flickr

Stewart Butterfield's Tiny Speck team

Last July, TechCrunch ran an item about Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's recent tweet that his new company was hiring.

"Maybe I make a terrible boss, but at least I know it," he tweeted. "Work with me." And based on that tiny little missive, his until-then unknown start-up Tiny Speck was flooded with job applicants hoping they join Butterfield as he and his partners made a second attempt at catching lightning in the Web 2.0 bottle.

Of course, no one knew at that point what Tiny Speck was up to, beyond the fact that the … Read more

Watching the birth of Flickr co-founder's gaming start-up

SAN FRANCISCO--Stewart Butterfield and his business partner Cal Henderson stared at the MacBook Pro in front of them.

For nearly a year, they'd been struggling to figure out what to call the game their start-up was building. Any time a team member loaded a working version, they'd sit through a few seconds of a splash screen with nothing on it but a generic title featuring little more than the name and logo of their company.

But now, the group had finally given their baby an official moniker: Glitch. And this was one of the first times the two … Read more

Photo sharing for everyone

Flickr, a popular photo-sharing and -hosting service owned by Yahoo, is to photos what YouTube is to video: it is the quintessential picture site. The service provides a virtual gallery (or many virtual galleries, if you prefer) where people share and explore each other's photos, and the result is an active and engaged community with a vested interest in digital photography.

Flickr offers a plethora of features, which vary depending on whether you subscribe to the free service or the pro version, which runs $24.95. Basic users can share and host hundreds of their own pictures on Flickr … Read more

Browse and download from Flickr quickly

Viewfinder is a desktop app that makes finding and downloading photos from Flickr much faster and easier. The app's well-designed, streamlined interface is centered, fittingly, around Flickr search results: you just type your terms into a search bar (specify text or tags in a drop-down menu), and the main window is quickly populated by results that you can preview, download, or open in Flickr using your browser. What makes this app so helpful is its ability to apply filters to your results; so, for example, you can look only at photos licensed under Creative Commons (more likely to be … Read more

Microsoft, Yahoo help keep India away from porn?

Birds do it. Bees do it. It's just that these days in India it may be a little harder to watch online images of human beings doing it.

Sex is often a slightly thorny subject (well, maybe except in France). However, varying attitudes around the world to varying sexual practices mean search engines must adjust their positions accordingly.

So it may sadden some to hear of a Guardian special investigation that appears to have unearthed evidence of Microsoft and Yahoo search engines complying with a new Indian law offering severe punishment for the display of "lascivious" content.… Read more

13 more sites expel NY sex offenders

Sites owned by Yahoo, AOL, and Google have joined Facebook and MySpace in expelling New York sex offenders from their rolls.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced Thursday that Google's Orkut.com, AOL's Bebo.com, and Yahoo's Flickr.com are among 13 additional social-networking sites to use sex offender data available through New York's Electronic Securing and Targeting of Online Predators Act (E-Stop) to find and disable accounts associated with registered sex offenders.

Other companies that have agreed to cooperate include BlackPlanet.com, Classmates.com, Flixster.com, Fotolog.com, hi5.com, MyLife.com, Stickam.com, … Read more

Buzz Out Loud Podcast 1112: Rupert Murdoch battles infinity

Microsoft is apparently willing to pay Rupert Murdoch to block Google from indexing any of his company's Web sites. Are we headed toward a world where the search engine you use determines what news you get? Probably not. We explain why Murdoch may be thinking in an old fashioned limited way rather than in the current infinite Internet way. We also declare the patent office baroque, and ask it to lose weight.

Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) Subscribe with RSS (video) EPISODE 1,112

Microsoft offers to pay News Corp. to “de-list” … Read more

Google cuts Picasa photo storage prices

Google has cut the price to store photos at its Picasa Web Albums site by a factor of eight.

The photo-sharing site offers 1GB of photo and video storage for free, but now going beyond that limit costs less. The options now range from $5 a year for 20GB to $4,096 a year for a whopping 16 terabytes.

"Today we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage even more affordable. You can now buy 20GB for only $5 a year--that's twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for … Read more

Getty and Flickr deepen photo-licensing ties

Yahoo's Flickr site has deepened its relationship with photo-licensing power Getty Images so photographers can nominate their own photos for inclusion in Getty's Flickr Collection.

Previously, Getty decided which images it believed were commercially viable, and since the program launched in July 2008, it has put together a collection of more than 60,000 commercial images. Now photographers, instead of just being able to indicate that they're willing to be contacted by Getty, can actively submit a portfolio of images.

"A submission should include exactly 10 images that represent what you consider to be the best … Read more