Piclens - A better perspective on web images &photos Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Delicious is an online bookmarking site that I use, as do many others. Unfortunately I've got so many bookmarked sites I can rarely remember what I have stored. Whilst the site allows you to apply tags to pages, hence permitting you to classify them, I am inconsistent in how I classify and hence two similar sites can end up with very different tags. This makes finding stuff tricky, but this is compounded when I can't remember the name of the site and so have to trawl through the links.

I've often wished for a visual thumbnail wall of my delicious sites, simply because I find it visual prompts of what the site looked like a quicker way of locating what I am looking for. Sadly, I've yet to find such a service.

In the same way, hunting for photos or images of my own or online tends to be very hit and miss. Classifications of tags work to some extent, but the reality is that nothing beats viewing the images. So I'm always on the lookout for tools to enable rapid browsing of images. On my laptop/desktop I use Picassa, the Google application which is excellent.

Well, today I found PicLens. It's a free browser plug from Cooliris, which provides astonishingly good image browsing facilities on the web. Clever use of zooming, panning and 3D style presentation not only improves your ability to scan, but is also visually stunning. It works on many photo/images sites inc Flickr, Photobucket and Picassa Web albums, as well as Google Image search.

Check the intro demo here.

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posted by John Wilson @ 9:05 AM Permanent Link ,

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In M&A, almost anything goes - MySpace & Photobucket Tuesday, May 08, 2007

A few weeks back there was a little news rumpus over the fact that MySpace had disabled Photobucket photos from appearing on MySpace pages. There was much discussion on blogs about why this had happened and how MySpace was throwing its weight around but how Photobucket was one of the most popular embedded items on MySpace pages and thus MySpace should be ready for some pushback.

Well, it turns out that this show of "force" was simply part of a negotiation tactic by MySpace who yesterday acquired Photobucket in a competitive bidding situation.

As Techcrunch observes "Some would argue that they play dirty poker, but shutting Photobucket down at a crucial point in the acquisition negotiations was a brilliant move, and may have shaved hundreds of millions of dollars off of the purchase price." Not to mention, it will have scared off some potential buyers in the race, worried about the impact on revenues and traffic this could have if implemented permanently.

Techcrunch contends that this was much better deal that YouTube was at a price of $250m on projected revenues of $25m. Or "To look at this another way, YouTube was paid about $67 per unique visitor. Photobucket got just $13."

It's ironic that another photo sharing site, Zooomr, had been struggling to find funding. I bet they find it easier now, although there is always a huge premium for being number one in a market and one of the potential future buyers will probably now be out of the running, unless of course they bought Zooomr for its technology and founder. Likewise, Flickr will probably be kicking itself for having sold for $25m.

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posted by John Wilson @ 9:53 AM Permanent Link ,

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