Flickr has finally delivered their official app for the Android platform. The app allows you to take beautiful photos with the in-app camera, enhance with filters, and quickly share on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and more.

The app allows browsing and navigating in a nice way to make use of maps, tags, and activity around your photos. You can stay up to date with the latest comments and activity on your photos and take advantage of full screen browsing and slideshows. It also allows you to access additional features online such as powerful organizational tools, community groups, fun photo apps, and more to engage with the 60 million members strong Flickr community. Using Flickr’s easy privacy settings, the app takes care that you share photos only with the people you want with.

However, under the hood of the great concept and feature set, the app fails to impress. The UI is painfully slow, and sometimes multiple taps are required to select a button/option. The official thread for the Android App on Flickr forums clearly indicates that most users are not too happy with the app. Although the app is available for Android 2.1 and higher, a wide variety of Android phones are not supported. Of course there are major grouses against non-availability of the app in several countries and markets, specially from paying Flickr Pro customers.

The Official Flickr for Android app is currently available in the below countries from the Android Market:
Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States.

Flickr Android app

Flickr has announced Photo Session, a whole new way to share photos with friends around the world in real-time. All you need to do is to create a Photo Session, invite up to 10 of your friends, and flip through the photos together in real-time. Using Flickr Photo Session is like flipping through a photo book while sitting next to your friend.

You can start a Photo Session by going to any set or photostream that has sharing options enabled. Select the photos that you’d like to share and choose ‘Start a Photo Session’ in the sharing menu. If the photo owner has not enabled sharing, the options will be grayed out. Photo Session allows you to get your friends’ reactions and comments on your photos instantly. When you move to the next photo it moves for everyone else too. You can also doodle on parts of the photo with the drawing tool and chat away with each other using the built-in chat widget, all at the same time. You can’t flip when the drawing tool is enabled but anyone can turn it off when you’re ready to move on.

A Photo Session will stay open for 24 hours. You can invite your friends on Flickr via email or send out the link to your contacts. Also, you don’t have to have a Flickr account to use Photo Session. Anyone can flip the photos but you need to sign-in if you want to chat or draw.

Photo Session is still a work in progress and has been announced today in a preview mode as Yahoo irons out the issues and optimizes the experience for everyone. Currently Photo Session is only available in English, and is supported on latest versions of Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. That’s hard luck for Internet Explorer 9 users like me. You can also use Photo Session on your iPhone or iPad.

Flickr Photo Session

Google Everywhere

It is hard to go online today without touching one or more Google products or services. If it is not search, it may be email, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, Docs, or Calendar. Google has truly blanketed us with their web-based app offerings. Heck, even the Google Doodle is a conversation topic!

In this editorial, I shall discuss how you can kick the Google habit, what I am using now as alternatives and why you probably won’t be able to replace certain Google products today. Ready to move away from Google? First, some background.

Why un-Google?

Some of the reasons I personally decided to look for alternatives:

• Google became a part of virtually everything I did online. I used GMail, Google Reader, Google Finance, Blogger, Picasa, Picasa Web, Google Docs, Google Search, Google Calendar and Google Maps. I felt uncomfortable putting such a large portion of my online life in Google’s hands.
• Google morphed from the cool little startup building fun stuff for consumers, to a dominant public company whose revenues essentially came from just one product. That’s the key most (96%) of its revenues (and profits) came from search advertising. In other words, it needed other ways to make money. The most obvious way to do so would be to extend the arm of advertising, their main revenue-generating product, into other products. I realized I was the merchandise.
• Google seemed to get Apple and Facebook envy. Apple was growing rapidly across all their product lines and at very high profit margins, and Facebook was taking eyeballs and key talent away from Google. This led to some bad attempts to mock Apple and Facebook publicly, which of course delighted the Google developer and enthusiast community but came off as being negative to me. If you make a great product, you don’t need a negative campaign.
• Aside from philosophy, some of the competing products started becoming better, and Google’s products started getting worse (more on that within my descriptions) prompting me to start Project Un-Google which was an effort to use fewer and fewer Google products, hopefully reaching a point where I did not depend on any Google product at all.

Whether it is for philosophy, or hedging your web app bets, it is good to know there is life outside Google when it comes to products and services online and offline. There is usually a strong resistance to change, especially if you have a long history with a product. There is a high cost for transferring the old stuff, and learning your way around a new product/service. However, these challenges are not insurmountable, and I hope you take a look at some or all of the products I list here as an alternative to Google. If you have ideas of other products I may not have mentioned, please let me know!

Popular Google products

Here are some of the Google products/services I will be comparing to competition:

• Search
• Picasa
• GMail
• Calendar
• Documents
• Groups
• Finance
• Blogger
• Chrome
• Maps/Directions
• Talk/Chat/Voice

I realize Google has many more products, appsand services, but I did not look at products like Book Search which are very niche. My attempt here is to look at the commonly used products and services only.

Six months back, Apple 3G topped the best camera device on Flickr and iPhone 4 slowly picked up it’s pace. Now, a year after iPhone 4 was released and Apple CEO Steve Jobs (at WDDC 2011), pointing out at that iPhone 4 was the second most popular camera on Flickr, has now topped Flickr’s camera popularity charts and is rated as the most popular camera in the Flickr Community.

According to the data released by Flickr, iPhone 4 is currently at the top of the list which overtook Nikon D90. It is followed by Canon cameras that are dropped down to third, fourth and fifth spots.

It’s not just that. The iPhone 4 tops the “Popular Cameraphones” category surpassing Apple iPhone 3G.

The number of iPhone 4 usage has drastically increased over the year. iPhone 4 has been ranked 1 out the other 4 devices – iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch and iPad 2

The reason fact being that the iPhone 4 is at the top of the list is that Apple’s iOS offers web connectivity and brilliant photography apps. It is also that smartphones are social network friendly and its easier to capture and share photos as we carry it along everywhere we go.

1001 Noisy Cameras argues with the facts that the high ranking of the iPhone is more of a testament, the number of mobile phones and the probability of people having the phone rather than the success and popularity of the iPhone.

• Every year there is exactly one new iPhone model released
• For the fourth fiscal quarter of 2010, Apple sold 14 million iPhones (that’s 14 million iPhones in 3 months)
• In two quarters (half a year), Apple sold 30~ million iPhones. If they have two more similar quarters, the total number of iPhones would be half of the total number of digital cameras produced/shipped by the digital camera manufacturers in the whole of 2010

Apart from the features offered by iOS, the other reason could be the number of iPhones units sold. From the above stats its clear that even if DSLRs or point-and-shoot cameras had built-in Wifi/3G or were social network friendly, they still cannot stop/overtake the iPhone due to the high volume of iPhones units.

Flickr data suggests that more users are using camera phones to click everyday photographs, slowly abandoning the point-and-shoot cameras. However, Flickr’s indication of the popularity phones are accurate to the extent that they can only detect the camera that is used to take the photo or shoot the video and not the timeline marked with dates.

Facebook lets you create customized tabs for your Facebook fan page by using FBML and iframes. These customized tabs act primarily as an engagement-enhancer for your Facebook page and create more possibilities for attracting others to your page, then ultimately, to your blog or website.

However, there is a problem. Creating these tabs for a novice is a painful thing if you do not know about xFBML. There is too much jargon involved in the process for creating customized tabs.   However, Involver helps you to remove all these limitations.

Involver is a social media Start-Up that has provided applications and monitoring tools to over 180,000 brands to date. The best thing is that it also provides some excellent applications for Facebook users free of cost. Over the past two years, Involver has shifted its paradigm from a Online-Video gatewey to   Social Media marketer.

What are the situations in which involver may help you?

You can add Twitter streams, RSS Feeds, Youtube Channels, Scribd documents and much more to a Facebook Page with no coding.

Situation#1. You want to create dedicated tab for your Facebook page that will show all the posts of your blog in reverse-chronological order by using your blog’s RSS feed.

Situation#2.You want to create a new tab in your Facebook page that will show videos from your Youtube Channel in a very interactive way.

Situation#3. A tab showing your Flickr Photo stream in Facebook page in an elegant format.

Situation#4. A dedicated tab displaying the entire twitter phenomenon from your twitter account to your Facebook fan page.

Situation#5. Finally, Static HTML application allows rendering of HTML in a Facebook iframe. You can use it as a fan gateway to get Facebook Likes. To use a bit of jargon here, you can use WYSIWYG (what you-see-is-what-you-get) to make HTML without actually knowing HTML. Then you can put it to Static HTML App of Involver that will convert it to a Facebook iframe. You may use this as a welcome tab for your Facebook page.

These are some of the well-known apps to make your Facebook page more interactive for free. There are also plenty of other options available for Professional users and Enterprises.
How to implement?

Go to Involver applications page and choose which application you want to use with your Facebook page. Free users are allowed to use only two applications for a Facebook page. So, if you don’t want to spend a penny and still want to engage your audience and drive Likes, choose only two of these apps.

After selecting apps, click on install. It will lead you to your Facebook account. Choose page from the drop down list and add the application to your page. After that, fill your credentials (RSS feed address, YouTube channel, Flickr and twitter account information etc.) based on what kinds of app have been selected and you are ready to go. It will take a few minutes and these tabs will be in action.

—- About the Author —-

Rizwan Noor is an internet lover by default and the founder of TechnoMistry, a technology blog aimed at helping readers with digital tips and tricks to enhance their productivity with the PC and internet.

It’s good to see some updates from a site that Yahoo! is planning on sun setting. Flickr recently received some updates and has added some cool sharing options to its web interface.

The new features include:

• Logged in users can now easily share their photos on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress or email them. While users who aren’t logged in can share it to Facebook and Twitter.
• Flickr has also added the ability to share private photos on Facebook. Once you share your private photos on Facebook, they become public for your friends on Facebook.

While the new features are more than welcome, in the process, Flickr has also removed support for the Opera Web browser. Ross from Flickr staff stating that in order to offer increased efficiency to other browsers they have restricted developments for Opera. He says,

I’m sorry that some pages no longer work on Opera. In order to work most efficiently for our users, we have to limit what browsers we support; that’s just the reality of modern web development. We have made the decision to not support Opera, due to the fact that it has a lot of non-standard rendering behaviors and is used by such a small percentage of Flickr members. This means that new features may not work, and that the site in general might even stop working.
I recommend downloading the latest version of Chrome, Safari, or Firefox instead.

Flickr for Opera is now less than usable. The sharing options does offer ability to share photos on Twitter and Facebook but it’s just the normal tweet button where the Flickr photo does not appear in the Twitter web interface but is rather just a shortened link by Twitter itself. Besides that, even the action function does not offer full functionality.

The last couple of years have been quite eventful for the folks at Yahoo.

First, they locked down Geocities during October 2009, followed by employees being laid off the next year. Shortly came the news that Delicious might just shut down as well, which was then explained as an idea of changing handsand not let the service die on it’s own.

Oh and the company also have a visitor tracking community system or something called MyBlogLog which is also going to shut down in May24 2011.

But wait, there must be something in the middle. Flickr Head of Product Matthew Rothenberg has recently announced that he will be leaving Flickr shortly.

Here is what the tweet reads:

Here goes: after 5 years, I will be stepping away from Flickr. Will miss working with such a talented, hard-working, and hard-drinking team.

As it turns out, Yahoo will lose yet another loyal employee who has been working as product head of Flickr for the last 5 years. This is the third departure in a row in the last couple of years, the earlier resignations were signed by Flickr Co founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake in 2008.

Flickr has been under fire for quite some time now. With the growing popularity of other photo sharing and community websites like Facebook, it’s no wonder that Flickr is unable to generate the attentionand continue it’s growth in numbers, interest and popularity. Only last month, the company accidentally deleted thousands of photos of a Zurich based photoblogger, leaving his precious photo collection dead in internet space.

MG Siegler from Techcrunch has an official declaration from Yahoo, which reads:

Matthew Rothenberg has made the personal decision to move on to a new endeavor.   In the interim, Markus Spiering will be stepping in as head of product management. Flickr continues to have an innovative, energetic and creative leadership team that is dedicated to its community of members. Flickr remains a key priority for Yahoo! and we are fully committed to making it the best photo-sharing experience on the Web.

Don’t get busy backing up all your Flickr photos yet – they will remain alive for some time, I guess.

Flickr has been known to be a reliable and popular service for storing photos. It is the best online photo management tool, has been used extensively and is one of the few Yahoo! services that users are still holding on to.

With these services, reliability is of utmost importance for users. The New Your Observer reports this as,

a Zurich-based photoblogger says Flickr deleted his account by mistake and lost his 4,000 photos. Mirco Wilhelm has the original files saved elsewhere, but the photos from his extensive Flickr collection had been linked to from all over the web, including the official Flickr blog.

This proves beyond doubt that the profile in question was indeed a major account and this will be a setback for Flickr as a photo management service. Wilhelm still has a backup copy of the images with him. However, all the comments to those images are irrecoverably gone and links to those images are all dead.

A few days ago, Wilhelm had received a support ticked after complaining about a user who stole his photos and posted them on his own account. In all probability, Flickr has deleted Wilhelm’s account instead of the other user.

Mr. Mirco Wilhelm had reacted in his blog post quoting the conversation that says,

Unfortunately, I have mixed up the accounts and accidentally deleted yours. I am terribly sorry for this grave error and hope that this mistake can be reconciled. Here is what I can do from here:

I can restore your account, although we will not be able to retrieve your photos. I know that there is a lot of history on your account-again, please accept my apology for my negligence. Once I restore your account, I will add four years of free Pro to make up for my error.

Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do.

Again, I am deeply sorry for this mistake.

Given that the Pro account costs 24.95 per year, a service like Flick should well understand the worth of five years of photography of such a high profile user and should give him a lifetime of free account.

Wait … what? I thought Flickr is a product by Yahoo?

The fact is that it still is and will continue to be so, but the good news is that today Flickr has embraced OpenID.   The photo sharing website now supports creating a new Flickr account using an existing Google account. Earlier today, they added a contact importer and now the Google account integration has been rolled out.

When you hit the “Create Your Account” link at the Flickr homepage, you will see a new option to sign up for Flickr using a Google account.

Clicking the “Google” button on the Flickr sign up page will open a small pop up window, simply sign in with your existing Google account and grant all the required permissions to Yahoo.

Hit the “Allow” button and you will be asked to choose a Flickr username and create your brand new Flickr account. There is no need to remember another password and sign up for a new Yahoo email ID,   just because you want a Flickr presence.

This is good news, both for users and Yahoo. On the user’s part, this is good because they need not essentially have a Yahoo ID in order to use Flickr. On Yahoo’s part, this will surely boost the audience and user base – lot’s of users will sign up for Flickr with their Google account because the entire step requires less than 5 minutes ( and no Yahoo ID !)

Existing Flickr users can still sign in with their Yahoo accounts as earlier, but the Flickr team is rolling out a new feature which will make signing in a lot more easier.You can now sign-in to your account without having to leave the page you were on, making it easier to post comments, favorite a photo or add someone as a new contact.

According to the Flickr blog, Google is their first partner while more email providers may be added soon.

Flickr, the photo sharing website by Yahoo has added some new features which allows you to import your Facebook, Gmail and Hotmail contacts in your Flickr account. Taking a hint from Twitter, Flickr also suggests users whom you may know.

To import existing contacts from Facebook, Hotmail and Gmail, go to the contact importer page and grant the required permissions.

This will load your existing Facebook friends who have a Flickr account and you can add them to your Flickr contact list one by one. The same procedure works with Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail contacts.

Once you have imported all the contacts, you will start seeing suggestions and people whom you may know. Contacts can be further categorized into different groups e.g Family, Friends and the friend suggestions are similar to that found in Facebook. You can dismiss a friend suggestion and Flickr will load a new Flickr profile, whom you may know.

There is another link called “Photos of Your Contacts” which shows the recent uploads by friends and people present in your contact list. You may further fine tune the page to see recent photos from different groups e.g friends, family members, co workers and so on.

If you are concerned regarding the privacy of your Flickr profile and do not want to be found in profile searches, head over to the privacy settings page and select the desired checkboxes. There are three settings which you can toggle:

1. Hide or unhide your photos from site wide searches
2. Hide your photos from searches on third party sites that uses the Flickr API
3. Hide your profile from site wide searches and third party sites that uses the Flickr API

Hiding your profile like this will hide it from Flickr people searches, suggested contacts, from the find your friendsaddress book search and from people searches on 3rd party sites.

Currently, Flickr limits a maximum of 3000 non reciprocal contacts, which means you can add up to 3000 people to your Flickr contact list. However, there is no limit on the number of people who can add you to their contact list. More information is available on this FAQ page.