July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yahoo has updated its Flickr app for iPhone with several new features to improve the experience, including downloading Flickr photos to your phone, faster picture uploads, and being able to mention your friends with an “@” tag.

Flickr has struggled over the years to stay relevant, and the rise of Instagram hurt whatever chance it had of being the dominant mobile photo-sharing app. But Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer clearly likes Flickr and has made sure the app has gotten some attention. On the mobile front, Mayer said she wants to eliminate up to 80 percent of Yahoo’s mobile apps, but Flickr clearly isn’t one of them.

Yahoo added Instagram-like filters to Flickr for iPhone in December and now we’ve got more updates today. This indicates Mayer clearly wants Yahoo to be recognized as a product company again.

The new update includes the following additions:

• Download photos from Flickr straight to your camera roll.
• Mention and tag friends in a photo or post by using an @ sign.
• Photo uploads have been optimized to work faster.
• Flickr photos are saved immediately to your iPhone camera roll.
• Higher-resolution photos are displayed in lightbox so you can zoom in more.
• You can take photos using the iPhone’s volume up button.

Read the Yahoo’s blog post on the update below:

Take the conversations to another level!

You can now mention your friends right from the app. Start by typing in the @ sign, and then simply select one of your Flickr contacts to mention them in a title, description or comment. We will notify your friends that you mentioned them.

Download your photos!

You can now download your own photos from Flickr to your camera roll. Just tap the share icon on any of your photos and tap “Save Photo”. A few seconds later the photo will be in your iPhone’s camera roll in the largest available resolution.

Faster than light (nearly)!

Uploads from the Flickr app are much faster. We did some magic to optimize uploads, but also start uploading in the background while you think about the photo’s title or where you want to share it to. You basically get the best of both worlds: High resolution uploads that will make sure that you can enjoy your photos in great quality in the future, plus fast uploads in the background, so that you don’t have to wait.

And there is more: Photos that you take with the Flickr camera are now immediately saved to your camera roll. We also now display an even higher resolution image in the lightbox view, so you can zoom in further and see all of the details. Lastly you can now take photos in a snap by using your iPhone’s volume up button.

Take a look at the new mentions function in the photo below:

iPhone photographer photo via Flickr

Click here if you’d like my weekly column sent directly to your inbox. It takes less than a minute to sign up, and you’ll get the stories before they’re published on VentureBeat.

It’s time to take back our social networks.

It’s time, because the networks we rely on have been gradually making it clearer and clearer that we are not in control. What they mean by sharing is not what the web used to mean by sharing.

Facebook recently updated its terms of service, removing a sham user voting policy that it had in place for a few years. It also updated the terms of service for Instagram, giving itself the right to sell your location and other data to advertisers — and even to feature your photos in advertisements, although it subsequently removed that clause.

Meanwhile, Twitter is steadily restricting the ways you can use tweets. While the company did just start letting people download an archive of all their tweets, it’s increasingly resistant to letting you do anything else with your data, such as integrate it with services like If This Then That.

So, fine: These companies are entitled to run themselves the way they want, and you can participate or not, as you choose.

But I want to suggest a third way, which leaves you in control of your own stuff.

It’s called blogging.

That’s a bit of a retro suggestion, because blogs have taken a back seat to other forms of expression in the past few years. The RSS feed never engendered the kind of reciprocal sharing and commenting that a well-designed social network does, and as a result, many people have migrated away from blogging.

“I’ve used many social networks. Friendster, Facebook, everything. But they come and go. But my blog has always been my home on the web,” Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, told me last week. ”What’s changed in the past few years is that blogging started to feel a bit more lonely, because it wasn’t connected to these social news feeds.”

Like Mullenweg, those of us who have had blogs for a decade or more have been using them less and less, drawn to the ease of tweeting and the warm, friendly responsiveness of Facebook.

But now it’s possible to circle back to the blog without giving up the social networks. In fact, it’s increasingly easy to use a blog as the center of your social universe.

That’s because, while social networks like Facebook and Twitter are reluctant to share data out, they are eager to bring your data in. (This is why Twitter no longer lets you update your LinkedIn status from Twitter, but you can do the reverse and update your Twitter status from LinkedIn.)

So if they won’t share, fine: Make your own website the source, and share it out to various other networks as a way of staying in touch with your friends there.

If you’re a WordPress user, a feature called Publicize makes this super-simple. (It’s built in to WordPress.com, and for people who host their own blogs using the open-source WordPress.org code, Publicize is now available through the Jetpack plugin.) With Publicize, you connect your blog to the social services you want to update: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. You may also connect it to Yahoo’s profile updates, but I don’t know anyone who uses those. It doesn’t have Google+ integration, a minor downside if you are one of the few who uses Google+. Once connected, every post you publish on your blog posts to the social networks you chose.

This, I’ve found, creates a subtle shift in the way I think about blogging. Blog posts are more integrated into my social networks — plural — and in turn, my social networks are tied into the posts I write.

Sure, I’ll still get @ replies on Twitter and comments on Facebook, and I’ll still post short updates that are unique to those networks. But with this setup, I’m less dependent on any one social network.

If I get tired of one network — say, Instagram pisses me off with a terms of service update — it’s far easier for me to relocate somewhere else, like Yahoo’s long-disused Flickr service, which just added a new iOS app that has its own Instagram-like photo filters. (It’s easy to post photos from Flickr onto a WordPress blog, and from there to your social networks, but going the other direction — from blog to Flickr — is trickier, probably because Flickr isn’t tied in to those Yahoo updates I mentioned above.)

Flickr, by the way, has been sending me a flood of notifications about new people following me, something I haven’t seen in several years on the service. I’m not the only one to notice this. Apparently, its new app has caught people’s eyes.

Bringing blogs and social networks together is exactly what the makers of WordPress were thinking with the Publicize add-on.

“We found that when we hooked them up, you can have the best of both worlds,” Mullenweg told me. “We’ve been trying to just close that loop.”

WordPress has more clout than you might think: According to at least one estimate, it powers 17.5 percent of the world’s websites. (That includes VentureBeat, which runs on WordPress.com, as well as my personal blogs.) And it’s an open-source system, not controlled by any one company, and not beholden to advertisers or data miners or other interests.

If the WordPress plan works, more people may return to blogging, not just as a form of self-expression but as a way of organizing their online social lives. As that happens, it might — just maybe — encourage a slightly longer attention span than you can manage with 140 characters.

“WordPress users are some of the most savvy users on the web,” Mullenweg told me. “They have accounts everywhere. They already have a Facebook and a Tumblr and so forth. So it’s a challenge to provide something different, something that’s geared more toward longer-form content, rather than something that’s a distraction, that you check while you’re busy.”

Imagine that. Along with owning our own words, we might actually start to think a little more deeply about them, too.

Photo credit: Vicki’s Pics via photopin cc

Twitter’s expanded tweets party is minus one VIP guest, but several other social services seem eager to make an appearance. The Yahoo-owned Flickr, alongside the release of a new app for iPhone, threw in support for Twitter Cards this morning, bringing its newly filtered captures to tweets near you.

Flickr vice president Brett Wayn hinted about the integration in a blog post this morning. Head of product Markus Spiering confirmed to VentureBeat that the Twitter Cards update went live early this morning.

A Flickr photo as seen on Twitter

Now, when you share a photo from Flickr to Twitter (from the new iPhone app or anywhere else), that photo shows up right inside your tweet, meaning your followers can enjoy the capture without leaving Twitter. Flickr previously employed a custom integration that enabled Twitter desktop users to see photos in-line with tweets, Spiering said, but the Yahoo photo property reworked the functionality to make its photos viewable inside Twitter’s mobile apps as well.

“When you think about what a user really wants, if you use the Flickr app, you chose Flickr as your photo service, and you upload your photos to Flickr,” Spiering said. “But also you make the explicit choice to share somewhere else. As a user, your expectation probably is … that you want to have your photos look as best as possible on the destination that you share them to.”

In-tweet Flickr photos are powered by Twitter Cards, also known as expanded tweets. Third-party partners can work with the information network to put their content inside your tweets for instant gratification. A smattering of companies, most recently Pinterest, have worked with Twitter to get their content in front of more people. But not Instagram. The hot photo-sharing app collected its square, stylized shots and went home.

With both Twitter and Flickr now offering their members photo filters, some could now see the companies as competitors. Flickr, however, desperately needs support from the hipper, more popular Twitter if the veteran photo-sharing service is to make a comeback. It also appreciates its relationship with Twitter, Spiering told me.

“For the mobile launch, it was important to us that we fully embrace Twitter’s platform and capabilities to provide the best photo-sharing experience for Flickr users,” he said.

Flickr also made adjustments to how its photos are viewed on Facebook. Now, photos shared from Flickr to Facebook are shown in full and look as if they were directly uploaded to Facebook, Spiering explained.

Photo credit: dirkdallas/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yahoo’s been busy. Just a day after releasing slick new email apps for iOS and other platforms, Yahoo has updated its Flickr app for iPhone with Instagram-like filters, an easier sign-up process, and more.

The once promising Flickr photo-sharing service languished after Yahoo purchased it. First Facebook took over by giving everyone a place to share their favorite pics. Now the Facebook-owned Instagram is the king of mobile photo-sharing. So it only makes sense for Flickr to copy some of Facebook and Instagram’s ideas to get more people to use Flickr again or try it for the first time. Twitter just added its own photo filters after Twitter and Instagram removed Instagram photo previews from inside Twitter.

Yahoo is amid changes under the direction of former Google VP Marissa Mayer, who took over as its CEO earlier this year. Mayer has pushed for an emphasis on products, and her gameplan for Yahoo’s comeback includes pushing for mobile, partnerships, and acqui-hires. New email and Flickr apps seems like a great start to fleshing out Yahoo’s mobile position.

Flickr’s updated iPhone app includes 16 camera filters, a simplified sign-up and registration process, better Groups capabilities, and the ability to explore photos nearby and other places.

Check out more photos of the new Flickr app below:

Photos via Flickr

Flickr — remember Flickr? — charges $6.95 a month to share your photos to the world, if you want pro functionality. Buffer, the social media sharing and analytics company, charges $10/month for anything beyond the freemium crumbs. And Dropbox goes from $10-50/month, just at the consumer level.

But subscription revenue has been around a lot longer than even the oldest dot-com. Aria Systems, a software-as-a-service billings platform, put together an infographic with all the subscriptions that the average American — you know, the person who lives next door and just got an Android phone — pays every month.

It’s a massive $857/month … mostly because of items that we don’t typically think of as subscription payments, but actually are. Things like insurance, a mobile phone plan, and utilities. Even the biggest one of all: health care.

Over time, startups can only hope that some of this revenue, most of which is dumped into the laps of massive contenders in yesterday’s economy, will come their way.

Here’s the visual data:

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

The company provides a unified interface where social media managers can monitor and manage their activity across multiple social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Additional social networks can be added via apps in the HootSuite App Directory, enabling users to manage YouTube, Flickr, and others.

Instagram is a big integration for HootSuite, as the service continues to grow in popularity, currently adding five million users a week. And SlideShare is a major platform for sharing presentations and PowerPoint decks.

Plus, since HootSuite already helps its clients manage their LinkedIn presence, and LinkedIn purchased SlideShare for $119 million earlier this year, it was a natural next step.

In a statement, chief executive Ryan Holmes said the company picked these networks to add to the App Directory because they enable the sharing of rich media content that aids engagement:

“We’re excited to welcome these popular social networks because they’re centrally focused around the easy sharing of multimedia content.”

The Instagram app will allow users to view and search photos, read what others have written, add comments, like photos, and share them to other social networks. Similarly, the SlideShare app helps users upload, find, and share content

The App Directory is one of the ways HootSuite distinguishes itself from competitors such as SproutSocial and Involver. Perhaps the only competitor with something similar is Radian6, with its Extension Gallery. Mark Holder, HootSuite’s director of integration partners, told VentureBeat that “roughly 10-15% of new users install at least one app within the first week.”

Created in December of last year, the App Directory features apps for integrating email marketing, surveys, RSS feeds, and more into users’ social media management activities. There’s even an app to manage Orkut, the Google-owned Brazilian social network.

The additions of Zuum and Edocr are a bit surprising.

Zuum is somewhat interesting, as it is a platform for social media marketing strategy, which is somewhat competitive to HootSuite, but it also provides insight into guaranteed-to-be-engaging content, helping social media managers know what kinds of content they should post.

Edocr, on the other hand, is a tiny business-document sharing site focused on lead generation, with only some thousands of monthly visitors. I’ve asked HootSuite why it chose Edocr and Zuum, and I’ll update this post when the company replies.

[ Update: the response was inconclusive. According to Holder, "Instagram and SlideShare have been among the top requested apps from our Free, Pro and Enterprise clients.” ]

I did ask the company when full Google+ integration is coming to HootSuite, but there is no specific timetable yet. Holder had the following to say via email:

We are not able to provide a specific date at this time as to when Google+ will be available to all HootSuite users. HootSuite was selected as an official partner by Google+ Pages, and we are currently working with their team to gather data from our current Enterprise clients actively using the integration.”

HootSuite is based in Vancouver, Canada, and has almost 200 employees. In March of this year, the company raised $20 million from OMERS Ventures.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Trying to prove that its not dead yet, Yahoo owned-Flickr is releasing yet another batch of updates, but this time with the emphasis on improving its Groups.

Thursday, Groups on Flickr, the site’s community-shared photo pools, have been gifted with the acclaimed “Justified View” (pictured above) for a richer, more impactful photo-browsing experience. The Groups experience also now features a right-hand sidebar for additional photo context, and allows for direct photo uploads. Flickr has even released new Group APIs for third-party app developers.

Just how popular are Flickr Groups? There are more than 1.5 million groups on Flickr with a total of 1.2 billion photos spread across them, and 850,000 photos are added to groups each day, a Flickr spokesperson said.

The most arresting update to Groups is the introduction of the Justified layout, which features group photos in an image-centric, collage-like grid. The view reveals high-resolution images on scroll-over and includes a light-box option for a full-screen view of a selected image. Flickr members were first introduced to the Justified view three months ago when Flickr rolled out a revamped Contacts page.

The new Group sidebar is an interesting addition to the Groups experience and should stimulate conversation for the photo-sharers still active in their Groups. The sidebar, a part of the Justified view, surfaces the most recent discussions happening in a group, and highlights the top group contributors and tags.

Flickr members may also appreciate that they can now finally upload photos simultaneously and directly to their groups when using the new Flickr Uploadr tool. Why Flickr is just now introducing a direct-to-Group photo upload feature, however, boggles the mind.

The past three months have been jammed packed with Flickr feature updates, with development and vision spearheaded by head of product Markus Spiering who continues to promise significant changes to the product and user experience.

So far, Flickr’s feature-by-feature facelift has been as rejuvenating as an eyebrow lift or a chemical peel. Sure, there are some noticeable cosmetic improvements here and there, but the procedures, just as in real life, aren’t fooling anyone. A little nip and tick doesn’t appear to be the solution to bringing the photo sharing community back to the heyday of its youth.

Google+ is succeeding in small bursts, feature by feature. As a social network competing with Facebook it’s a flop, but its video-chat tool Hangouts is a winner. Now photo sharing is poised to be the service’s next breakout hit, thanks to an enthusiastic community of photographers who like the focus on attractive full-size images, Google+’s new photo-centric iPhone app, and a uniquely Google passion for metadata.

In fact, Google+ is pushing hard on the photography front and is in a great position to dominate the floundering Flickr.

The Google+ team teamed up with Kelby Training for a two-day Google+ Photographers Conference in San Francisco, or as it was adorably called, a HIRL — Hangout in Real Life. Vice president of product for Google+ Bradley Horowitz (pictured above), who led Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr in 2005, kicked off the event Tuesday by talking about the future of photography, how Flickr changed his outlook, and whether ads will ever make an appearance in Google+.

A camera that records your blood pressure

“I feel photos are the lifeblood of our service,” said Horowitz. “They are the way we can most immediately and viscerally connect as human beings.”

For the past four-plus years, Horowitz has pushed his passion for “social computing” at Google: combining photos, algorithms, and human interaction. While some of us may see the rising flood of images and data — from camera settings to GPS location — as overwhelming, Horowitz sees it as an opportunity. He thinks the future lies in capturing even more data, sharing more information, having more sensors, and recording more dimensions.

For example, we generate so much information that going through it to find gems is becoming more and more difficult. Ironically, even more data can be used to bring order to overload.

“I want to know everything I can about the environment,” said Horowitz. “I would like to know more detailed information about the roll, pitch, yaw of the camera. About the lens optics, about even the blood pressure of person whose hand is on the camera, even the galvanic skin response.” These biological markers can be used to identify the special and meaningful moments in your life worth remembering, such as the happiness you felt seeing your kid take her first steps.

Tools like Google’s own Google Glass could be a great start for capturing all of this information, but of course there are a few kinks to be worked out first.

“I never know whether Vic is listening to me or not,” said Horowitz of Google’s Vic Gundotra, who sometimes sports the augmented reality glasses during meetings.

We are capable of so much more than Instagram

Capturing pixels is just the beginning of a photo. How it’s processed and used after it’s on a computer is becoming even more important. Google has multiple properties that dabble in photos, including Picasa, Google+, Drive, and even email. The next step is to combine those tools together, something Horowitz admits is still an issue.

“Ultimately the brand distinction between those needs to go away… we’re working hard to erase the seams between these experiences,” said Horowitz in response to a question about the difference between Picasa and Google+. “The fact that you have to ask it is a failing on our part.”

Eventually Google aims to blur the line between the device and the cloud, so all the data you generate is automatically backed up, archived, and secured in a nice non-obtrusive manner. Automating this synthesizing stage would free up time for photographers to focus on the more enjoyable process of manipulating the data.

Horowitz wants to increase the power its own post-processing tools, making image editors scalable so that an amateur can use them as easily as a professional photographer. Replacing the very segmented image editing market and creating a tool that is equal parts Instagram, Lightroom, and Photoshop is an especially ambitious (perhaps naive) idea.

Google wants you to think of ads as little presents

The absence of ads in Google+’s lightbox, the tool that shows your images, is part of what appeals to the many photographers who use the service. But certainly it’s only a beta perk, right? After all, a whopping 96 percent of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. Google’s philosophy when it comes to ads is that they can be a very useful part of the user experience (as they are in search results). However, it doesn’t want to serve them where or when they don’t belong and won’t be the most effective.

“We don’t think of ads as punishments the users must endure, we think of ads done well as something that users would cry over if we took them away,” Horowitz said.

The company has not yet found a way to make ads useful in the lightbox. If a Google+ user is looking at photos of their family, says Horowitz, “the last thing you want to do is stick an ad between that intimate moment and intimate interaction.” Instead, Google leans more towards collecting data and delivering it when the context and time are right.

For example, say you review a restaurant. Google will tuck that information away and deliver it when it is relevant, perhaps six months later when one of your friends looks for a restaurant recommendation in the same area. “That’s a gift from me to that person facilitated by Google.”

And it all started with Flickr

Horowitz has a background in photography, like many others on the Google+ team (“We are geeks, and photographer geeks are a sub-flavor of geeks.”) As a grad student, Horowitz worked on some of the earliest image-processing programs and algorithms that analyzed images.

Eventually he landed at Yahoo as the head of multimedia search, which is where he met the founders of Flickr, a “fascinating, tiny little company in Canada.” They asked why, instead of writing complex algorithms to analyze images, he didn’t just ask people to volunteer their knowledge, à la Flickr’s tagging? People can just look at an image and say if it’s a dog, a person, or even if its funny or snarky.

“I realized my algorithms were so far from having a snarky detector that this was a better approach,” said Horowitz. “A little bit of social engineering was better than all the algorithmic approach… it introduced the concept of bringing people and community into the equation.”

Horowitz went on to oversee Yahoo’s acquisition of Flickr, and eventually moved on from the company. But now, many years later, the idea of social computing that Flickr planted in his head is being used to turn Google+ into real Flickr competitor.

Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing community has been in makeover mode of late and is getting incrementally better with subtle upgrades. Tuesday, Flickr released a reworked photo page layout with a new look that’s nearly impossible to miss — especially on large displays.

Flickr’s “liquid” layout, as it’s called, is a dynamic format for each photo page that now features newly supported hi-res images on the main photo page. The layout also automatically adjusts the photo page and image size based on the user’s browser window size to feature the biggest photo size appropriate for each photo viewer.

“Flickr is known for its outstanding image quality that enables people to showcase the amazing details of their photographs,” Flickr’s head of product Markus Spiering told VentureBeat. “With our new, larger hi-resolution images and liquid design each photo page on Flickr comes alive.”

The new liquid layout is powered by an algorithm that accounts for browser width and height size, and displays content at a width that will best showcase the most common 4:3 photo ratio while also ensuring the photo title and sidebar are visible on the page, engineer Ross Harmes explained in a blog post on the technology behind the update. The algorithm also favors native photo sizes, never upscales images, and should allow for faster page load times.

The layout ultimately makes for an enriched new way to browse photos on Flickr, especially on large displays, and represents Yahoo’s renewed commitment to the photo property it let languish for far too long (we’ll have to wait and see how Flickr fits into interim CEO Ross Levinsohn’s plan for beleaguered Yahoo). But it might be too little, too late to win back or attract photo-sharers who’ve migrated to Facebook and mobile apps such as Instagram. For consideration: Flickr members upload 3.5 million photos per day; Facebook members upload 300 million photos per day.

The liquid layout featuring hi-res images has been pushed live for all Flickr users. The new photo sizes have also been added to Flickr’s API and now appear in the “All Sizes” menu.

Flickr and Pinterest have teamed up to provide photo-pinners with a simple tool for inspired sharing.

Tuesday, Flickr released a share-to-Pinterest button that will ensure all pinners past and present properly attribute images plucked from Flickr to the source of their inspiration.

click to enlarge

Pinterest is the picturesque, visual water cooler where people “pin” to personal collections to express themselves. But the digital pin-board site, as a fast-growing social network, has quickly become a haven for copyright infringement as members pin photos without credit. Earlier this year, Pinterest released a do-not-pin code, immediately implemented by Flickr, to safe-guard protected works.

Now, the companies hope to encourage responsible sharing with a special “pin it” button for Flickr users. The button, live now, is a one-click tool located alongside Facebook and Twitter buttons in the service’s share menu. The button automatically applies photo attribution during the “pinning” process so that the photographer’s name, the photo title, and a link back to the original work are all attached to each pin. The attributions cannot be edited, staying intact as pins are re-pinned, and have been retroactively applied to all images hosted on Flickr, including those that are embedded around the web.

“Attribution is a work in progress and we’ll continue to add additional sources,” Pinterest said in a statement. The company is also rolling out attribution for Vimeo, YouTube, and Behance.

Flickr and Pinterest first entered into talks around attribution a few months ago after observing that the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing community had become a top three source of images for the inspiration site, Flickr head of product Markus Spiering told VentureBeat. The companies have a joint interest in respecting the rights of content creators, he said, and together they set about hammering out a solution that would appease photographers and pinners alike.

With attributions retroactively applied to pins, Flickr photographers will get more visibility and the photo site will likely experience a bump in visits, Spiering said. Flickr also anticipates a significant pop in the rate at which images are pinned to Pinterest.

Today’s Flickr update is the fourth in a string of upgrades that the service has planned for this year. Future improvements will re-imagine the product experience in terms of engagement, Spiering said. Flickr, he added, has also made mobile initiatives a high priority for this year.

Photo credit: nhofer/Flickr

After eight years and 7 billion photos, Yahoo-owned photo sharing community Flickr is giving members a better, faster way to post and share their images on the site.

Flickr is in the processing of rolling out a revamped photo upload tool, appropriately named “Flickr Uploadr,” that sports drag-and-drop support, includes photo thumbnail previews, allows for easier arranging and tagging, and is said to be 20 to 30 percent faster at uploading photos.

“We’re excited to introduce a faster, easier uploading experience that underscores the importance of the story behind each photo,” Flickr head of product Markus Spiering told VentureBeat. “This is a significant step in the evolution of Flickr, and you’ll continue to see changes to the site aimed at creating more beautiful, relevant experiences for our community.”

The new tool, written in HTML5, is specifically tailored around the bulk photo-uploader. Members can grab a smattering of photos, drag them to the browser, arrange them into sets, add tags and descriptions, set licensing terms, tag friends in photos, and adjust advance settings all before clicking to publish photos to Flickr at enhanced speeds.

Flickr has also increased file size restrictions to support even higher resolution images. Members on the free plan can now load photos up to 30MB in size, while those who pay for Pro accounts can load files up to 50MB in size.

Uploadr replaces Flickr’s rather rudimentary browser-based photo upload tool, a pain to use when uploading large quantities of photos. The new uploader may also encourage more users to get organized (and descriptive) when posting and sharing photos on Flickr.

Uploadr is part three of an ongoing, year-long makeover initiative for Flickr. Yahoo kicked off the Flickr redo with a new Contacts page in late February and followed that up with an updated photo editor at the beginning of April.

“The product is going to change significantly, and the user experience is going to change significantly over the course of the year,” Spiering said in February.

As Yahoo shows a tardy, but renewed commitment to Flickr with somewhat minor, incremental updates, Facebook has taken a much splashier approach to ensuring it remains top of mind for online photo-sharing. The social network swiftly purchased mobile photo phenom Instagram for roughly $1 billion in cash and stock, and just amended its S-1 to show that it now sees upwards of 300 million photos uploaded to Facebook per day. Flickr members, for comparison, upload 3.5 million photos per day.

Flickr Uploadr is being dolled out to users on a rolling basis over the next few weeks, the company said. Yahoo will only support the tool on Chrome 6, Safari 5, and Firefox 8 and above browsers.

Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site Flickr, the property involved in a patent spat between Yahoo and Facebook, is providing its users with new editing tools and filters courtesy of online photo-editing specialist Aviary.

The Flickr photo editor, rolling out to users starting Thursday, replaces former functionality provided by the soon-to-be defunct Picnik with Aviary’s sophisticated tools for adding filters, correcting blemishes, cropping, drawing, adjusting, and otherwise enhancing images. Future updates will also support photo straightening and zooming.

The editor, which works on the web and iPad, has been optimized for speed and simplicity, Yahoo said. “Aviary has built a lot of custom integration technology for Flickr allowing for seamless embedding on the site,” a Yahoo spokesperson told VentureBeat.

Aviary’s editor is written in HTML5. That’s a big difference from where Aviary started out, as a flash based editing tool aimed mostly at the web. Since making a smart pivot towards HTML5 and building a great SDK for easy integration into mobile apps, the service has seen company has seen a big spike in usage.

Aviary offers basic editing services like cropping, rotating and the like. It also builds some fun filters, stickers and text effects into it editor. The business plan is to begin offering premium tools for an extra charge, and having its editor on Flickr is definitely a massive expansion to the company’s user base.

We should note that while Aviary’s photo-editing features will make for a pleasant addition to the Flickr experience, they’re not unique to Yahoo’s photographer community. In fact, back in January, Aviary gave Facebook users similar tools to enhance and edit their photos hosted inside the social network. Aviary also makes its tools accessible to developers for integration into their web and mobile apps.

Partner Aviary, founded in 2007, is based in New York City and has raised a total of $11 million in funding from Spark Capitol, Jeff Bezos, and Reid Hoffman.

Yahoo will gradually dole out the new photo editor to members on a rolling basis over the next few weeks.

Updated with additional reporting by Ben Popper.

Yahoo’s popular photo-sharing community Flickr has been called out as one of the primary properties infringing on Facebook patents in the social network’s counterclaim, which it filed Tuesday.

Facebook responded to a March patent suit brought against it by one-time-Valley-friend Yahoo with a counterclaim alleging violation of 10 patents. The social network claims that Yahoo’s homepage and content optimization engine infringe on Facebook patents. Yahoo News, Sports, Games, Finance, Autos, Movies, Shopping, and Travel properties also infringe on Facebook patents in the way they serve advertisements to visitors, Facebook argues.

Flickr, however, was given the star treatment, and fingered in particular for its violation of two patents (embedded below) around feed personalization and content tagging.

Patent 7,827,208, or the ’208 patent as its referred to in the suit, is the “Generating a Feed of Stories Personalized for Members of a Social Network.” Facebook argues that the Flickr Photostream, Recent Activity, and Groups Activity features all infringe on this particular patent.

On the tagging front, Facebook owns the patent for Tagging Digital Media (patent 7,945,653) and claims that Flickr’s People in Photos, a tagging feature similar to Facebook’s offering, infringes on its intellectual property.

In all instances, Facebook calls for a cease and desist verdict.

“Facebook has been irreparably harmed by Yahoo!’s infringement, for which there is no adequate remedy at law, and such harm will continue unless Yahoo! is enjoined by this Court,” the social network said in the suit.

Angry finger pointing photo via Vlue/Shutterstock

The first bandages of Flickr’s reconstructive surgery were removed Tuesday to reveal a new Contacts page, giving us all a small peak at the planned piece-by-piece makeover for the photo-sharing site losing face to prettier up-and-comers.

The new Contacts page has already been gifted to some members and will be slowly rolling out to all users of the Yahoo-owned property over the coming day, a company representative confirmed to VentureBeat.

When browsing photos from Flickr contacts, users will now be greeted with a colorful collage-like grid (pictured above) that puts friends’ photos front and center in what the site refers to as a “Justified layout.” The page also reveals high-resolution pop-up images on scroll-over and includes a light-box option for a full-screen view of a selected image.

The look and feel of this revamped page is the future of Flickr, with its design gradually being carried over to the entire site.

The Contacts page, Flickr senior product manager Markus Spiering told VentureBeat last week, is the first of many changes for the site in the year ahead. “The product is going to change significantly, and the user experience is going to change significantly over the course of the year,” he said.

Flickr will next work on the roll out of its redesigned photo upload, organize, and categorize application. The reworked tool will become available to users in March.

As the third most popular source of content on digital pin-board site Pinterest, Flickr and its photographers are subject to frequent acts of copyright infringement. But a site-wide update to Flickr promises to better protect members and their copyrighted works.

The Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site has just added Pinterest’s newly introduced do-not-pin code to Flickr pages with copyrighted or protected images.

“Flickr has implemented the tag and it appears on all non-public/non-safe pages, as well as when a member has disabled sharing of their Flickr content,” a Flickr representative confirmed to VentureBeat Friday. “This means only content that is ‘safe,’ ‘public’ and has the sharing button enabled can be pinned to Pinterest.”

Pinterest, as a refresher, is the digital pin-board site that encourages members to “pin,” via bookmarklet, the products, recipes, clothes, photos, and other items they love to collections called boards. The private beta site has grown into one of the most-trafficked social networks online.

The site has also given birth to the most inherently viral variant of the status update yet. This new breed of update, however, often promotes piracy as pins including copyrighted works spread from person to person.

To protect itself from copyright lawsuits, and appease disgruntled photographers and publishers, the young social media company introduced a snippet of code Monday that website owners can now add to their sites to prevent unwanted pinning. If a person on Pinterest attempts to share something from a site with that code in place, she will see a message that reads: “This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!”

Flickr can’t prevent all acts of photo piracy just by enabling the code — determined sharers will just work around the inconvenience and manually download and post images — but the act signals the site is proactively looking out for its photographers.

A facelift for Flickr

Yahoo-owner Flickr has undergone reconstructive surgery and will emerge, in a week, with a new-and-improved face and a mission to recapture the glory of its youth. But even the best plastic surgery will do little to help the aging photo service compete with a new crop of vibrant photo-sharing applications.

Flickr’s makeover, as first detailed by BetaBeat, will feature a more colorful photo view that eliminates most of the whitespace members are currently accustomed to, and will soon include a new photo upload page that looks and functions radically different from today’s upload page.

“The product is going to change significantly, and the user experience is going to change significantly over the course of the year,” Flickr senior product manager Markus Spiering told VentureBeat.

Just don’t expect these significant changes to happen overnight. The first improvements, as explained by Spiering, will first start appearing next week. Flickr will introduce the new Contacts page, pictured above, on Feb. 28 and will roll out the upload page to users some time in March. Additional changes, not yet divulged, are slated for later release in 2012.

“Suddenly the photos look more than four times their current size and lie neatly justified on the page, somehow jigsawing together without cropping or changing the order in which they appear,” BetaBeat’s Adrianne Jeffries said of the new photo view.

If the screenshots are any indication, the fresh-faced Flickr will delight those with a penchant for a vivid photographic experience. The facelift, however, will do little to cajole today’s mobile photo-sharer to give the aging service a second look.

In 2005, Yahoo acquired the beloved photo-sharing community. And while Flickr has continued to operate with a personality distinct from its owners, it has languished as photo-sharing, especially by way of mobile devices, has thrived.

Instagram, an iPhone-only application with photo-enhancing features and filters, has captured the imagination of the iPhoneography community, which includes professional and amateur photographers alike. The service is tailored around expeditious sharing via mobile device and has successfully encroached on Flickr’s domain while Flickr sluggishly embraced the mobile movement.

Professional photographers, the audience most likely to pay for Flickr Pro accounts, also seem to be happily exploring their options. 500px has emerged as a vibrant community tailored around the professional, and even Google+’s photo features have gained photographer-appeal.

But Facebook is still Flickr’s most agile competitor. The social network has a mainstream audience that posts 250 million photos per day and is happily doing so without paying annual fees for the privilege. Flickr continues to see a substantial quantity of photos posted to its site each day — 3.5 million photos, Spiering said — but it is dwarfed by Facebook.

Without a time machine on hand, Flickr’s best chance for a return to glory will be under Spiering’s leadership. Spiering took over as head of product roughly one year ago and has talked openly about 2012 being an important year for Flickr.

Influential photographer Thomas Hawk, a big proponent of Google+, is impressed with the pending Flickr changes and believes that Spiering is the right man to spearhead a Flickr turnaround.

“It’s super positive to see innovation coming out of Flickr,” Hawk told VentureBeat. “I think Markus Spiering is turning out to be a pretty positive thing for Flickr.”

Flickr, as Hawk sees it, has needed a redesign for years, and Hawk thinks that a page focused on better photos will go a long way to encourage more activity.

“Hopefully, though, Flickr uses this redesign as a first step in a bigger overhaul that actually addresses site functionality in even bigger and more meaningful ways,” Hawk added.

This post was updated with statements and photos from Yahoo.

The popular photo service will discontinue its Picnik photo-editing features in a few months, the team revealed today.

“We know that you love editing your photos on Flickr and this transition doesn’t, in any way, mean that there will no longer be editing capabilities,” Flickr head of product Markus Spiering said in a blog post on 2012 changes to the Flickr experience. “It’s actually quite the opposite: we are working on making the editing experience even better on the site.”

Flickr, one of Yahoo’s most-beloved products, has allowed its members one-click access to Picnik’s suite of simple, online photo-editing features for more than four years running.

The shift away from Picnik is likely motivated by either a desire to stop piggybacking off of a Google service — Google acquired Picnik in 2010 — or the result of a lapsed agreement between Yahoo and Google. Neither company is being forthcoming about the reasons behind the change.

Flickr members can expect several more changes to the service in the year head, Spiering said. The site will also turn off Flickr Clock and Photo Session, and stop supporting Windows Phone tablet apps as of March 20. Flickr also recommends that Firefox 3.6 and Internet Explorer 7 users update to newer browsers, as the service will no longer support the dated browsers moving forward.

Oddly enough, Photo Session, a browser and mobile app Flickr feature designed to let people digitally and remotely flip through photos together, was only just introduced to Flickr members in September of 2011. The feature was not seeing the traction the company had hoped for, Spiering said, but the technology will live on in other products.

Yahoo and Google both declined to comment on the relationship between Flickr and Picnik.

Image via fromfok/Flickr

Fans have fallen in love with the zany title, said Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of San Francisco-based Tiny Speck, in a a post on the Glitch blog moments ago. But there are a couple of major improvements the company wants to make to change the way the game plays. I guess you could say that Glitch has hit a glitch.

“There are two obvious and huge improvements we need to make: the first is to make the early game reveal itself more easily to new players so they can get into the fun faster,” Butterfield wrote. “The second and larger task is to give those players who have gotten over that initial hump and fallen in love with the game — spending dozens or even hundreds of hours playing — the creative tools that they need to change the world in more tangible ways: building whole new locations themselves, designing new buildings, setting up resource flows and forming flexible organizations to create bigger things together.”

Butterfield added, “And we’re committed to giving people a square deal: we know going back to beta was not what you expected, so if you have bought anything from us and you don’t feel like you got your money’s worth or you don’t like the idea of everything changing, we will give you a 100 percent, no hassle, full and complete refund.”

The funny there here is that most other game companies do major revisions like this, and they simply require their users to download a big patch. They don’t announce that they’re “unlaunching.” It’s almost business as usual in online games for the games to change over time.

[Update: In an interview, Butterfield said that the company felt like it was making a couple of major changes and had to go through the formal process of "unlaunching" because it was already generating revenues from the game. He said that the game has more than 100,000 users and that it wants the customers to be happy or get their money back.

Tiny Speck will likely work on the new features for a period of months -- more than a couple of months but less than a year -- as it seeks to enable the changes. The biggest change will be making the world more malleable so that heavy-duty users can create their own major objects, such as buildings, and stay busy so they don't run out of content, Butterfiled said.

Butterfield said that the game would stay available but would have occasional down times as the company does the revisions. ]

Glitch is unlike most other games you’ve seen. From the moment you log in, you know you’re not in the real world anymore. You appear inside a brain, one of the minds of eleven giants who imagine the game’s zany landscape.

“It is super metaphorical,” the greeting for the tutorial says. “Your job is to grow and expand the world, shaping it while developing your own unique character.”

This journey into the imagination isn’t your normal game, so it’s no surprise it came from a startup that’s been working on it for a very long time.

Glitch is the brainchild of Butterfield’s Tiny Speck. Butterfield previously co-founded photo-sharing site Flickr. Video games are often slammed for their blockbuster mentality, not creativity. If Glitch takes off, it will show that there is still room in the perhaps overly commercialized game industry for artistically crafted and thought-provoking independent games. The animations of the persistent world are hand-drawn. The world has its own ecology and economy.

From the very start, Glitch is different. You can water plants, but you can also pet them to make them grow. If you nibble a pig’s ear, it will give you some meat. You can find little “music blocks,” which play snippets of music when you click on them. If you find a butterfly, you can give it a massage. If you squeeze a chicken, you can get a piece of grain.

You have to do things that keep your energy and your mood high. In order to do that, you have to collect and eat things. Everything has to stay in balance. These complex systems, such as the world’s trees, have to be cared for in order to keep the world in order. Pigs have to be fed or they eat leaves off the trees. If the leaves are eaten, the trees die.

Tiny Speck’s own press release opens with a quote from James P. Carse, who said, “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other, infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

Glitch is a web-based massively multiplayer online game. It is non-violent, highly social and is played as a two-dimensional cartoon animated world. Butterfield says the designers of the game and the players create the Glitch universe in tandem, with the designers constantly tweaking and improving the platform while the players cultivate a sophisticated and irreverent civilization.

Players can do just about anything, from curating an art installation to hosting a diamond-infused dinner party. Tiny Speck provides the raw materials and a stimulating environment. “The vision is to bring a new level of creativity, beauty and social engagement,” Butterfield (pictured at top) says.

Part of the mission is to bring art to a wider audience. The game mixes all sorts of original visual styles. The look varies as you travel up and down the boulevards of the world. It changes from psychedelic to surreal, from Japanese cutesy animation to hyper-saturated pixel art, classic cartoon to contemporary mixed media.

Players can adjust their avatars, or game characters, in many different ways. They can buy outfits and customize as they wish. They can go on missions. In one, they have to get some official papers from a government agency. They have to interact with bureaucrats, who keep saying they have to check with someone to get a proper answer. At some point, the bureaucrat finally delivers the papers.

The game invites players to come back a lot by getting them to learn skills. There are about four months’ worth of skills in the game now. The game also has hundreds of different objects.

You can also come back just to explore the surreal universe. If you want eggs, you can get them from an eggplant. Then you take them to a chicken to incubate them. Dairy products in the game come from butterfly milk. And pigs are born from the eggs.

On the social side, players can go on quests together or play multiplayer sports mini games. They can form conga lines and dance. The world is unified, so friends can interact with anybody in the world. The game is built in Adobe Flash, so it isn’t that demanding, technically. But Tiny Speck tried to push the limit on how many objects can be on the screen at one time. The game has cool lighting effects and faux 3D animations.

Butterfield and his wife Caterina Fake were thinking about making a game before they did Flickr. But Flickr took off like wildfire and they sold it to Yahoo in 2005. They then returned to work on the original game that they had started. Tiny Speck’s founders include Butterfield and three other original team members from Flickr: Cal Henderson (pictured above and below in green shirt), Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov. They started the firm in 2009 and it now has 40 employees. Tiny Speck raised $10.7 million in April from Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. Legendary game designer Keita Takahashi (no relation to me), the creator of Katamari Damacy, joined the team in July as a Glitch game designer.

Players can stay in touch with the game while on the run. The full Glitch site is accessible from a mobile app, Glitch HQ, for the Apple iOS platform. The mobile app lets players keep up with updates and chatter from their game friends. Third-party game developers are busy creating web and mobile extensions of the game using Tiny Speck’s applications programming interface.

The game is free to play, with virtual item sales. But you can subscribe to the game if you wish to get wider access to cool things. You can’t purchase anything in the game that gives you an advantage over other players. If you buy anything, it’s mostly for the sake of decoration or vanity.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Popular photo-sharing site Flickr is stepping up its mobile efforts with new Android and iOS features.

The site launched its first Android app today, and also introduced a new feature for iPhone and iPad customers called Photo Session.

Photo Session lets you “flip” through a gallery of photos with friends, no matter where they are in the world, using your iPad or iPhone.

“Photo Session is like sitting next to your friend and flipping through photos, but your friend can be anywhere in the world,” Flickr said.

Flickr has had an iPhone app since 2009 but Android users have had to content themselves with unofficial, third-party alternatives until now.

Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, has 68 million users, 200 million Creative Commons-licensed photos, and the largest pool of geotagged photos of any photo-sharing site, according to Yahoo.

Yahoo is now calling itself “the premier digital media company,” according to Yahoo vice president Steve Douty. Flickr is now the focus of this digital emphasis. Yahoo claims more than 600 million unique visitors a month, and delivers 42,000 customized home pages to site visitors every 5 minutes, he said. Improving the company’s mobile reach is the next step.

“We are committed to being a bigger player than we are today in the mobile space,” Douty said.

The new app is meant to put photography front and center, according to product manager Marcus Spiering.

“We focused around very clean, beautiful design where the photo is in the center of the foreground,” Spiering said at today’s press conference.

Upon entering the app, the “You” screen gives you access to all of your photos, albums and contacts.

Taking a cue from the surging popularity of upstart mobile-phone photography apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic, the new Flickr app includes photo filters as well as sharing tools. There are filters designed to create high-quality photos. Photos go to Flickr automatically but photos can be shared across other social networks including Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

You can easily add metadata, and geolocation data is optionally automatically embedded in each photo.

However, said Spiering, privacy options will protect those who don’t want to share their pictures with the whole world.

“We want people to feel very safe, photos are something that are very personal,” said Spiering.

Related articles

• Flickr releases new real-time developer tools in time for Photo Hack Day (venturebeat.com)
• Instagram 2.0 adds full-size images and live filters (venturebeat.com)
• Flickr hits 6 billion photos (digitaltrends.com)
• Instagram CEO: Other photo-sharing sites are not competitors but alternatives (zdnet.com)

“It is super metaphorical,” the greeting for the tutorial says. “Your job is to grow and expand the world, shaping it while developing your own unique character.”

This journey into the imagination isn’t your normal game, so it’s no surprise it came from a startup that’s been working on it for a very long time. Glitch is the brainchild of Tiny Speck, a San Francisco company started by Stewart  Butterfield, who previously co-founded photo-sharing site Flickr. Video games are often slammed for their blockbuster mentality, not creativity. If Glitch takes off, it will show that there is still room in the perhaps overly commercialized game industry for artistically crafted and thought-provoking independent games.

“This world is built with hand-drawn animation,” Butterfield said. “It is a persistent world, with its own ecology and economy. It’s totally uncharted.”

From the very start, Glitch is different. You can water plants, but you can also pet them to make them grow. If you nibble a pig’s ear, it will give you some meat. You can find little “music blocks,” which play snippets of music when you click on them. If you find a butterfly, you can give it a massage. If you squeeze a chicken, you can get a piece of grain.

You have to do things that keep your energy and your mood high. In order to do that, you have to collect and eat things. Everything has to stay in balance. These complex systems, such as the world’s trees, have to be cared for in order to keep the world in order. Pigs have to be fed or they eat leaves off the trees. If the leaves are eaten, the trees die.

Tiny Speck’s own press release opens with a quote from James P. Carse, who said, “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other, infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

Glitch is a web-based massively multiplayer online game. About 27,000 players have already tested the game. It is non-violent, highly social and is played as a two-dimensional cartoon animated world. Butterfield says the designers of the game and the players create the Glitch universe in tandem, with the designers constantly tweaking and improving the platform while the players cultivate a sophisticated and irreverent civilization.

Players can do just about anything, from curating an art installation to hosting a diamond-infused dinner party. Tiny Speck provides the raw materials and a stimulating environment. “The vision is to bring a new level of creativity, beauty and social engagement,” Butterfield (pictured at top) says.

Part of the mission is to bring art to a wider audience. The game mixes all sorts of original visual styles. The look varies as you travel up and down the boulevards of the world. It changes from psychedelic to surreal, from Japanese cutesy animation to hyper-saturated pixel art, classic cartoon to contemporary mixed media.

Players can adjust their avatars, or game characters, in many different ways. They can buy outfits and customize as they wish. They can go on missions. In one, they have to get some official papers from a government agency. They have to interact with bureaucrats, who keep saying they have to check with someone to get a proper answer. At some point, the bureaucrat finally delivers the papers.

The game invites players to come back a lot by getting them to learn skills. There are about four months’ worth of skills in the game now. The game also has hundreds of different objects.

You can also come back just to explore the surreal universe. If you want eggs, you can get them from an eggplant. Then you take them to a chicken to incubate them. Dairy products in the game come from butterfly milk. And pigs are born from the eggs.

“Everything is super whacky,” Butterfield said. “If you play it for a while, it makes sense. It’s a surreal wrapper around the world.”

On the social side, players can go on quests together or play multiplayer sports mini games. They can form conga lines and dance. The world is unified, so friends can interact with anybody in the world. The game is built in Adobe Flash, so it isn’t that demanding, technically. But Tiny Speck tried to push the limit on how many objects can be on the screen at one time. The game has cool lighting effects and faux 3D animations.

Some of the sections of the world reflect the influence of some of the giants, but the world isn’t divided into territories. The basic story is that one giant became too powerful at one point and things “glitched apart,” Butterfield said.

Butterfield and his wife Caterina Fake were thinking about making a game before they did Flickr. But Flickr took off like wildfire and they sold it to Yahoo in 2005. They then returned to work on the original game that they had started. Tiny Speck’s founders include Butterfield and three other original team members from Flickr: Cal Henderson (pictured above and below in green shirt), Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov. They started the firm in 2009 and it now has 40 employees. Tiny Speck raised $10.7 million in April from Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. Legendary game designer Ketia Takahashi (no relation to me), the creator of Katamari Damacy, joined the team in July as a Glitch game designer.

Takahashi is busy building zany missions for the game. Butterfield said that Tiny Speck will take advantage of web-based software to release new content on an hourly basis. He showed me how quickly he could create an object, give it characteristics, and set it loose in the world. Half the development time, he said, was creating tools to quickly create game elements.

Players can stay in touch with the game while on the run. The full Glitch site is accessible from a mobile app, Glitch HQ, for the Apple iOS platform. The mobile app lets players keep up with updates and chatter from their game friends. Third-party game developers are busy creating web and mobile extensions of the game using Tiny Speck’s applications programming interface.

“Those developers can create something and have it be in the world in an hour or so,” Butterfield said.

The game is free to play, with virtual item sales. But you can subscribe to the game if you wish to get wider access to cool things. You can’t purchase anything in the game that gives you an advantage over other players. If you buy anything, it’s mostly for the sake of decoration or vanity.

VentureBeat’s readers can get a “fast pass” access to the world of Glitch by clicking on this link. The company may not be able to add everybody all at once at the very start.

# # #

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

But perhaps more interesting than Buzz’s imminent death is the fact that Yahoo announced the service’s closing several weeks ago on April 4, but nobody seems to have noticed. It wasn’t until this morning that TechCrunch reported on the shutdown, and other than a few scattered press releases from Yahoo on the net, there doesn’t seem to be much earlier mention of Buzz’s passing.

There’s also a prominent announcement at the top of the main Buzz page, which I assume has been there for weeks and has also gone unnoticed.

That it took so long for anyone to recognize Buzz’s passing is more telling of Yahoo’s failures than the actual death of the service. Even in its heyday, when Buzz was sending obscene amounts of traffic to sites that were voted popular (mostly because those sites also appeared on Yahoo.com, one of the most trafficked sites on the Web), it still seemed no one but hardcore social news junkies was talking about it.

Buzz, which first launched in February 2009, is yet another potentially useful service that was squandered by Yahoo. That list includes Delicious, which Yahoo says it’s planning to sell off, and the social photo site Flickr, which somehow completely missed out on the mobile photo craze. Yahoo has already shuttered MyBlogLog, a service it bought for $10 million that let you create communities around your blogs.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Despite continued questions over its legality, the hot iPad social magazine Flipboard shows no signs of slowing down. The company announced the latest update to its app last night, bringing with it support for Google Reader, Flickr, live previews and more.

Flipboard made waves when it launched in July with its unique ability to turn any web page into an elegant reading experience. But publishers weren’t so enthusiastic. Flipboard first started off scraping content directly from websites, which brought up major copyright concerns from publishers. Now the app is pulling content from RSS feeds — which is better than scraping content, but is still questionable legally.

With this latest update, Flipboard automatically loads a story’s original website underneath its optimized magazine view, instead of having users click a “read on Web” button manually. By doing so, Flipboard readers now count as normal website pageviews on analytics systems — which should make publishers happy.

The company says that Google Reader support was the feature users requested most. Flipboard has added a “deep implementation” of the service — meaning it supports pretty much every aspect of Google Reader. You can browse your Reader folders and your friends’ shared folders, and of course you can star, comment and share stories as well. With this update, Flipboard is now a legitimate feed reader competitor to the likes of Reeder, the current king of iPad feed reading.

Flipboard says it also added Flickr support due to high user demand. It makes sense — Flickr photos combined with Flipboard’s elegant layouts makes for a winning combination. Now you can view your Flickr photostream, your favorites, groups and more from within Flipboard.

There are also a number of social networking upgrades within the app. It gives you easy access to your Facebook groups, fan pages and photos. You can also get access to your Tweets, favorites, @mentions and lists. Not only can you read content from social networks, you can contribute too: Flipboard lets you post status updates, photos and share links across Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader.

The company says it has also added deeper integration for Flipboard Pages, its magazine-style layout that it’s currently testing with nine publishers.

Flipboard has released a short video showing off the new features, which you can view below:

TweetPhoto

The name change may be a smart move. TweetPhoto, after all, implies a limited service to just one social network. From the company’s beginning, users have been able to share photos across both Twitter and Facebook for friends. Now, users can create their own network within Plixi and create listings that allow others to upload photos based on places and events.

For example, a Plixi user at a concert can upload photos to a specific location within the network and see other user’s photo uploads. The company refers to the service as a check-in, a term made popular by location-based services like Foursquare, for photos.

The service is available on the company’s website and Android and BlackBerry apps as well as a new iPhone application. A whole host of other applications build Plixi into their products for photo sharing, according to the company’s website.

The company has plenty of competition to worry about, including photo-sharing sites like Yahoo’s Flickr and social networks that have their own photo features, such as Facebook. The company may be looking to cut through the clutter by focusing on giving developers tools for building Plixi into their products. Its tools are aimed at developers already integrating their offerings with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Foursquare.

The San Diego-based company, founded in 2009, recently landed a first round of funding for $2.6 million led by Canaan Partners, and included Anthem Venture Partners as well as several angel investors.