Location-networking is meant to provide two experiences:
1. Broadcast your location to your friends and FoaF network in the hope of making unexpected connections; and
2. Share comments and rich media (photographs, video, voice etc.) about your experiences at a particular location.
This then, is the state of my location networking experience one year on:
Two problems have remained stubbornly unresolved for that entire period
1. The lack of two-way sync between Brightkite and Fire Eagle – While I can understand why Google Latitude won’t play with Fire Eagle, I’m puzzled by the reluctance of the other players in location networking like Brightkite and Foursquare to integrate with Fire Eagle. Integrating with Fire Eagle would allow location-networking providers to stop worrying about how their users send updates to their service and focus on making the experience more fun to use. Instead, all the players in location-networking are guilty of listening only to the echo-chamber hype of early adopters and providing solutions only for the platforms the geeks love, i.e., the iPhone, the Blackberry Bold generation and the Android OS. This is remarkably short-sighted considering:
a. While the iPhone is the fastest selling Smartphone today, it still isn’t beating older Blackberries, Windows Mobile or the Palm OS in terms of installed base.
b. No Smartphone is coming close to beating the "dumb" cell phones install base
If location-networking is to really become as ubiquitous as social networking, it has to run on a variety of platforms and require little by way of a hardware minimum. The promise of location-networking, to open your phone and see the location of not just your friends but of your FoaF network is truly remarkable. But meeting only the needs of the echo-chamber will keep location-networking a niche product, until it is killed off by the geeks who abandon it for the next cool thing on the horizon.
2. The lack of rich metadata for any media shared through Brightkite – Let’s ignore the fact that Brightkite does not support video uploads to Flickr (despite the fact that Flickr has had video in place for over a year now). No, my complaint is about how little metadata is passed to Flickr when I send a photo to Brightkite.
a. No tags
b. No Titles
c. Email subject as description
c. No EXIF data
Using the Email Subject line as a description isn’t a very great idea either – why can’t we specify the Title via Email Subject and the description via Email Body? Isn’t that more logical. The lack of tags means these images are going to be very hard to surface via search. All in all, it’s a very limited and clunky solution for something a lot of other products do very well.
I had hoped that 2009 would be the year that location-networking really started to take off. It now seems like location-networking will continue to stagnate until someone builds a product that not only works for the early adopters, but for the early majority and the users after that
Browsing through the Straits Times this morning, I came across a photograph that was attributed to “flickr.com”:
Attributing the photo this way is wrong in a couple of ways:
1. Flickr is not the organization that “owns” these photos, it’s merely hosting them.
2. If the photo was licensed under a Creative-Commons license, the Straits Times should have attributed the photographer in the article, under the terms of the license.
I decided to look up who had posted this photo on Flickr to determine which license the photo had been made available under – that’s when it got really puzzling.
I couldn’t locate this image on Flickr and it was only when I broadened my search to Google that I located this image:
Blog post with original image.
Looking through the source of the page, I can’t find any link to Flickr – only to a Japanese-language webpage that has very little information.
So it appears that not only has the Straits Times screwed up how attribution should be done for photos taken from Flickr, they have actually sourced the image from some other website and forgotten to link to the correct website.
*Pulls out giant roll of paper, starts reading…*
"I’d like to thank my mother, my father, my wife, my camera for not screwing up like it usually does, the statue that stayed still… "
But seriously, this is the absolute high-point of my brief photographic career – having not one, but two photographs published in a coffee-table book.
As much as I would like to chalk this one up to sheer talent, I think it would be more interesting to talk about some of the real factors that lie behind this little achievement:
Luck – This more than anything else was why my photo got picked in the first place. Being in the right place at the right time, being prepared – whatever you want to call it. For some reason, I chose to carry my point-n-shoot with me that day. I lived dangerously for a moment and stopped to shoot this, despite a hungry wife waiting impatiently beside me 
. I managed to shoot a relatively sharp photo, despite the poor lighting and lack of any stabilization. Whatever you want to call it, I call it luck.
Location – Add location and location to that. After all, who knows how many beautiful photographs are out there, condemned to obscurity on some obscure photo-blog that no one has heard of? And then there’s Flickr – which is to image search what Google is to the rest of the web. Flickr is far from being an ideal solution for photographers – as Lane Hartwell, Scott Beale and many others would attest, but if you want to be noticed on the web, edgy does not do it.
Licensing – This is really only applicable because I host my photos on Flickr, but it’s important for a photographer to think about. If you are somewhat serious about photography, you have spent hours looking for just that right angle. You have spent far too much time (mostly by your significant other’s standards) in front of a computer, tweaking every photo till it just so. And most likely, a fair chunk of cash on the right gear. So it’s only fair that you want people to give you credit (or cash) when they use your photographs elsewhere. You might decide to go with the licence "All Rights Reserved" in Flickr. But if you take a look at the search function in Flickr, you’ll see they give a lot of love to photos that are Creative Commons-licensed. Which is only going to help your photos get found. Not convinced? Let’s consider a hypothetical situation – some one out there is hunting for a photo to accompany a blog post. They hit Flickr, punch in some keywords and get a few hundred results. They open a couple of interesting photos – one of those interesting photos is yours marked as All Rights Reserved and the other, is marked as Creative Commons licensed. Your blogger-in-a-hurry has 3 options here:
1. Contact you either via Flickr PM or email, requesting for permission to use your photograph. Wait around till you check your email and reply. Negotiate the terms (if any). Embed the photograph.
2. Right-click your photo and Save to Disk. Embed the photograph.
3. Link to the Creative-Commons licensed photograph on Flickr and add a little text attributing the photographer.
Which option do you think the Blogger is going to pick? A lot of them are going to rip off your photo (even if it’s Creative Commons-licensed) but there are some folks who don’t mind doing the right thing – but even they are going to prefer the Creative Commons-licensed photo for it’s ease of reuse.
The reality is that if your work is digital and on the web, it’s going to get re-used without your permission. With Creative Commons-licensed, you stand a better chance of getting some credit.
I personally use the most open of Creative Commons licenses – the free-love Attribution license, which basically lets you use my work (or a part of it) in any way as long as you credit the author. I chose this license for a few reasons – my photography is still fairly ordinary and mostly by luck – if someone wants to use it, why stop them? There is another factor – although I post full-resolution images to Flickr (and I allow the original image to be downloaded), the small sensor size of my camera means that my photos can really only be used on the Web. It’s not good enough to be used in print form. When I do eventually upgrade to a better camera, I’ll be moving to a more restricted license – the Non Commercial, Share Alike License.
Metadata – Now I would have liked to keep that L thing going (you know, Luck-Location-Licensing..) but I couldn’t find any words to match – your loss, I guess 
. Next to music, I find that photography has an extraordinarily robust mechanism for storing and preserving your metadata – the IPTC Core Metadata Standard. The IPTC standard provides for a vast array of pre-defined and free-text fields that can be embedded into a photograph. Once you take the time to input this information, a vast number of programs and websites (including Flickr) can read this information and expose it to your viewers. The part I really love about IPTC metadata is that it’s inextricably linked to your photos – you move your photos, the metadata goes with you. When I switched from Iview Media Pro to Lightroom earlier this year, that migration was made much more painless by the fact that I had been using this sort of metadata for some time. It allowed me to very rapidly establish my hierarchies in Lightroom and be productive. I expect that you will see this sort of metadata usage grow rapidly over the next few years, as more basic photo organizing software such as Windows Vista Photo Gallery and Picasa encourage people to enter metadata and then store this information using such industry standards. The final question about metadata that one should ask is – how much metadata to include? That is an entirely personal choice, but really more the better. For example, and although I don’t have access to stats in Flickr to back this up, I just know that including a tag "Fuk Tak Chi building" for the photograph that was picked for publication made the difference.
Bonus metadata – skip this section if tech-talk makes your eyes glaze over . Very few cameras support this out of the box, but all photographs can be geo-tagged, i.e., have latitude and longitude information embedded that tells you exactly where in the world this photograph was taken. If you are willing to invest in the time, you get to visualize your photographs in a whole new way. I’m not going to spend too much time talking about my geo-tagging workflow , suffice it to say it has far too many moving parts in it 
.
What it essentially boils down to is this – I happened to be in the right place in the right time, I was prepared and I put in some effort afterwards to help my photograph get noticed. In other words, I was lucky
Talk about shooting your mouth off
A while back I had made a long-ish post about the Recent comments feed on Flickr and how the lack of authentication could allow people to see your non-public photos.
Well I recently had posted some photos to my Flickr photostream, that were in fact marked as private (for friends & family only) and one of them recently attracted a comment.
Guess what – they never showed up in my RSS reader. That’s when I took a closer look at the description for the recent comments feed, and I realized it says “All comments posted to your public photos and/or sets.”
D-oh! So that’s how Flickr is overcoming the lack of authentication issue. Private photos and messages never appear in RSS.
I’m partly relieved and partly annoyed. Relieved – since that means your private photos are still private. Annoyed – because this means there is a chance that someone might miss these comments. Since you have to log into Flickr to see these comments, if you happen to be one of those Flickr “superstars” who attract lots of comments right off the bat, there is a good chance comments on private photos will get lost.
Anyhoo, just wanted to say “my bad, my bad!”
On a bit of a RSS trip here aren’t we? 
Anyway, this is something I came across a few weeks back and it’s been bugging me ever since.
Since everyone likes a stroke (and I’m no exception) – I have subscribed to the feed for comments on my photos at Flickr. Now, the RSS feed for the recent comments takes the following format:
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/activity.gne?user_id=<Your Flickr ID>&format=rss_200
The Flickr ID in the above link is a 12-character alpha-numeric string that every Flickr User gets when they register for the first time.
Unfortunately, there is no authentication on this particular RSS feed – which means that if you know a user’s Flickr ID, you can easily see all the comments that any one makes on that individual’s photos.
The Flickr ID is incredibly easy to find as well – if you haven’t picked a “easy name” for your Flickr photostream – it directly appears on your photostream. Even otherwise, the Flickr API provides this information readily and there are Greasemonkey scripts out there that make this a single right-click.
So what’s the problem you ask? Anyone can see those comments anyway – sheesh! Well yes, anyone can see the comments on your public photos, but by reading your recent comments feed they can see comments on any private photos as well, i.e., those photos which you have marked as family/friends only.
Further more, the recent comments feed provides the URL for the medium size of your private photos. Downloading the original resolution images is then trivial – merely requiring replacement of a “_m” in the URL with a “_o”.
The creep factor just increased substantially didn’t it?
Now by default, using the RSS format means that no authentication mechanims are supported directly. Basic authentication can be used (which would take the format http://username : password@api.flickr.com/services/feeds/activity.gne?user_id=<Your Flickr ID>&format=rss_200), but this isn’t directly supported by the protocol.
On the other hand, the ATOM format does support authentication (see the RFC) and Flickr infact uses ATOM for all photostream RSS feeds. So why not switch the private feeds to ATOM as well?
For the oldest reason in software development: security is just not sexy – so something like this is always going to fall to the bottom of the pile.
Right upto the moment when some-one abuses this loop-hole that is. And the Flickr forums go up in flames (as they have tended to do fairly regularly these days).
Here’s hoping this gets patched soon – oh and could I get a pony with that?
Update: I spoke to soon. Flickr does in fact protect your private photos. See this follow-up post.
*deep breath*, originally uploaded by JKonig.
It’s not so much about her photographs, but her way of pulling in you right into the moment when that photograph was taken – letting you see for a minute what was in the photographer’s mind when the photo was taken is just a priceless gift.
So please if you have a minute – make a wish for jkonig. Thank you!
I’ve been looking around for a photo sharing site that would offer:
- Unlimited Storage
- High bandwidth
- The option for anyone viewing the image to see larger thumbnails and even the original image and not just one tiny 100×100 square
- Tagging
- Easy to use interface
Finally realized that there was no free site that met all these requirements and decided to get a Flickr Pro account. I must say that it’s absolutely worth it. Consider me a “Flickrite” now
