PureGin.org

I just saw this GrowLab post about an initiative to get local companies to get listed and link to a directory of Vancouver companies.

Now, I definitely think we can do more to celebrate being based here in Vancouver, as we digital creatives go out to sell to the entire world, but I hate seeing us once again starting yet another directory from scratch!

What other directories could we re-use the data from?

How about Crunchbase (143 companies listed)?

Or Angel List (172 startups listed in just Vancouver)?

Or the StartupNorth Index? Even Techvibes has a company directory!

Now, of the four, I think only CrunchBase has a Creative Commons license that easily encourages re-use of the data. (And yes, I'm still waiting for StartupIndex.ca to publish what their license is, and I've bitched … err, "suggested" to Techvibes that they should have an open license, too).

But it means that companies have an incentive to fill out and keep the information up to date. Both StartupIndex and CrunchBase are wiki-style, meaning anyone can help keep the information up to date.

So, let's re-think creating directories from scratch. Talk to some of these existing sites, and by all means make http://www.vanmade.ca an interesting hub to tell the stories of these companies.

But more stale directories is not what we need.

(ironically, this might have been just a brief comment on the GrowLab site, but comments are turned off)

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There is great momentum about lots of people learning to code this year.

I just saw a tweet from @codinghorror --

RT @codinghorror: "everyone should learn to code" is a bad idea because it presumes code is the solution, when it's frequently part of t ...

— Rob Loach (@RobLoach) January 5, 2012

This is important to think about. First, from a business perspective, many don't understand the cost involved in code 'just for them'.

Hosted services or using open source might be better answers than coding something from scratch.

If you are non-technical and have a *little* money, then you should pay to get an education on how to work with developers. See Derek Sivers' excellent post on the subject: http://sivers.org/how2hire

Second, the happiest day in a real developers life is when she can DELETE code. The most stable, secure code is the code you didn't have to write in the first place.

In parallel to the NOT coding options, I feel strongly about people learning to NOT web host.

Technical as well as non-technical people fall into this trap: I'll just maintain and manage another server, it's "cheaper" than the platform or API or fully managed service equivalent.

All that being said, the expectation for understanding things of a technical nature is higher. Be technically informed, software really IS 'eating the world'.

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I don't have any image editing apps on my Mac other than Preview.app (well, and Skitch), so I was looking for an easy way to make animated GIFs without having to have a dedicated app of some kind.

(All done on OS X Snow Leopard)

First of all, it turnes out that Preview.app makes it really easy to create animated GIFs. See Robert Harder's post for a full tutorial.

Short version: open the Preview.app sidebar, drag and drop your GIFs on top of the first GIF, save the whole thing to get an animated GIF.

But Preview.app doesn't let you loop the resulting GIF, or set the delay between frames. Enter this SuperUser Stack Exchange answer.

Short version: grab and install this precompiled .pkg of gifsicle, then run something like the following in the Terminal:

gifsicle -bl --delay 100 oh_yeah_andrea.gif

-b does batch mode and writes back to the source file name. -l sets looping, which is infinite by default. --delay sets the delay between each frame in 1/100 of a second, so 100 is a 1 second delay.

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Let me start by saying that it feels like we're actually in a golden age of great online support & feedback tools. I'm sure there are more than the ones that I'm listing here. Also, at different times, I've recommended each of these tools for a specific purpose - many of them have broad feature sets.

With that in mind, I recently did a mini-analysis of 5 different services that provide support & feedback functionality. I was analyzing from the perspective of a small company that is just starting out, for a mainly B2C product, with desired features covering both support (email / widget / etc.) and public feedback / user suggestions. Low cost growing to a projected small number of support people (say: 5 people) was also a factor.

In addition, domain aliasing aka CNAME support to be able to use the domain name of my choice was a must have (I'm not going to build web traffic to somebody elses domain). In other words, I don't care if you have cheap starting plans, I'm going to care about the level at which I can do domain aliasing, otherwise I won't use you.

I actually started with Assistly, and really liked the system. But the deeper into it I got, the more confusing it was, and the more it was clear that it was built / optimized for much larger organizations. It is a relatively new service, so it may be going through some growing pains.

Testing all of these other services again*, it was clear that all of them were built around per-agent pricing, which seems to be optimized for the way larger companies work: there are support people, and there are the rest of the organization. Assistly's Flex Agent plan does a good job of recognizing that everyone in an organization needs to do some form of support, but at it's core, it also had the per agent pricing.

*except for Get Satisfaction, which I've used in the past. It doesn't offer domain aliasing (or private email support) until their $99 plan either so didn't meet my needs in terms of price. I think it's a great community support system and the one you should look at if you're mainly doing public community management.

And so, we come to Tender, which seems explicitly geared to small company support. It starts at $24, but includes 3 agents and pretty much everything you need to do support and public feedback / knowledge base out of the box.

It's next tier adds (more) custom branding and more agents, but in both price and features seems to be designed to be something you grow into (rather than the infinite progression of per agent pricing of the other services).

Tender is optimized for email. Notifications are sent out, and you can then either reply or perform administrative actions via email. Technically, it's also optimized for RSS, since it has both unauthenticated and authenticated RSS feeds which let you consume everything in it from the comfort of your RSS reader.

Perhaps more broadly I should say that Tender seems to be optimized for conversation. Which also seems to be a fit for how smaller companies help their customers, rather than "support".

Below, the table with notes on all the contestants.

 

Name / Pricing Plan Link Starting Price Users Domain Aliasing Notes Get Satisfaction $19 1 No
(starts at Connect $99 w/5 agents)

Focused on public community.

Zendesk $9 1 No
(starts at Regular $29/agent)

Has extensive email support ticketing, decent Twitter integration. My pick for larger companies.

Tender Support $24 3 Yes!

My recommendation for small companies.

UserVoice $5 1 No
(starts at Plus $25/agent)

Only recently added support. My recommendation if you want to focus on voting / feature suggestions.

Assistly $0 1 Yes!

Bonus points for $0 plan, great Twitter feedback integration.

Got other suggestions for great support & feedback services? Please add them in the comments.

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This may be obvious to many nerds, but another huge advantage of running your own site, and choosing your own CMS carefully is how you can optimize for readability and page load performance. via zerodistraction.com

Any platform you choose really only needs to support two things:

1. Using your own domain name
2. Ability to export

I'm not too concerned about hosted platforms - fact is, they make it exponentially easier and faster for many more people to be publishing.

(aside: you're talking about choosing your own CMS and you're using URLs that end in .html?)

The concept of readability is interesting: the major hosted platforms all have non-painful templates, and the best you can customize extensively.

I *have* been wanting to get a personal brand and actually have design applied to this blog and my link blog: for readability. And properly export / flatten my archived Drupal site.

But on readability: since I *will* be reading the majority of your content using RSS, I don't REALLY care that much about the design of your site.

So it becomes about the "extras" that you implement on your site.

Starting with RSS, if I've come to your site, you should probably make it easy to subscribe to "you" - your RSS feed, your Twitter, anywhere else you put "good stuff" that I might be interested in.

I think the commenting system is important. That will be one of the reasons I'm visiting your site, that I feel strongly enough to leave a comment.

This blog post is a comment, or a reaction to the original post. I think that would be interesting, to show the web of links that come in and out of your site and individual pages.

Exploring your site, surfacing other good things to read, would be another extra.

(this is ANOTHER blogging-about-blogging entry! is this a trend?)

I'm not sure what other extras I want out your personal blog or site. Thoughts?

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Sadly, no matter how much you might want it, you can’t will an innovative eco-system that generates new companies into existence, you have to let one grow. As Dave ten Have said recently, entrepreneurial activity doesn’t come from central planning. So, while it seems like a lot is being done, in my opinion at least, it is mostly splashing and thrashingand not much forward momentum for the people that all of this is supposed to be helping. via rowansimpson.com

I agree with virtually everything stated in this article. Some particularly good parts to expand on:

Both incubators and accelerators have good definitions.

It's exactly what I've always said about incubators - a sheltered, safe place to grow is not the right environment for startups, who need to learn how to fight for their lives. The various options on how to fund incubators are all problems I've looked into.

The starting accelerator phrase is "Accelerators are the exact opposite of incubators. They are all about speed!" - yep. As well, the issue of "local" accelerators vs. Y-Combinator / TechStars / the very very few top tier accelerators is stated well:

Unfortunately for local programs, as more smart founders realise they can do this it just accentuates the problem by further lowering the volume and quality that they have to select from.

Everyone applies to the top tier programs as well as local programs. If you don't get in to the top tier, then you look farther afield. By definition, every program that isn't top tier will get at best second-class teams.

On government funding:

• Government programs fund the wrong thing/team: "I have no issue with pouring fuel on existing fires. Unfortunately, most of the time, it’s the exact opposite."
• Jumping through the various hoops and paper work is a waste of time: "the best founders often don’t bother to apply because the benefit doesn’t justify the time spent"
• Risks and rewards need to be aligned: "Not to [have the government as a shareholder or creditor] is to privatise profits and capital gains but socialise the up-front risk."

What should the government do? At this point, I can't think of anything other than get out of the way. I am not smart enough about policy or tax programs or whatever to figure out what this means.

I have had some serious discussions around whether it is worthwhile to help build a better startup ecosystem in Vancouver / Canada. This quote also stands out for me:

Rather than trying to solve meta-problems, like how to create an eco-system, why not get your hands dirty and help directly?

I will continue to advise a small number of startups, and to take a lot of no harm / no foul coffee meetings to try and help make introductions and connections that can help startups move.

I am largely un-interested in building an ecosystem beyond introducing people, and supporting people who want to do events, or build community, or do meetups that they would be interested in doing anyway.

In short, actively building an ecosystem is likely a waste of time. You need to build an environment in which smart, motivated people want to stick around and build things in, that they have a competitive advantage in in some way.

This can happen by having great companies grow / anchor here - which will attract smart people, some of whom will spin out and do their own thing, attracting more smart people: some with tech skills, some with money for funding.

This can also happen by getting behind startups that are winning, and having them succeed - with follow in funding, with growth to become an anchor, and yes, with acquisition. All of these items put money in the pockets of founders (first time or otherwise), who can then go on to become the next generation of angel funders and serial founders.

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Since mid-September, I've gone through several rapid changes in how I share links, how I blog about them, and how I tweet those links.

In mid September I wired up If This Then That (IFTTT.com) to Twitter favorites and Google Reader shared items. At first I thought I'd push them here, to my Posterous-powered blog, but I would then never get around to expanding them. As well, the links were "lost" in the main body of the blog post.

(aside: remember mid-September? Google Reader still had social waaaay back then)

I went back and pretty much immediately rejigged things to post to a new link blog at http://links.bmannconsulting.com powered by Tumblr. Tumblr is interesting because it is sort of the reincarnation of structured blogging in some ways - the links are separate, there are some nice "via source" fields as well.

That worked for a while, but I was never very happy with the format of the Twitter favorites that I captured. I wanted to go read those articles, but in the end they were sometimes not worth sharing, and they made for weirdly formatted posts.

I got feedback from Lloyd in particular that he liked it when I posted an excerpt from an article and posted some commentary (visually and functionally very similar to shares in Google Reader).

And then, of course, Google Reader shares went away, and RSS Hero was born.

So, this has turned me into even more of a lean, mean, feed reading machine. But it also meant re-jigging my workflow.

So: consumption of items for sharing / link blogging comes from RSS Hero and from people I follow on Twitter.

For RSS Hero, if I don't have much to add, I just hit 's' and share the item. If I do want to add some commentary or quote a particularly good phrase (which I enjoy doing and people seem to enjoy reading as well), I hit 'v' and open it in a new tab for capture + commentary by Tumblr bookmarklet.

For Twitter, I spawn links into new tabs and read

In parallel, I still have Packratius sending favorites over to Diigo. When I am reading Twitter on mobile, a simple favorite means I can then see the article by subscribing to my Diigo feed in RSS Hero, and spawning links into a new tab from there.

(I've never really gotten around to figuring out Instapaper or ReadItLater, although I guess a lot of people use those tools)

On the output side, I've added my link blog RSS feed as a share feed on my RSS Hero account, so all the items there show up as native shared items on my profile.

So, lots of separate, juicy RSS feeds that you can choose to subscribe to, in order to follow my shares. BUT, sadly, there are many people that do the majority of their link consuming only / primarily through Twitter.

(Isn't it great to be indulging in a little blogging-about-blogging and blogging-about-tweeting? Feels like the olden days!)

I've also felt that while my link sharing has gone up, my being-a-source-for-cool-links-on-Twitter has gone down.

I experimented with BufferApp. Very interesting - distribute links out over the day that I am already sharing, so that my "sharing blitzes" get spread out more evenly.

Then, since I am a n00b at Tumblr, I discovered the queue feature there, which does basically the same thing as BufferApp.

Then, since I am doing mainly quote posts to satisfy Lloyd's request for excerpts of articles, I realized that the tweets are somewhat nonsensical, whether run through Buffer or through Tumblr.

The final straw was seeing Todd's retweet of @DouglasWhite:

Is Twitter becoming the social media dumping ground? Too many truncated rss and secondary FB posts #disrespect

The missing link here is that Tumblr quote posts don't have a separate title field, which would let me hand craft what goes out in a tweet. I *could* switch to link posts, where the title is editable, but I am enjoying selecting an excerpt.

I've got posts in Tumblr queued up until Saturday, so you'll see a few more truncated excerpt sentences going out until then. We'll see if the link post type makes more sense going forward.

As per the title, so much for the struggles of an infovore that likes to share ;)

(Yes, this does sound a lot like Les Orchard's "Social Media Cyborg" post, because we're actually using a lot of the same ingredients.)

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Your enthusiastic support of our vision and your unheralded creativity deserved a response. We realized that Path could be so much more, so we built a better version of Path for you, your friends and your family. So today we are excited to present to you Path 2: the Smart Journal — a re-imagined, re-designed, and simplified Path. We think you’re going to love it as much as we do. via blog.path.com

Path is relaunching, and since new (old) users kept pinging my old account, I went and re-downloaded it.

I am impressed by the smoothness (some have called it Apple-like). The journal / diary aspect is like Momento. The emotions and public aspect will be interesting to see what happens.

Todd Sieling, UX expert extraordinaire, is excited by Path in contrast to Instagram.

I disagree with Todd and wrote "For me, Instagram has become the most fun and engaging online community experience since I started using Flickr just as it was getting started" when I posted How to Play Instagram.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to kicking the tires on the new Path, and seeing where it leads. Can Path ignite community this time?

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My guess is that OSHA hired Eastern Research Group to build this application because they were already on an approved contractor list and the business development person from ERG told them that they were capable of doing it. The application was then built in-house at ERG by a developer who had no clue what they were doing, probably under a tight deadline, or it was outsourced to some other firm that was fleecing ERG the same way they were fleecing OSHA. Clearly there was nobody on the OSHA side who was capable of doing even the rudimentary inspection of what was delivered that it took me 30 minutes or so to perform.

I have worked as a consultant before and I see this a lot. People who outsource software development simply lack the expertise to assess the applications that are built for them. They don’t know how much they should cost, what to look for in a vendor, or how to evaluate what’s delivered to them to make sure they got their money’s worth.

I went into this thinking that maybe everybody involved was honest and the bad result was due to flaws in the process, but now I think it’s pretty clear that ERG sold the OSHA a false bill of goods and wound up fleecing them pretty badly. I hope it’s not too late to get their money back.

via rc3.org

There are many examples of this. It doesn't matter if it was ERG or an outsourced firm that ERG hired (likely), this is the kind of application that should be rejected as "not done".

Rafe says "People who outsource software development simply lack the expertise to assess the applications that are built for them". Absolutely. So why do they go ahead and make contracts that they don't have the skills to assess whether they are getting what they want?

Non-technical organizations need to have a technical person on their side, to vet both vendors and the results from those vendors.

I have used the phrase "Software procurement", because it is a common phrase and process often associated with governments or with non-profit organizations.

Both enterprises essentially use our money (in the sense of the tax-paying public or the donating public) to do this work. We need to hold these enterprises more accountable AND we need to assist them in getting better quality software.

Any software procured in such a way should be open source, or at the very least have a source available / perpetual license clause so the enterprise can make future changes without having to throw it away and start over.

Web services are fine (or even preferred!), but then need to have open data clauses. Preference given to services user accessible import / export tools are built into the platform.

I posted something on G+ that touches on this as well. I think some of the non-coding attendees should spend some time talking about it at the Vancouver Open Data Hack Day - I'll be there.

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Taken at Baguette & Co

This is a pretty typical bulletin board. I love them. I love the community feel of this mess of news and updates and tear off "buy my stuff" or "contact me" posters.

As a broad communication mechanism, it's useless. As a visual interface that is interesting to look at, it succeeds.

Should we replace them with digital? Digital has to offer more than just paper replacement before it's worth it. It needs to tie in community, just like this physical bulletin board does. So. Likely interaction and social media.

And cheap and simple, like a bulletin board, that "just works". And probably no money in it, other than the coffee you'll buy while you peruse.

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I wrote a couple of weeks ago asking whether Google's changes to Google Reader were going to destroy an entire ecosystem.

Many others wrote articles about their usage of the Google Reader social features. From meetups to marriages, a whole world of stories were uncovered about the personal connections that people had made through Reader.

I got emails and Twitter messages from a number of people in response to my own post. One of those messages lead to a meeting where many ideas were shared, and a desire to scratch our own itch.

What if there was a Google Reader like feed reader? One that kept those social features? What if we added some features, like X, Y, and Z?

In short, what if feed reading had some innovation applied to it again?

That night, RSS Hero was born.

I've been using RSS Hero to read items from the 500+ feeds I am subscribed to for the last two weeks. It's good enough, which means it's time to let other people in the door and start giving some feedback.

Other people's accounts are being activated starting today. If you were already on the Alpha list, you're first in line. If you're a news junkie who relies on RSS as part of your workflow, go sign up. 

I've written a few other things about what you can expect from RSS Hero today as part of the alpha launch.

I've been a heavy cheerleader and eager consumer of features, but mainly a strong advisor to RSS Hero. The founder and technical brains behind it is someone new to the Vancouver area, Kalvir Sandhu aka @kalv.

Kalv is a fantastic technologist who has been a pleasure to work with. I've enjoyed riffing on ideas and then seeing them come to life a day or two later.

I'm waiting with baited breath as other people slowly start coming into the RSS Hero app and I again start to see that familiar flow of shared items from other people add to the feeds that I consume, and as we as a community of early adopters decide the direction that we want the app to take.

Bonus link: Tina Turner.

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“Canada’s ideal environment and proactive frame of mind are setting the standard for entrepreneurial culture,” Colleen McMorrow, Ernst & Young’s entrepreneurial services leader in Canada, said in a press release.

“In fact, 88% of survey respondents agree these qualities are putting the country on the map as a startup paradise.”

via bivinteractive.com

I saw this via GrowLab.

Can we please stop blowing smoke and be realistic about Canada's startup ecosystem? Yes, there are some real advantages. But there are also some real and severe disadvantages that we need to continue the discussion around.

Mark Evans' post from Oct 21st in the Globe and Mail - Reasons for optimism on the VC front - is another piece that is speaking glowingly about conditions that at best aren't true or at worst overstated as to their positive impact.

The mention of Bootup Labs as a sign of optimism being just ONE of the reasons that I can personally point to as being completely wrong about that piece.

We need more talent. We need better talent. We need better company ideas. We need more hustle. We need to work together more. We need more early stage fundraising. We need more follow on funding.

If you believe everything is a paradise, you're not going to work as hard as you need to. We have a neighbour ten times our size, and I see far less than 1/10th the size of an ecosystem here.

Bottom line: Canadian startups need to hustle.

(and so do Canadian VCs - shout out to Real Ventures and iNovia as being the only two I am proud to be cheering on)

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you have to be an early adopter to understand when you should avoid it. FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) should never be a motivator to avoid new and shiny, but a deep understanding of technical flaws *should be*. via dojo4.com

My friends at Dojo4 in Boulder, Colorado are very smart people. While this was written and framed with code / technical problems in mind, I think almost all of this advice applies (with some light editing) to non-technical problems as well.

My only beef is their use of the cliche of "ninja" in the title of the blog post :P

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What we have cobbled together is something really rather novel: an ad unit that smart readers actually want to click on. via blogs.reuters.com

This whole article by Felix Salmon, entitled The future of online advertising, needs careful reading.

In fact, there is a whole segue at the beginning into how the US is hobbled by their payments system, and that this has retarded the growth of micro-payments, which could be a very viable way to support content online, if only it existed.

I am hoping to see a shift away from advertising. The rise of readability as a feature (Readability, Instapaper, ReadItLater, Safari's reading features) is astounding when you think about it.

I have been largely untouched by these, because I still consume the majority of my reading through RSS, which neutralizes all these ad-ridden sites.

But I do want them to survive. I do WANT to give them money in some form, or at least share my attention for the good stuff.

Makes me think about the concept of Attention Currency, and the concept that if an ad is hyper-relevant to the viewer, it is no longer an ad but rather good content.

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Iron Blogger is a blogging and drinking club based on this premise. The rules are pretty simple:

• Blog at least once a week.
• If you fail to do so, pay $5 into a common pool.
• When the pool is big enough, the group uses it to pay for drinks and snacks at a meet-up for all the participants.

Nelson Elhage ran the original Iron Blogger for about a year before the effort ran out of steam. I've started a new instance with a couple people from the previous group and a bunch of folks from Berkman, MIT, and beyond.

via joi.ito.com

This is very cool. Thinking out loud (and REALLY need a post here rather than just the link blog) - I think I know several people that would be interested in doing Iron Blogger Vancouver.

Who's in? Leave a comment.

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I wrote a stream of consciousness answer to David Ascher's question on G+ "Knowing as you do that Mozilla is a public benefit organization trying to make the internet as wonderful as possible for as many as possible … [what] might be things that Mozilla could offer [beyond the browser]":

I think you could build open web cloud services that other developers could use without fear that they would disappear / be secure / not get raided by governments / etc. 

Perhaps make them so that any app can switch to "self hosted" mode very easily as well. So data portability by default, and various other goodies (identity, etc.).

Payment? I'd trust a Mozilla Wallet (that was internationalized etc.) before many other things. A Flattr-esque system to support makers of all stripes.

The Mozilla App Store and/or powered by Firefox Cloud become a way to trust random-j-webapp, and the mass market public demands those things from competing vendors as well.

Mozilla could do a lot of good by building an ecosystem (a reef, as it were) that many other developers could build on top of.

Turns out I still have a fair bit of passion around the #OpenWeb. My approach to open has always been highly pragmatic. You need to be awesome first, and then the open-ness gets to be the trump card. That, and ecosystems are the key.

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So, you may have heard that in just under a week, Google Reader is changing. It's unclear exactly how much will change - to quote the official post I linked to:

As a result of these changes, we also think it's important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader's social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week's time we'll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.

The TechCrunch article was a little more direct, being titled Google Reader Getting Overhauled, Removing Your Friends. The comments are fascinating - the silent majority (of which I count myself a member) of RSS disciples, news junkies, etc., all of whom use Google Reader.

I read Google Reader "natively" on the desktop, having it open in a browser window. On my iPhone, I use Byline, a free RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader. That syncing is available through an API. As is the sharing / starring / liking / share with note that I suspect most Google Reader clients implement as well. Churning through 300+ feeds on a daily basis is THE thing that keeps me up to date and informed - it's an essential part of my information toolchain.

I would hope that Google gave some of these client apps a heads up that they've got a week to make changes. Because, you know, it takes a little more than a week to make API changes, resubmit to the appstore, etc.

If they haven't, and the entire Google Reader ecosystem is going to suffer some level of breakage in under 7 days… eeek!

Google, what you're hearing is fear. Like, big time fear. Like, that other company that killed Delicious type of fear. I mean, the Google Reader blog has 212,000 RSS subscribers!

And what that fear is making me do (beside being completely irrational) is to look for alternatives. Ideally, an alternative I can rely on going forward.

Of course, as Rafe writes:

The good news for Google is that there’s not much competition in the news reader space any more, so it’s not like Google Reader users are going to rush off to use some other product as a result.

I think there is lots of competition in the news reader space, if you consider the multitude of mobile clients. There isn't competition in the giant-backend-architecture-of-polling-syncing-feeds space.

I'd love to see something like Pinboard for RSS. I'd pay for it.

While news reading is something I'm passionate about, it's not enough for me to go off and build this myself. Perhaps a good fit for my friends at Summify -- something I'll definitely bring up with them. They might also have more insight into API changes, since they are going to have to do a lot of development if it is changing

Update: Here's a post from Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon, a Windows desktop RSS reader:

Google will continue to support [sharing] features in its API even after they disappear from Reader's UI. But at some point (I don't know when yet) they will cease to function, and you'll be unable to share articles in FeedDemon or follow the shared articles of other users.

A reprieve! Note as well the point where it states that the API is "unofficial".

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My interest in flickr is so low now that it’s not worth my time to fix this. It’s not about being upset about this; it’s about flickr being allowed to deteriorate and stagnate to the point where I no longer care about being a member on it. There are better uses of my time, and better places to put my images. via chuqui.com

I think Flickr's technical staff are doing some interesting things - like the Flickr Android app and the whole concept of photo push.

But, it seems like the "community" is languishing. This thing with Chuq (really? you don't want a rich set of professional photographers on your platform -- preferring fauxtographers?). And D'arcy Norman muses about mass exporting to WordPress.

In D'Arcy's case, that has to do with a larger trend of self hosting, BUT, it comes down to the quote above from Chuq -- Flickr is not adding enough community value anymore.

I value the rich set of APIs and data that Flickr hosts. At $30 / year, even if I'm paying that to just keep my photos, it's worth it to me. And, interestingly, my Pro account comes up for renewal in a couple of weeks.

I think photos are only becoming more important as social objects. With Apple's iCloud and DropBox's plans to be your filesystem everywhere, photos are going to be the volume driver of storage. Neither of them do community or metadata well, areas where Flickr has done fantastically in the past.

Flickr as app marketplace, providing photo storage, community, and metadata as a service? I think there are numerous ways to reboot and re-energize Flickr. I just hope that there are plans afoot to do it.

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