Me and My Photos (Part 2)

A while back, I needed to present a series of photos as part of a video promo I was creating.

I knew that Picasa (the free photo curation and editing tool from Google) would make a video from a slideshow for me. To test it out, I made this little video. It was pleasing to share the fabulous song (Catie Curtis - It's a Wonder) and I was happy with the treatment of the photos given that I didn't have to do very much work to put it all together.

As a first cut, it was just fine and I've had fun returning to it occasionally to reminisce.  On the other hand, it was a little bit simplistic and I'd wished for more options.  Fortunately, Picasa does offer other options. (You can select the length of time for each photo, have a choice of transition types, and as you could see with this demo, a choice of audio track to add.)

Recently though, I found that the options it offers are not rich enough to put into a video about which I was serious.  I believe that Picasa photo videos are fine for sharing with family, but the range of options falls short for putting into a serious promotion clip.

The option for doing that in a way that works was to use iPhoto on the Mac. I know, I know, it's not fair to suggest options that only work if you have this particular brand of computer, or subscribe to this particular service.  I'm not suggesting that you should necessarily do this (but it did give me a thrill to imagine how the fan boys will shudder as I call the Mac a "brand of computer").

On the other hand, if you are serious about rolling out a video promo, you probably have strongly considered using a Mac to do that work, so you will have iPhoto right at hand.

But here's a video that uses the slide show video presentation available by using this approach.

The nuances of the presentation made a good visual bed for the content we wanted to present in this clip.  (And no, this really isn't that serious -- it's exactly serious enough!)

The good news for you if you are trying to decide how to present a set of photos is that you can use free software (for any platform) from Google, or you can use (nearly) free software on a Mac to get good results as well. The choice is up to you.

Me and My Photos (Part 1)

Most of us have discovered how we can share our photos with our friends using Facebook, Flikr, or Google+. There are other choices available to you (Twitter, Picasa Web Albums, Photobucket), depending upon who's watching, and what features you want when you post your photos. This is our chance to talk about which of the choices will really meet your needs.

First, let's rule out some of the poor choices.  Here are my top two.

The first inviolable rule for me with a photo sharing site is that my friends and readers must not be required to create an account and log in before they can see the photos. Kodak's poorly conceived Photobucket site is the poster child for this broken architecture.  I know they tell you that "it's free to register for an account" and they've even made it (apparently) easy to log in by allowing you to use your Facebook or Twitter account for credentials, but there's this little problem...

When you return to the site after having been away for some time, do you remember your username and password for their system? Maybe you write it down somewhere (not recommended) or maybe you're willing to simply have them reset the password every occasional time that you log in. But tell the truth. How much trouble are you going to go through just so that you can see your friend's puppy pictures? (Update: Seems that Kodak has a new site called Kodak Photo Gallery that uses the same broken approach, but they also made it easy for you to buy other stuff from them. How thoughtful!)

The other poor design choice is a pet peeve I share with many people about Facebook.  The system for displaying new photos is irrational and causes a great deal of confusion.  At first, it seems great because they make it quite easy to share the photos from your computer, phone, or from a growing variety of other devices that you use to get your photos.  (Ironically, even as Kodak files for bankruptcy, they have just released a camera that shares directly with Facebook.)

The problem comes with how the albums are shared.  If I add a photo to an album (a popular choice for that is "Mobile Uploads") the last three or four photos from those albums are posted on my wall along with any comments people have added to the album.

What that means is that if I post a photo with the owner of a great restaurant I'm visiting, it may show up on my wall with a photo from the club last week, or a photo from my friend's wedding ... and whatever comments my friends had about those will be dragged along too.  Someone reading on FB today will see that I've added a photo, may be able to guess which one is new, and will generally have little idea which comments are related to the photo.

A scenario just in case that doesn't seem infuriating enough to you:

Imagine that the last photo I posted to my album was one of our family dog with a litter of new puppies.  If I post a snapshot of myself with a new girlfriend at a concert today, it appears in my news stream along with the prior photo of the dogs. Unfortunately one of my friends commented about the puppy photo with "the bitch looks a little tired, you should probably get her a stand-in"

This is the comment that will appear under the display of the new photos.

Okay, this is minor annoyance but c'mon. This has happened to my friends several times (not the "bitch must be crazy" comment exactly, but something similar). Did no one at Facebook notice this?

On the other hand, there are good and useful sites that allow sharing in a fashion that really works.  Facebook is not too bad if you curate the photos carefully. (Mostly this means you must carefully segregate them into appropriate albums, and adding photos to an old album will probably misfire in some way you can't predict until you see it.)

We also like Picasa Web Albums from Google for its presentation and upload options. Google offers software you can run locally (Picasa) that allow you to curate and make simple edits to photos.  The software connects directly with the web platform to allow you to share the photos online using the resolution (from near thumbnail to original dimensions) and privacy options that you select. (Update: Google has announced that it will be re-branding Picasa to be "Google Photos" to bind it more readily to the Google+ platform.)

When the photos are online, then you have the choice to share the link to a specific photo, an entire album, or even a slideshow. Sharing can be public so that everyone sees, or it can be limited to people you select (although in that case of couse, they will have to log in somehow to identify themselves), and the photos or slideshow can be embedded easily in other web content.

The service has the right features and I would wonder that it's not more popular for sharing if it weren't for the widespread acceptance of another very useful sharing platform - Yahoo!'s Flikr.

This platform also allows you to place the photos online at the resolution you select, share with the population you choose, and to craft slideshows and albums in a way that works.  It's likely that Flikr's long history as one of the most popular photo sharing platforms has given it the edge in the field.

Conclusion: If you want to share photos with your friends and family, or more critically with your team at work, or with clients, you will want to consider using Flikr or Picasa Web to give you the most useful and professional presentation. (Update: While writing this article, I checked in at Flikr to recall its features and options.  Several of my page requests ended at an error page that asked me to try again later.  This usually means either that the host company is either rolling out a new option and is in transition, or that they are backing out support for the service. So your mileage may vary.)

In part two of this article, we'll take a look at two options for turning your photos into a movie.

Because We (the FAA) Said So...

You may have long suspected that there is no genuine technical reason that electronic devices need to be stowed during takeoff and landing on a commercial airline flight.

Most of us in fact have been aware of this for so long that the jokes about it have become as tired and shopworn as the old airline food jokes. Alec Baldwin brought the joke back for one last round with his Saturday Night Live appearance.

But the truth of the matter is much as you've suspected. Independent testing demonstrates that the actual risk of interference with aircraft systems by a Kindle or a non-transmitting handheld device is not significant.

A curious technology writer, Nick Bilton, had this to say on the matter.

“The power coming off a Kindle is completely minuscule and can’t do anything to interfere with a plane,” said Jay Gandhi, chief executive of EMT Labs, after going over the results of the test. “It’s so low that it just isn’t sending out any real interference.” 

So the most likely case seems to be that the FAA has not altered regulations it enacted many years ago when devices were different and when accurate and comprehensive test results may not have been available. 

I've always accepted that the regulation existed to force passengers to be more alert and ready to take emergency action during the most critical portions of the flight. The FAA does not support this claim and cannot explain why the rule exists.

What can you do about that?

Who is this about, anyway?

One of my most long-established pet peeves about web content, and presentation of information on the web is what I call Header Fluff.

Early browsers were often plagued with this unsightly condition. But even if browsers have grown somewhat free of this heartbreaking life challenge, content designers can still succumb to it for their individual efforts.

Here's a page we encountered recently.

The news story is in there somewhere. Even with a generous definition of other parts of this page as useful content, the total proportion of meat is around 15% here I think.

I want this publication to succeed, and I hope they wake up to the imperative that they lead with content.

Red Queen's Race Continues

It seems that the proliferation of interesting platforms designed to deliver us media forces us to stay constantly in motion to see what's next.

The old conversation about which "portal" and later which "platform" would prevail -- that conversation has evolved.

Now we are in a conversation for what will integrate and expand the social media space. We can agree that there will be more than one influential platform and our next exploration is that of how to make them work together.

Two recent rollouts speak to the emergence of new needs and requests in the marketplace for media delivery.

How to Ride Into the Sunset

...I got a note today about the waning days of Google Wave. After I'd read and considered it, I realized that what I was looking at is the Very Right Way to sunset a product or service. Once again I'm struck by how, against all odds, Google continues to behave in the marketplace the way I'd ask a corporation to act. I wrote about Google Wave earlier here, first when I was introduced to it and impressed by what might be possible, and later when the announcement came that the service would be retired.

Today I received a letter from Google that told me what to expect, and what my options might be. I was impressed with the informative nature of the communication, and an open exhibition of concern for my experience as a consumer. The truth is that I never paid Google a penny for Wave, but they relate to me as a customer. There is another corporation in this Valley to whom I have given plenty of money and I still find myself treated there as an adversary, a mark, or an annoyance whose purchase in the past holds no weight today. ("What have you bought from me lately?")

What was exceptional about this Sunset Notice is that it not only told me exactly when the shutdown date would be (60 and 180 days in advance) but it also told me where I could find open source alternatives that might serve my needs as someone who's come to appreciate what Wave can offer.

Take a look:

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.

I've been involved in the emerging software game since the days when we thought spreadsheets were pretty darn spiffy, and I have to say this is not the usual approach to turning out the lights on a service.

But there's a more important thing, and I've spoken here about it before. It's the matter of how easy (or difficult) a company makes it to take your stuff and move on.

Earlier in my career, I took home a nice consulting fee to help a client retrieve its information from a Microsoft service and put it on another platform. It required the creation of some fancy scripts and a lot of hand curation to get the stuff out because no means had been devised to allow my client free access to its own data. It had been easy enough for this client to put the information into the system, but there was no means to download/retrieve the information in a fundamentally whole fashion. (Well of course! Because who at Microsoft could ever dream that you'd want to use anyone else's service?)

Today the issues are more with Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and their peers.  How many of those give you a clean method for retrieving all of your data?

Certainly Google leads that pack in terms of making my data available to me in a form that I can use. To me, that's the main feature that a cloud computing company needs to offer. It's cool if you make it easy for me to get data into the system. I just insist that I have a way to retrieve it and remove it when I wish to do so.

Using the service to retrieve my data from G+ it took me about 4 minutes (including time to search for the right page, and time to expand the resulting zip file archive so I could see into it).  In contrast, the download process for Facebook was easy to initiate, but rather than deliver the goods in real-time for download, FB will be processing my request offline and send me an email when it's time to download.  Since I began it, I've had time to read a number of emails and do a little bit of other research, and still no archive... I'm sure it will be fine and that I'll find it useful.  We shall see.

In contrast even to that, Twitter posts that I've made more than 90 days in the past are not available to me from Twitter. I did have some luck with Tweetdoc, and a search for "Twitter archive download" yields some ideas although many of them are dated from between 2007 and 2009. So your mileage may vary.

I've said it before and I'll close with this observation one more time. One of the most critical factors in choosing a cloud company is their willingness to make it possible for you to get your data back.

I might have lied a little when I said that I had not paid Google. (Actually, I said that I'd never given them a penny, and that is accurate.) I am fully aware that having me put my information into their system in the first place is what Google is accepting as payment. I've certainly done that.

But I have to say that I have certainly been paid back in full with the services and benefits that the Mountain View corporation has given me. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Plaxo, and LinkedIn are all trafficking on the data I provide to them. Are they delivering equivalent value to me in the marketplace? Look for yourself and see your own answer to that question.

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And by the way, I've finished writing this article, proofread it, done more research in the meantime, and I still have not heard back from Facebook about my archive there. I'll update here if it ever comes through.

Five Social Media Tools

Choosing the most useful tools from among the wildflower garden that makes up today's suite of social media services and software is a game with a moving goal line. For one thing, the way we use social media is evolving rapidly. Another factor is that the field is so new (in terms of human history with technology) that we're scarcely certain about what we need or what we want.

These five tools are the ones that I find that I use regularly today. If we talk about this in three months, I believe that my answers will change.