Archive

Flickr’s new iPhone web interface = AWESOME (with screenshots!)

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on October 1, 2008
. 2 Comments

Saw word from John “Daring Fireball” Gruber tonight that Flickr finally launched an iPhone optimized web interface. Finally! :-)

Of course, I had to check it out right away, and I agree with John - it’s great. Possibly the best iPhone web interface I’ve seen. Really nice. There’s no way to upload photos from the site (though they do point out that you can upload via email, which I’ve been doing from the beginning from my iPhone, and it works really well). But that’s about the only thing I can see that’s missing.

Update - What Doesn’t Work: The things that work on the desktop but don’t work on the iPhone version are basically the parts of the site that use Flash - the Uploadr, the Organizr, the Map, and Video playback (you can still see video pages and their comments, you just can’t play the videos). Oh, and Slideshows. Everything else works. I see this as one big benefit of all the work Flickr did a long time ago to move as much of their interface as possible into Ajax and javascript, and away from Flash (which doesn’t work on the iPhone, and likely never will).

To check it out yourself, go to m.flickr.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch. I’m sure the other methods you can use to trick sites into thinking you’re using an iPhone will work, too. There’s even a nice iPhone Home Screen icon if you want to save a bookmark to it there, and launch it from the Home Screen.

I took a bunch of screenshots. Here they are, in no particular order:

Flickr iPhone Interface - HomeFlickr iPhone Interface - Activity
Flickr iPhone Interface - My PhotostreamFlickr iPhone Interface - Single Photo with Comments
Flickr iPhone Interface - Recent from ContactsFlickr iPhone Interface - My Favorites
Flickr iPhone Interface - Contact ListFlickr iPhone Interface - More
Flickr iPhone Interface - SearchFlickr iPhone Interface - Explore/Interesting
Flickr iPhone Interface - CollectionsFlickr iPhone Interface - Home Screen Icon


Tying Your Tubes with WordPress - My Session at WordCamp Portland

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on September 27, 2008
. 5 Comments

I’m giving a session at WordCamp Portland today on “Tying Your Tubes with WordPress“, all about integrating all the difference places you probably write, read, and discuss things on the web into your WordPress blog. This post is the reference for the session, with the slides (such as they are - most of it is going to be discussion) and links to the plugins I talk about.

Here are the few slides I put together, on Google Docs. I’m working on them as we speak, but by the time the session starts, they should be more or less final:


And here are links to the plugins/tools that I’m going to talk about:

  • Alex King’s Twitter Tools - to put daily tweet digests on your blog as posts (great for archiving them, since Twitter cut off access to tweets older than a few pages).

  • K2 Theme - besides the TON of other great things it can do, it’s great for putting tweets, etc. in a sidebar using “Asides”. The K2 Support Forum is a GREAT resource if you have questions or need help.
  • How to exclude a category (say, your tweet digest) from your site’s RSS feed. Either have people subscribe to the funky URL you get from this, or if you use FeedBurner, just tell it that the funky URL is your source feed.
  • FriendFeed Comments - show comments and likes that your post gets on FriendFeed right on the post itself.
  • FriendFeed Feed Widget - for showing your last 10 or so items that end up on FriendFeed right on your blog. There are some other cool badges on that page. Similar to Twitter badges, which I don’t use (I use Twitter Tools’ daily digests instead).
  • soup.io, for publishing blended feeds. I use this for my lifestream and my linkblog.

I’ll add any other info that comes up during the session, and if you have any questions, post them in the comments! Woo hoo WordCamp Portland! :-)


More on Community Building: Hosting a Party vs Building a Building

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on September 26, 2008
. 0 Comments

Following up my last post on how building a community is like hosting a party, I saw a great post this morning from Doc Searls, wherein he riffs on how companies come to him all the time, and say “we’ve built this great site, why don’t more people visit it?”:

The other day I was sitting in the company of leaders in one industrial category. (I won’t say which because it’s beside the point I want to make.) A question arose: Why are there so few visitors to our websites? Millions use their services, yet few bother with visiting their sites, except every once in awhile.

The answer, I suggested, was that their sites were buildings. They were architected, designed and constructed. They were conceived and built on the real estate model: domains with addresses, places people could visit. They were necessary and sufficient for the old Static Web, but lacked sufficiency for the Live one.

This goes RIGHT along with what I’ve been saying about how community building is like hosting a party. So many people come to me and say “we’ve built this great community site. Now how do we get people to use it?” They’ve built a building. A house for the party to happen in. It’s a usually necessary first step (the party COULD happen “in the streets” on Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. without a “house” of its own), but it’s ONLY a first step.

Once you’ve got a party house, stop worrying about the house, and start worrying about getting people to come to the party and have a good time!


Building a Community is like Hosting a Party. Don’t Be a Bad Party Host!

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on September 24, 2008
. 9 Comments

My job and my passion is community building. More specifically, exploring new ways of community building, and teaching them to other people. Quite often, I end up using the metaphor of hosting a party to describe what it’s like to build a community. A lot of what it takes to host a great party is the same as what it takes to build a great community.

My friend and Community Rock Star, Dawn Foster, has been posting a series of must-read posts over at her blog, Fast Wonder. If you work in online community building (and if you think about it hard enough, you probably do, even if you don’t realize it), you absolutely MUST subscribe to Dawn’s blog. She’s brilliant, and speaks the truth. Listen to her, and do what she says. :-)

Her latest post is on who “owns” a community, and the tendency that companies have to sometimes act like dictators when they “own” the community (by hosting it on their site, etc.). They do things like delete any comments that they don’t like, or that portray them in a less than glowing light (rather than establishing a comment policy, and only removing comments that break one of the rules). It’s a great post, and the comment I left got kind of long, so, never being one to waste the opportunity to recycle my own words so more people will read them, I’m reposting here. :-)

Trying to get “owners” to not freak out and do things like delete negative or critical (but otherwise non-rule-breaking) comments is hard.

The company that “hosts” a community should think of itself as en equal member of the community, with some special responsibilities. When you host a community, you’re throwing the party. Sure, you build and “own” the house (site) where the party will happen. You invite interesting people to come to the party, and hopefully have other interesting people for them to talk to, and interesting topics for everyone. You can provide amusements, but not stupid party games (no one likes to be forced into doing something they don’t like at a party). You’re there in case something goes wrong, and needs to be addressed. But if you’re a good party host, you want to make sure things go smoothly, and enjoy the party equally for yourself, NOT make yourself the center of attention the whole time.

Every time I think about it, I find more ways the party metaphor applies to community building. I think in this case, with ownership, you could say that sure, a party host COULD make and enforce abitrary rules, and act like a dictator, trying to control what people talk about, because it’s “their” house or “their” party. But that makes the party suck. No one will want to stay if you start acting like that. And in the end, besides defeating the whole purpose of having a great party/community, it’s really just embarrassing. No one likes an overbearing, self-agrandizing party/community host. :-)

So, when you’re building an online community, or hosting a party in your home, don’t be “that guy”. Think about how to make the party/community more fun, more engaging, and above all, kick more ass. Everything else is just frosting.


Google Android/T-Mobile G1 Phone breaks cover. But it’s no iPhone.

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on September 23, 2008
. 8 Comments

There’s a group of people who don’t want or can’t have an iPhone. They have numerous reasons. Maybe they’re locked into T-Mobile, and they can’t switch to AT&T. Maybe they’ve convinced themselves that they can’t live without a hardware keyboard. Maybe they’re open source patriots who feel like Apple exercises too much control over what you can and can’t do on the iPhone. Heck, most iPhone owners (myself included) probably have those feelings in some measure. But for the die hards, these reasons have been enough to prevent them from just giving in and getting an iPhone. In the 14 months that the iPhone has been available in the U.S., Apple has whittled the resolve of this group down as much as it probably can. The ones that are left, iPhoneless, are probably NEVER going to be convinced.

For those people, today is an important day. Today, the T-Mobile G1 (aka the HTC Dream, aka the gPhone), which runs Google’s open source Android operating system, was officially announced. And choruses of heavenly angels were heard. :-)

Photo courtesy Flickr user bpedro, Creative Commons

I’m an avowed Apple fan and iPhone lover, but Android-based phones are fascinating to me. I’ve been perusing the breathless online accounts of “hands on” experiences, shakycam video, and armchair analysis (e.g., this post) that the G1 has generated since it’s launch event in New York this morning. Here’s what I think so far.

The G1 is a GREAT device. It can do amazing things. It’s got wifi, GPS, and works on a (supposedly-fast-but-so-new-that-no-one-really-knows-yet) 3G network. It’s only $179 with two year contract ($20 less than the iPhone - take THAT, Apple!). You can get Google Maps with Street View. You can browse and buy from 6 million DRM-free MP3s at Amazon, right on the phone. There’s an apps “marketplace” where you can download programs to make your phone into a flashlight, or a Tamagotchi, or whatever. It’s got a nice 3 megapixel camera. It integrates with Gmail and Google Calendar. It’s got a real, honest-to-Sergey physical keyboard that hides under the slide-out screen. Check out these two hands on videos from Engadget for all the dirty details.

It has some quirks. For example, HTC, the company that makes the hardware for most of the smartphones in the world (like the Palm Treos, and most Windows Mobile devices), has, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the G1 shouldn’t have a standard 3.5mm stereo headphone jack. Instead, it gets a single mini USB jack, for syncing, charging, power, and audio, and uses HTC’s proprietary “ExtUSB” dongle. The G1 ships with some (probably cheap, almost certainly uncomfortable and tinny sounding) earbuds that can use this proprietary connection. But if you want to use your own earbuds or headphones, you’ll have to get an ExtUSB dongle, sold separately, and rumored not to be available until some time after the October 22 on-sale date of the phone. To quote Engadget, “Why, HTC!? Why?!” So much for replacing your iPod with the G1. And what’s up with the vast bezel of blank plastic that surrounds the screen? And the bananaphone curvature that the bottom part has, when viewed from the side? I have my doubts about how usable the off center keyboard will be, when flipped open in landscape mode. Oh, and if you’re a corporate Exchange email/calendar user? You’re out of luck, at least until someone writes a decent Exchange ActiveSync app.

No word on how expensive T-Mobile’s 3G data plans will be (though they’d be insane to make them more than the $30/month that AT&T extracts from iPhone users - especially since their Terms of Service set a soft limit of 1GB data transfer per month - something you could EASILY blow through on a device like this). And while T-Mobile will happily sell you an unsubsidized (no contract) G1 for $399, you don’t get to SIM unlock it and take it to another network until you’ve been a T-Mobile customer in good standing for 90 days. And forget about tethering to use it as a 3G modem for your laptop.

But, quirks aside, I’m certain that the G1 will be a popular phone. For the holdouts who somehow don’t have an iPhone, this is the phone to get. It absolutely kills any Windows Mobile phone I’ve seen or used. And unless you’re locked in to BlackBerry via your company or something, I’d say that the gPhone is better than a BlackBerry, too.

So, if you want to or can be an iPhone person? You probably already are. For everyone else, your new phone has arrived. :-)


Writer’s Block. I has it.

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on September 20, 2008
. 3 Comments

Hope it won’t last too much longer.

I’m still posting lots and lots of short stuff, as usual, so make sure you check me out on Twitter, FriendFeed, and my Linkblog (where I post interesting news and my take on it). Feel free to subscribe via the relevant means (feed, follow, etc.) if you want to automate the whole process.

See you soon! :-)


Counterpoint: The State of Search on the Kindle

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on September 4, 2008
. 2 Comments

(Over on the Intel Software Network blog, software ninja Clay Breshears put up a post today about why he will “Never Own an Electronic Book”. Turns out his frustration stems from how hard it is to search for something, if you don’t know exactly what you’re searching for. This is a problem not just for ebooks and readers like the Kindle, but for the web and our text-oriented world in general.

I typed up a response to Clay in a comment, which I’m reproducing here, because I think it illustrates that things aren’t as bad as they seem, and not yet as good as they should be.)

Clay, you make a very good point, but it seems to be aimed at the effectiveness of search in general, rather than just on ebook readers (though they suffer in the same way). Just like prices can only come down, I hope that natural language search can only get better from here.

That said, as a rabid Kindle fan, the situation there might not be as bad as you fear. ;-)

When you search on a Kindle, it searches across all the books you have on the device (it indexes them during idle time while you’re reading, and new books show up in the index quickly). And here’s what the search results page looks like:


Image credit Robert Mohns via Flickr

It shows you how many results were found in each book, and by selecting that book, you can quickly skip back and forth between the hits.

Notice that there are also options to find results from the web, Wikipedia, the Kindle Store, and the built-in dictionary on the Kindle, if what you’re looking for isn’t in one of your books.

Search DOES need to get better, but I’m pretty happy with how well it works on the Kindle today. Come by next time you’re in the neighborhood, and I’ll give you a demo! :-)


New Google Reader Feature - Inline Web Page Preview (Not!)

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on August 31, 2008
. 4 Comments

Update: I’m an idiot. This is a feature that’s part of Lifehacker’s Better GReader Firefox extension that I installed the other day. I just now noticed the behavior, and though it was part of Google Reader itself. Still, a cool feature - check out Better GReader for that and more! And sorry for the false alarm. Here I thought I was breaking news on a new feature! ;-)

Just noticed this - a new Google Reader feature!

Google Reader Inline Preview


When I clicked the post title, instead of opening in a new tab, as usual, it opened an inline preview of the entire target web page, right there inside Google Reader.

There’s a new “Preview” button at the bottom of the entry, too, where you can toggle the preview on and off.

Haven’t read anything from Google about this feature yet, but it’s neato! :-)


I Hate the Term “User Generated Content”. How About “Community-Curated Works” Instead?

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on August 28, 2008
. 6 Comments

Something about the term “user generated content” has bugged me ever since I first heard it. I’m enthusiastically behind *what it actually means*. But the term itself just sticks in my craw. It makes me think of a galley full of slaves users, chained down, “generating” “content”.

I just came across this post about the term from Ted Ernst at AboutUs (a Portland-based wiki company where Ward Cunningham, the guy who invented the wiki concept, works):

The individual contribution is not what’s important, it’s not what makes everything work — it’s the fact that we have a community of contributors who implicitly agree to work together, to collaborate, to try and constantly improve the content.

It’s a short post, and worth a read. It references (and quotes) a great post by Brianna, a Wikimedia admin, where the idea originated. Read that one, too:

Actually, there’s only one problem at root: the attitude which leads one to choose these words. That attitude is one from the corporate world. That the best term they could come up with was “user-generated content” shows what a limited understanding the business world has of what it is we’re doing. And why should we settle for the best term THEY can come up with?

I’m a big believer that names are important. They have power and significance beyond what you think.

Food for thought.


Best way to upload photos from an iPhone, and preserve location information (or: review of Flickup for iPhone)

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on August 20, 2008
. 8 Comments

I use Flickr to store my photos online. You can “geotag” your photos on Flickr, to show where, exactly, they were taken (on a map). I’ve geotagged most of the 4000+ photos I have on Flickr. By hand, dragging them to the correct location on the map. What a pain.

The iPhone, with the new 2.0 software, can take pictures and tag them with your current location (if you have an iPhone 3G with real GPS, this location information is usually MUCH more precise). Suddenly, the dream of being able to get photos from the iPhone to Flickr, WITHOUT having to manually geotag or othewise manipulate them, seemed to be within reach.

So close, yet so far away.

Right now, there are a few ways to get photos from an iPhone to Flickr. The easiest, I think, is to setup the “upload by email” feature on Flickr. This gives you a secret email address that, when sent a photo as an attachment, uploads the photo to Flickr for you. This is how I get iPhone photos onto Flickr 99% of the time. The downside is, the photos get sent at a much smaller size (640×480) than they were taken at (1600×1200). On top of that, all of the “EXIF” metadata (what make and model camera took the picture, what exposure settings were used, etc.) gets stripped off of the photo when it’s emailed. This includes the geotag/location information. So it arrives at Flickr shrunken and lobotomized and unaware of where it was taken. So sad.

Once the App Store launched, Flickr uploader apps started appearing in droves. AirMe seems to be a popular one, but I tested it, and it didn’t preserve the geodata, (and I think it shrunk the photos, too). So I deleted it.

I’ve been watching the development of an app called Flickup with interest. The author, Martin Gordon (@kodachrome22 on Twitter), is someone I kind of know from Ars Technica. But most importantly, the feature list of Flickup looked promising - it can upload photos and preserve the geotag/location information. It’s not free ($1.99), so I waited a little longer to try it than I would have otherwise, but try it I have, and I’m pleased (if not 100% ecstatic) with the results.

First of all, Flickup DOES preserve the geotag information of the photos it uploads (with a caveat):

Flickup Geo Test


This is a photo I took from within the Flickup app, and uploaded straight to Flickr. The app asked me for permission to use my location (like all location-aware iPhone apps do), which I granted, et viola! The photo appears on the map where it was taken (to the best of my iPhone’s knowledge). Click on the photo then click “map” to see it - I can’t figure out a way to direct link to a single photo on the map on Flickr.

Even better, for photos taken from within the Flickup app (as opposed to uploading saved pictures from the Photo Album), the photos go up to Flickr in their full 2 megapixel 1600×1200 glory.

If you’re looking for an app ONLY to take pictures, and send them directly to Flickr, you can stop reading here. Flickup is perfect, and does everything you’d expect it to (you can edit the title, description, and tags of the photos, etc., too).

So what are the caveats? They have to do with uploading saved pictures from the iPhone’s Photo Album.

First, when you upload a saved photo from the album, it goes as a shrunken 640×480 version. Martin says this has to do with some limitations in the iPhone’s APIs (which I believe). He also says that the API is the cause of all the other EXIF metadata being stripped from the photos (which is probably what makes this such a problem in the first place - fix your stupid APIs, Apple!) Don’t count this against Martin or Flickup.

Second, when you upload a saved picture from the album, Flickup WILL geotag it, but it appears to grab your CURRENT location (it asks), rather than use the location data stored in the photo. In other words, it will geotag the photo with the location of where it was UPLOADED, instead of where it was TAKEN. Martin acknowledges this is sub-optimal.

Flickup from Photo Album Test


(A photo uploaded from my Photo Album, but geotagged at the time of upload.)

If what Martin says about the Apple APIs stripping out EXIF metadata (and again, I have no reason not to believe this is true), then there’s probably no way for Flickup (or any other photo uploader app) to preserve a photo’s ORIGINAL location information. The best we can hope for is how Flickup works - tag it with the location at the time of upload. If you take photos and upload them immediately, then there’s really no difference. But it’s super annoying that Apple comes SO CLOSE to making this work the way it should, yet falls short in the home stretch.

So, is Flickup worth the $1.99 in the App Store? If you’re a Flickr user that cares about a) uploading pictures at full size instead of 640×480, and/or actually preserving all that fancy location data that your iPhone can tack onto your photos, then yes, absolutely. Flickup is the way to go for full size geotagged Flickr uploading goodness.

There’s still room in this field for perfection. But it seems that it will depend on Apple making changes to the photo and location APIs on the iPhone, or some really clever developers figuring out ways to get around those restrictions. Guess which one I’m betting on happening first? ;-)