Significant upgrades

Yahoo is expected to announce significant upgrades to [Flickr] on Monday as well, and one source who has seen the new version of Flickr described it as “stunning.”

Now this I'm excited about. (via ReadWrite)

Update: Hell, yes!

Yumblr

I can only speculate, but from what I’ve read elsewhere, Tumblr would’ve run out of funding money soon, so at some point, the cat-lovers and cutters would have had to grin and bear it or take their business elsewhere either way.

Rumor has it that running a service (especially one used by millions) costs money, and since I first joined Tumblr a few years ago, I’ve paid precisely fuck all, which is what I assume everyone else paid too.

Fear of change is natural, and sure, Flickr has definitely been mismanaged until fairly recently, but still – take heart, kink lovers: there’s loads of skeevy porn still to be found there, Yahoo! takeover or not.

Furthermore, provided these (so far, entirely) unsubstantiated rumors are true, Yahoo! has agreed to mostly leave Karp to his own devices for the next 3 or 4 years, at which point there’s a good chance Google will own and run everything everywhere anyway.

Update: It’s official!

Death of a Reader

“No”

Apple’s products say “no” a lot. No, you can’t have that hardware keyboard or removable battery. No, you can’t install that app. No, you can’t have that feature. [...] As Apple has grown, so has the number of people who have fallen on the wrong end of its opinionated product design.

Marco Ament on the strange levels of anger Apple seems to create. He is immediately called out by angry Android users who blame, naturally, Apple.

“Shades”

…the modular, sleek SpectreOne desktop machine may have shades of an Apple iMac…

I don’t want to exacerbate the pissing contest, so will merely say this: Giggle.

Thoughts on Flickr

Most of us old warhorses who have been around the Internet a while (back when we had to use dial-up modems, barefoot in winter etc.) probably have at least a passing relationship with Flickr. As has been documented elsewhere (extensively, I might add), Yahoo! bought Flickr and, as is Yahoo!’s won’t, let it go to shit.

Granted, it’s not quite that bad. Flickr is still fundamentally a decent service, but it’s stuck in 2005 and according to my calendar, this is the year 2012. Flickr could’ve – should’ve – been Instagram. It could also be a neat alternative to Pinterest, at least for users such as myself.

Now, I do suspect things are afoot already: Apple’s Mountain Lion is getting integration with Flickr. This should help drive traffic to the site, especially if the same integration comes to iOS, which is arguably more important than Apple’s desktop offerings. Of course, users still need to actually like Flickr when they get there, and of course, start to use it.

More important than Apple integration, however, is the news that Google’s “20th employee,” Marissa Meyer, has been hired as Yahoo!’s new CEO. (Leading to this within a day of the announcement) Hiring her may help Yahoo! and it may not, but Meyer gets the web. For an Internet company, I can see that being potentially helpful. (Granted, Google bought Picasa and let the web interface stagnate, though Google+, the anti-social network is arguably meant to replace it)

So here are a few things I’d like to see Flickr get on:

1. A decent app. I don’t know what the Android app is like, as there wasn’t one back when I had an Android phone, but the iPhone app is, frankly, a disgrace. After waiting for ages, I finally paid for FlickStackr. (Which is very good, by the way, but a lot of the functionality should be in the official app.) I was actually rather hoping they’d buy (the now-defunct) PicPlz.
2. A bookmarklet. How hard can it be? There was a functioning Flickr bookmarklet back in 2007, made by a user. You can’t seriously claim Yahoo! can’t make this themselves. I get that new companies like Pinterest (and vi.sualize.us, which I’ve been using for years) are necessary to shake stuff up, but personally, I’d rather have a “collection stream” on Flickr. Sure, storage costs money, but maybe as part of the paid service (which I’ve been using since 2006)?
3. A make-over. Flickr has looked the same for years. Granted, that has little impact on basic functionality, except when it does, but a new coat of paint wouldn’t hurt either. Hey, I’m fickle; so sue me.

I still have faith in Flickr. The team seems to be on ”our” side, and have acknowledged the many issues of their stagnant service. The main problem is Yahoo! itself. I hope they’ll come to understand that they have a solid product on their hands that could potentially prove fantastic for them, provided they focus on the end user instead of the shareholder. (Granted, I’m not an economist, but I would think there’s more money in retaining happy users than driving them all away.)

Plus one

I admit it: I'm kind of burned out on Social networks at this point. I am a member, or have been, of: Friendster, Pownce, Orkut (possibly Jaiku, who gives a shit can keep track?), Twitter (2 accounts + around 6 joke accounts), Facebook, Tumblr (3 blogs), LinkedIn, Coroflot (when it was called something else), Identi.Ca, kvitre.no, WordPress.com, Fluther (more of a community), MySpace, bebo, delicious, Diaspora (the hub at poddery.com), Flickr, Foursquare (more here), Gowalla, Posterous (more here), GoodReads, Path, Last.fm, LiveJournal, My Opera, Pinterest, Virb, Instagram, PicPlz, soup.io and WAYN. And that's just the stuff I remember off top of my head.

Lastly, of course, there's Google+, the mighty G's attempt at coralling you into an even smaller corner of the Internet. I have no doubt that Sergey and Larry's pet eventually will take off in a big way, much like Android has. “If you build it, they will come,” as the movie said, and ultimately, the people will haz their hamburgerz, and the hardcore G+ users will complain about getting what they wanted in the first place: the patronage of the common rabble. So it goes.

At the moment, however, it's something of a ghost town over there. I assume my user pattern is pretty standard: drop by every now and then, look around, then leave. The new redesign is very nice; clean, simple and appealing. You can do pretty much anything, and I'm told that if you know where to look (and can be bothered to do so) there's lots of interesting content to be found. On the whole, though, I just can't be bothered. I much prefer blogging here and sharing elsewhere, like on Tumblr.

More than the post-apocalyptic experience, though, I think what gets me most about Google+ is its evangelists: huffy folks, most of whom deliver a similar cri de coeur with equal fervour: “G+ is where I go for interesting people with whom I have interesting conversations about interesting things, without all the idiot updates from my stupid friends.”

I don't know about you, but that line of arguing doesn't really make me feel terribly wanted. Paradoxically, in attempting to make you switch to The Next Big Thing, the early adopters and hardliners have made Google+ pretty unappealing: beyond Page and Brin's vaguely desperate pleas to come play with them (a tactic we all know won't get you laid), it sounds like a social network for people who are (or at least consider themselves) better than you, a social network without all that pesky, you know, social stuff.

Like I said, I have no doubt Google+ will eventually be huge. The user base has already grown a lot, in no little part thanks to, ahem, creative registration (yeah, sure, ogling watching that Secret video counts as using G+). It's not that far a stretch to imagine that you'll eventually need to sign up for an account just to use Google Search. Hyperbolic? Perhaps. Assuming activated Android phones automatically will count as well: probably less so.

I understand Google has every right to do this; the company can do whatever they want. They've built a billion-dollar empire, a colossus straddling the whole globe, pushing the future before them, while I'm just an asshole with a blog, so what do I know? Regardless, It still seems vaguely off to me, a retroactive move to catch up from a company that's usually in the lead.

I'll readily admit there's a lot that annoys me about Facebook, but my friends are there, and unlike the most vociferous Google+ users, I actually like my friends, warts and all.