer on to the website. Spiering said that Uploadr is more like an app and less like a website. Photos can be instantly viewed as thumbnail images allowing you to add tags as you upload.

To see photos of the new Flickr, check out the gallery below:

Klout Now Measures Influence from 10 Different Networks

Riley Kennysmith — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 16:30:22 +0000

Today is a big day for Klout. The social influence calculator just added five new networks to its algorithms, bringing their measurement possibilities to 10 total networks. Adding Tumblr, Blogger, Flickr, Last.fm and Instagram to the already-included Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and YouTube means that some Klout users are about to see a huge jump in their scores. The staff blog reminds users that “connecting an account will never lower your Score, but it may increase it as we can give you credit for your influence in that network.” TechCrunch notes that Google+ is still missing from the list but that it should be on its way soon.

Klout measures social networking influence based on users’ interactions with their followers and friends, on a scale from 1 to 100. Linking new networks to an account doesn’t immediately improve one’s Klout score, and Klout hasn’t explained exactly how the new networks will be calculated. I’m curious as to how (or whether) Klout will include scores for users who have multiple blogs with Blogger or Tumblr.

Situation Room Photo Hits Close To Half Of Most Viewed On Flickr In 3 Days

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 04 May 2011 16:27:52 +0000

The above photo was taken on May 1, 2011 and uploaded to Flickr on May 2. It is a photo of Barack Obama and other members of the White House staff watching a live feed about the mission against Osama Bin Laden. This photo has hit about 1,678,265 views thus far. The highest viewed photo on Flickr is a picture of Nohkalikai Falls, Cherrapunjee, which has 3,020,228 views thus far.

Several people have already taken this popular photo and made some memes out of it like adding The Situation from Jersey Shore and sticking him in the room. Technically this is the fastest viewed ever photo on Flickr now. Right this fastest viewed photo on Flickr is a photo from the Royal Wedding that hit over 1.3 million views since Saturday.

[TechCrunch]

Flickr Head of Product Strategy and Management Matthew Rothenberg Steps Down

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:58:12 +0000

Matthew Rothenberg was the head of product strategy and management at Flickr. Rothenberg worked at Flickr over the past 5 years and stuck around even after co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake quit Yahoo! Markus Spiering will be filling in for Rothenberg until a replacement is found. [TechCrunch]

Flickr Announces App For Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 05:52:18 +0000

Flickr has recently announced Flickr for Windows 7 and Flickr for Windows Phone 7. Through the Flickr apps, you will be able to swipe through panoramic blades to see all recent activity and the latest uploads from your contacts. The app is fully optimized for high-resolution display. Tapping on a photo brings up a full-screen lightbox view.

On Windows 7 Slate devices, the Flickr app will have a “Context View.” The Context View lets you see other photos in the set, group, etc. from a contact or nearby on a map when you zoom out of a full-screened photo in lightbox view. You can see geo-tagged photos on a map or view nearby geo-tagged photos from the community through the app as well.

[Flickr Blog]

Flickr Accidentally Deletes Mirco Wilhelm’s Account Which Had 4,000 Photos Stored

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 06:39:51 +0000

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) photo sharing website Flickr.com has accidentally deleted the account of Mirco Wilhelm, which had 4,000 photos stored. Fortunately Wilhelm had the photos stored somewhere else. However Mirco’s photos were being linked to from all over the web including Flickr’s blog itself.

Wilhelm was shocked when he tried to log into his account and he was asked to create a new username. He had submitted a ticket to Flickr a few days ago complaining that another user is suspected of using his copyright photos. It is believed that Flickr deleted the wrong account.

Below is an e-mail that Flickr sent to Wilhelm:

Unfortunately, I have mixed up the accounts and accidentally deleted yours. I am terribly sorry for this grave error and hope that this mistake can be reconciled. Here is what I can do from here:

I can restore your account, although we will not be able to retrieve your photos. I know that there is a lot of history on your account-again, please accept my apology for my negligence. Once I restore your account, I will add four years of free Pro to make up for my error.

Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do.

Again, I am deeply sorry for this mistake.

It is believed that Flickr is close to resolving the situation:

Hi Mirco,

I can definitely get you logged back in to your account.

However, we are taking a look to see if there is anything we can do in this particular case to restore your content.

While we investigate this we need the account to not be touched. As soon as I have any further information, I’ll get back to you and will also provide the instructions on how to get you logged back in and the [...]@yahoo.com account re-connected to this Flickr account.

Thanks,

Cathryn

107 Trillion E-Mails Were Sent Out In 2010

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 20:12:39 +0000

The complete stats about e-mail, websites, web server market share, domain names, Internet users, web browsers, videos, images, and social media are out and Pingdom did a great job aggregating all of this information. About 107 trillion e-mails were sent out in 2010 and 89.1% of that number was spam e-mails. As of December 2010, there was about 255 million websites. Of the 255 million websites, about 59.4% was hosted on Apache servers and 88.8 million were .com websites. The number of blogs by the end of the year was 152 million and 25 billion tweets were sent on Twitter in 2010. As of December 2010, Internet Explorer had the lead market share at 46.9% followed by Firefox at 30.8%. About 2 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day and 20 million videos are uploaded to Facebook every month. Now over 3,000 photos are being uploaded on Flickr every minute and over 3 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook per month. [Royal Pingdom]

World Erotic Art Museum Threatening Thomas Hawk In $2M Lawsuit For Uploading Photos To Flickr

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 21:51:00 +0000

The World Erotic Art Museum in Miami Beach, Florida has threatened Thomas Hawk with a $2 million lawsuit because he took photos and uploaded it to Flickr. However this isn’t the first time that Hawk was kicked out of a museum for taking photos or being harassed for taking photos. Below is a blog post that Hawk wrote and the museum’s response:

Hawk wrote on the following blog post, which has been deleted since:

The World Erotic Art Museum in Miami is trying to sue me for a minimum of $US2 million for posting photographs that I took in their Museum on Flickr.

[In their] complaint they accuse me of violating their policy stated at their entrance saying that the museum prohibits professional or flash photography.

I saw no sign when I visited the museum.

However, I took no flash photographs in the museum, and Flickr (where I posted the images) is strictly defined as a non-commercial photosharing site. I have not sold any images of that I took at the museum and I have not profited one cent on any the images that I posted on Flickr. What’s more the complaint says “at no time did Plaintiff or Plaintiff’s agents give express or implied permission or authorization to Defendant to take the photographs.” This is a bald faced lie. One of the employees at the museum in fact approached both me, and my friend Mo, who were taking photos to talk to us about them. He specifically asked me if I was making a book and I said no. He said fine and we continued photographing in the museum at the time.

Further Flickr explicitly describes itself as a non-commercial site. This is not professional photography.

[...]

Further the museum filed a DMCA request fraudulently and had Flickr remove many images that they do not in fact own copyright to.

The museum owner and curator Naomi Wilzig said that visitors are allowed to take photos, but it is an unspoken and unwritten understanding that no one would ever post something explicit online — especially photos that involve penetration. Wilzig uploaded 334 photos on his Flickr account, many of them being explicit. Wilzig believes that kids are at risk of seeing them online as a result.