Tom Raftery’s Social Media

One bit of functionality which Flickr has long been missing is online photo editing. This was a bit of a gaping hole considering Flickr is a site for online photo sharing and storage!

However, Flickr announced yesterday that they have integrated the functionality of online photo editor Picnik into Flickr and it is now possible to edit your photos within Flickr.

As you can see from the screenshot below, the editing functions are quite basic as yet, but the great thing about these online apps is that they tend to improve their functionality over time.

I’d love to hear Walter Higgin’s take on this (Walter is a friend and CEO of Sxoop Technologies, the makers of Pixenate – the premiere online photo editor).

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I posted here previously how Yahoo! were making signing up for an account difficult if you were Irish (you had to fake a postcode and their validation code wouldn’t accept most attempts). This affects you if you want to use any of their services, Flickr, Del.ic.ious, Mail, etc.

Well, in a recent comment on my screenshot of the offending sign-up page, Kevin Collins, who works for Yahoo! said that this issue has been resolved:

I’ve been following this internal change, and it looks like it was pushed out to production; the postal code field for Ireland has been removed

Sure enough when I went to the Yahoo! sign-up page and chose Ireland, the Postcode field disappeared:

Kudos to Yahoo! for (finally) fixing this.

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I’m uploading a couple of images to my Flickr account right now and it is like wading through treacle – they are going really slowly.

I’m not sure if there is an issue with my broadband provider of if Flickr is having problems/throttling upload speeds.

Anyone else noticed this?

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Tired of looking at the same old desktop on your computer?

There’s a free gallery of very nice downloadable wallpapers for Windows Vista available here.

The photos are from a blogger and prolific Flickr user called Brajeshwar and as well as individual photos, you can also download a .zip wallpaper pack.

I’m not quite sure why they call them wallpapers for Windows Vista though. They are just .jpg files and work equally well on OS X (and XP as well).

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If we ignore the fact that the term Web 2.0 is controversial for all kinds of reasons and concentrate on the applications themselves, which Web 2.0 apps (using the broadest possible definition) do you use most?

I use:

1. my blog and podcast software all the time (they are run out of WordPress)
2. my Flickr account regularly to post photos
3. Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets frequently for collaboration or sharing of documents
4. Google’s Calendar to synch with my laptop and mobile phone calendars
5. Technorati, PubSub and Google’s Blogsearch to subscribe to RSS searches
6. Flock as my main browser of choice (primarily because of the Flickr and Del.icio.us integration) – I also use Firefox, Camino, Safari and IE7
7. Feedburner to burn and track my feeds
8. NetNewsWire, Google Reader and iTunes to consume my feed list
9. TechMeme, Megite and TailRank for keeping up with tech news
10. Del.icio.us very occasionally to store URLs for items I have found interesting

What cool Web 2.0 apps am I not using that I should be using? What are your favourite Web 2.0 apps?

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I was very much of the impression that startups these days, because they want to keep spending to a minimum, would be more likely to use Open Source tools to develop their applications. The likes of MySQL instead of Microsoft SQL Server, for instance.

This view was re-inforced by an interview I did with Salim Ismail for the it@cork pre-conference podcast series where he said all his startups used open source software.

However, after a chat with Microsoft’s Rob Burke on his blog, now I’m not so sure!

In my comment, I said Microsoft’s SQL Server should support other platforms and in this way, startups would be more likely to use it (i.e. if they didn’t have to splash out for a Windows license). Rob’s answer surprised me though, he said:

Our group at Microsoft Ireland can, quite literally, not adequately keep up with the demand we get from local startups (and larger ISVs) who see the value of the platform for the data tier and want to find the best on-ramp. You may have noticed – we’re hiring two more evangelists!

So startups in Ireland are choosing Microsoft SQL Server in droves? Why? The latest version of MySQL has stored procedures, triggers and views. It is platform independent, has a very strong support community and runs some of the better known sites on the web like Craigs List, Del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, and Wikipedia, to name but a few.

If you chose SQL Server, you are locked into the Windows platform and although there are free versions of SQL Server to start out with, a fully licenced version to run a web site will cost you tens of thousands of Euros/dollars.

Why would any startup choose SQL Server? What am I missing?

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