Web Sites: April 2008 Archives

As much as those of us in the opinion business like to think that what we write about a new product is the be-all and end-all on it, from a consumer's point of view, it makes more sense to taste the water from more than one well before committing to a purchase. The trick, however, is not to drown in information in the process. That's where Reviewgist comes in. The recently revamped service scours a universe of "trusted" web sites for reviews on a panoply of products--including digital cameras--and using its "patent pending deep semantic analysis engine" crunches the opinions in those reviews to rate the products. A nifty feature of the site is its new comparison interface. Not only does it compare products side-by-side, but when you roll your cursor over the bars in an item's rating graph, excerpts from reviews appear beside the comparison chart. So if you touch the "image" bar in a camera rating, for instance, quotes relative to imaging extracted from reviews on the product will pop up on the screen. Reviewgist is still billing itself as a beta site, and its product database seems a bit underpopulated at the moment, but it's still worth a looksee.

Horizons broadened today for some 40 million users of Photobucket, one of the largest photo sharinig sites on the Internet., as the service introduced new technology that allows images and videos stored at its site to be accessed from a wide spectrum of places--places such as Web sites, Web applications, desktop applications, browser plug-ins, mobile phones, home-entertainment systems, digital photo frames and directly from cameras.

The technology called anAPI, Application Programming Interface, empowers developers to create applications that permit Photobucket users to

• Securely log into Photobucket accounts
• Create, edit and access albums
• Upload new content to their albums
• Share content from albums via email
• Search through publicly available content on Photobucket and
• Access and update metadata (titles, descriptions, tags, etc.)

Following the Photobucket announcement, a number of developers launched applications using the new API.

Flektor, a unit of Fox Interactive Media, trumpeted a new slideshow creation tool made exclusively for Photobucket that lets its members create MySpace addons like slideshows, polls, surveys and quizzes with customizable skins, sound and interactivity that are all updated in real time.

Intercasting Corp. introduced a tool for seamlessly moving photos from mobile phones to anywhere within Photobucket.

Another player in the mobile space, Ontela, says it has adapted its PhotoCopter service to automatically upload images from mophos to the 'bucket.

Personal book publisher Blurb revealed that it has incorporated the new API into its BookSmart software so Photobucket users can "slurp"" pix from the service into Blurb's program where they can be used to create photo books.

Another tome maker, Albumoprinter, has embraced the API, which can be used to drag-and-drop images from Photobucket into the company's online personal photo book system.

The API is also being used by Tapatap to allow Photobucket members to meld their images into the social photo game maker's mobile offerings.

And Picnik, an innovator in online photo editing, is using the API to link its editing tools with Photobucket. Picnik users can work on their Photobucket images from within the editing service. and when they're finished working on a photo, it can be sent back to Photobucket without leavinig Picnik.

No doubt these are just a few of the applications we'll see cropping up in the coming months as developers warm up to the new API.

Adobe garnered headlines when it launched its new online photo sharing community Photoshop Express at the end of March, but it also caught some flack for the site's service agreement--an agreement that looked like a power grab for the intellectual property rights of the Netpost's users. That was never its intent, the company said, and today it has attempted to rectify the situation by issuing revisions to the service policy. In the proposed revisions, which take effect April 10, Adobe says that it will be retaining "only those limited rights that allow us to operate the service and to enable you to do all the things the service offers. If you decide to terminate your Photoshop Express account, Adobe’s rights also will be terminated. Adobe doesn’t claim ownership of your content and won’t sell your images."

If you're still waiting for your 15 minutes of fame and would like to see what it'll be like when it strikes, you might want to surf over to MagMyPic. Although pretty much a one-trick pony as far as Web sites go, the Netstop lets you upload a photo and see what it would like if it were the cover of People, Vogue, Time, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated and others. Well, the actual names of the magazine templates used by the site are more like Popular, Vague, Life, Natural Geography and Sports Celebrated, but you and your friends will still get the picture, or should I say cover? I know that hard core Photoshoppers are shouting at their computer screens right about now, "I don't need no stinking Web site. I can do that myself!" If you do have that kind of do-it-yourself bent, you may want to check out Dave Johnson's step-by-step for the process over at PCWorld.