Posted 11/04/09 at 08:16:12 PM by Ryan Whitwam

The Flickr API is nothing new, but the photo sharing site is now bringing it more front and center. Flickr has unveiled their new “App Garden” that provides a better interface for finding useful photo apps. The new page is more compact than the old API interface. Each app gets a thumbnail preview that links to an individual page. Here, users can tag, discuss, and favorite an app.

There are still a few missing features, though. Flickr is about sharing, but there’s no way to share a list of your apps with friends. It also doesn’t take advantage of Flickr’s friend activity feed to show off what apps you’re using. However, the recommendation system does allow users to recommend individual apps. If you’re a Flickr user, do you like the new interface?

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Posted 10/27/09 at 04:30:00 PM by Florence Ion

Frequent Flickr users who utilize the popular photo-sharing site for its social networking perks will appreciate the Better Flickr plug-in for Firefox. This add-on incorporates an assemblage of useful Greasemonkey scripts to super-power your Flickr experience with essential features like adding a link for replying with a user’s name, icon or both for easily replying to the appropriate person within a comment thread, tacking on a short URL link in the sidebar, and including links to view the photo in various other sizes.

 Read on for more info!

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Posted 10/13/09 at 07:41:28 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Western Digital has announced the second iteration of its TV connected media player. The new WD TV Live HD takes all that was awesome about the old, and adds some new tricks. The box still has wide codec support for playing files from USB drives, but it now also streams content from Youtube, Pandora, and Flickr. Users can also connect network drives to the new version to view files.

The WD TV Live HD, as the name would suggest, outputs 1080P HD video via a HDMI 1.3 port. Composite and component are also available. If you need to get video off that USB drive and on to your TV, the WD TVs provide an attractive alternative to media center PCs. The new WD TV device has an MSRP of $149.99.

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Posted 09/25/09 at 08:16:58 AM by Paul Lilly

What a rough year it's been for anal retentive geeks who like the Internet just the way is, thank you very much. Still flabbergasted over Ikea's decision to switch its font from a customized version of Futura to Verdana, members of the Defenders of Things That Don't Matter organization (which doesn't really exist, but should) found themselves reeling once again, this time over Yahoo branding Flickr so that it reads "Flicker from Yahoo!"

How could Yahoo be so callous to the dozens, maybe even hundreds of Internet users who would predictably be taken aback by the insignificant change? According to company CEO Carol Bartz, techy hipsters and "middle America Yahoo" just don't go hand-in-hand.

"When you get outside New York and Silicon Valley, everyone loves Yahoo," Bartz said to a roomful of journalists and bloggers a few days ago at the unveiling of Yahoo's $100 million marketing campaign 'It's Y!ou.' "I just want to transplant all of you guys out of your cynicism. What is wrong with you guys? Go be cynical about frickin' Google. You got me pissed off."

Some Flickr users are pissed off too. As one commenter in Flickr's forums put it, "it really does feel like Yahoo is kidnapping the once awesome Flickr name by forcing itself on the logo." Others have called the logo change "stale" and "very ugly." Makes you wonder how Flickr user shhexycorin could possibly be "indifferent" when so many others are obviously perturbed.

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Posted 09/21/09 at 12:30:00 PM by David Murphy

Do you hate Adobe AIR? I sometimes do. While the applications based on Adobe's framework can be pretty neat to use, there's something about their similar look and shared frameworks, not to mention features, that just can just drive me up the wall. Plus, every new Adobe AIR-based application has to be installed and run through Adobe AIR itself. While it's a handy way to make sure that you're running the most up-to-date version of the application, the Adobe AIR platform isn't very conducive to portable use. Actually, you can't stick AIR-based applications on a USB key and run them at all--the host computer would still need Adobe AIR for these apps to function.

That's but one minor complaint about the AIR platform. There are more, but this week's freeware roundup isn't intended to be a slam on these Adobe apps. Rather, I'll be taking a look at some of Adobe AIR's more popular applications and offering up unique freeware alternatives that don't require use of the AIR platform to work. Not all of the listed applications will support portable use out-of-the-box, but you can use the popular Mojopac Free program to store and access all of these apps on any USB device of your choosing.

Put your trigger-finger on the uninstaller button for Adobe AIR, then click the jump!

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Posted 08/06/09 at 12:54:14 PM by Paul Lilly

Maximum PC readers have long had the importance of maintaining backups beat into their heads, but apparently photo-hosting service isn't a subscriber to the magazine. How else do you explain losing thousands of user photos with no way to restore them?

Or at least that's the case if you believe a purportedly scorned user who claims to have had his Flickr account hacked and then terminated. According to Morgan Tepsic, a photographer and soon-to-be art student in Taipei, Taiwan, he woke up to discover three concerning emails in his inbox:

1. [redacted]@hotmail.com has been added to your account!
2. Your password has been changed!
3. Your account has been terminated!

After contacting the Yahoo-owned service about the security breach, Tepsic said he was told "it isn't possible to restore the content of the account." Flickr did offer to restore his screen name and URL, "but unfortunately the images, comments, and other content isn't recoverable."

There's a lot more to Tepsic's customer support nightmare, which you can read here, assuming you're not offended by big, bolded F-bombs.

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Posted 06/04/09 at 02:09:10 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Tianamen Square massacre in Beijing. Tianaman Square was home of the Chinese student freedom movement, the "Goddess of Democracy" statue, and the location for the iconic photo of the student staring down a row of Chinese People's Army tanks. However, if you use the Internet in China, you probably won't see anything about this event this week - unless you're clever.

Starting Tuesday, the Chinese government shut down access to virtually all search engines and social networking sites, including Twitter, Flickr, Bing (Microsoft's new search engine), Live.com, Hotmail.com, Blogger, and others. All YouTube videos are also being blocked, as are BBC World News reports on the anniversary.

Are these actions unexpected? How can you bypass these types of blocks? Join us after the jump for more.

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Posted 05/14/09 at 01:55:52 PM by David Murphy

When's the last time you surfed on over to your Pligg and updated what you were doing for the entire Internet to see?  What about Elgg?  Have you changed your favorite movies to reflect that big blockbuster hit you saw this weekend?  You probably don't have to, because all of your friends using the Tweetero client on their iPhones could just log on and see exactly what you were up to.  Or not.  Because you aren't on Twitter -- you're on Identi.ca, the open-source equivalent of the popular messaging program.

Unlike the open-source software world, where even the smallest gems of programs can find a meaningful existence, the open-source social networking world depends on people.  Masses of people.  You can't just launch a new social networking platform and expect it to flourish if it doesn't have a decently sized audience. And you're never going to pull away the users that are already comfortable on their existing Web 2.0 platforms if you just imitate the best practices of the current litany of sites.  But that's what's happening in the open-source social networking world right now.  There's a healthy mix of innovation and duplication, giving some segments of the online world new and interesting applications... and others with their 25th version of Twitter.

Which areas of social networking are dead zones for open-source development?  Click the jump to find out!

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