Geekblok

I’ve ranted about OpenID before and in my predictions for 2008, I even wrote that OpenID will get supported more and more.

Today, Yahoo! announced that their OpenID implementation (as a provider) has opened up as a public beta. This means that you can use your Flickr photo URL (or custom me.yahoo.com URL) to log in to a lot of places. This will most likely boost the OpenID implementations (for now you can offer your service to (theoretically) all the Yahoo!/Flickr users).

Let’s see if my OpenID prediction becomes reality. As for the measurement, I’ll use The OpenID Directory. Currently, they have listed 471 websites.

Will Google and Microsoft follow soon with OpenID?

Due to the Flickr API, we see new initiatives pop up everywhere. Today I’d like to show you a little game called PhotoSoup. The site itself describes the game as:

PhotoSoup is a visual word puzzle generator that allows users to create word search puzzles with tag-photo pairs taken from Flickr. The tag is hidden in the puzzle, and only the associated photo is shown as a clue. The objective is to find all hidden tags in the puzzle before you run out of time.

The game is quite simple. Find all the words (tags) that describe the images around the puzzle and select them before you run out of time. Due to some weird tags you can never guess (like “bw”, “joe”, “henry” etc.), you might want to hit the “Show Hints” button. This way, you’ll see the tags you’re expected to find.

Let’s look at a sample game with topic: “geek”

Warning: you may find this game addictive!

Tagging your photos on Flickr can help you to describe the photo. By tagging them, you can search for that specific photo with ease. Smark helps you with this tagging process in quite an elegant way.

After selecting the set(s) you want to review (and tag), you see the photos individually and suggested as well as recently used tags are shown beneath the images. Simply add tags and navigate to the next image (note: you can use your cursor keys to navigate, woohoo!).

It’s working rather nice and the author of the website is open to suggestion. The changes requested by me were implemented within a day. If you have suggestions, dump them in the Flickr group

Last, but not least, “smark contains no additives or preservatives”.

Flickr is a great place to store your photos. You can keep pictures private or share them with friends, family or the entire world.

But sometimes, those four levels of privacy are not enough. Imagine you have pictures of your wedding and you don’t want the world to see them. Yet you do want to share them with your not-so-tech-savvy uncle who provided the awesome car. Too bad he refuses to sign up for a free Flickr account. This is where Invitr steps in. It allows you to share private pictures with anybody who has an email account (and that most likely includes uncle Bob).

After logging in with your Flickr account, you can select the pictures you’d like to share. Select them all, add the email address(es) and set an optional expiry date. After that, the recipients will receive an email with a unique link that shows them your lovely wedding photos (or any other photos you might have selected).