Web Design and Development
Classification
Community
Getting Started
ICE
OCS
RDF
RSS
ScriptingNews
Weblogs

Expono: Flickr, Picassa and the Kitchen Sink

You can't swing a stick on the Web these days without hitting a photo or media sharing service. Some of the most popular ones like Flickr and Photobucket have become an indispensable part of our online lives. Among the most recent services to enter the game is Expono, a photo sharing, organizing and protecting service with added features like GPS tagging and the ability to connect with social media services Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed. Expono has everything you would expect to find on a media sharing site like online backup, easy sharing, albums and tagging, but adds a whole bunch more features that you might not expect all in one place. It is certainly worth taking a look at.

In September of 2008, Expono went live with its site and made the bold choice to go with 100% cloud computing. Other sites like SmugMug have done this with great success and it feels like a growing trend. The lower cost and ease of scaling made cloud computing a sensible choice for Expono and the company set about building its incredible array of features. Those features, combined with the company's talented and ambitious team based in Oslo, Norway, make Expono a contender in an increasingly crowded media sharing marketplace.

Sponsor

Expono is a "freemium" service that allows its non-paying users to transfer 10GB of data a month, use 1GB of storage space and have one custom group. The $45 Plus account allows for 100GB of monthly data transfers, 10GB or more of storage space and up to 10 custom groups. Plus users also have access to a lot more features.

You can go here to view a complete list of Expono's features. It's an impressive list, if not a little overwhelming, and you simply need to have a look for yourself. Here are a few of the main features we like:

Custom Location in Maps:

Geotagging has become a pretty popular thing to do with photographs. It's just interesting for us to see on a map where a photo was taken. It gives viewers added perspective, helps the photographer better organize their collections and could even help businesses attract customers. Expono has a feature that lets users drag a pin, place it on a map where the photo was taken and give that place a name for future reference. It's a simply but useful tool and a nice feature.

Language Translation:

Expono has not forgotten our Spanish-speaking friends and allows English-Spanish translations. The company is frantically working on translation to other languages like Danish, Russian, French and Hebrew and is actively searching for help translating other languages.

Full Quality Photo Sharing on Facebook:

Expono allows users to share full quality photos and activities and connect on Facebook. It looks pretty straightforward and easy to do:

"Simply go to Facebook Settings on Edit Services menu, press the "Connect with Facebook" button and follow the instructions. It takes 10-30 seconds!"

"After your accounts have been connected, you will be able to tag your Facebook friends on your photos like any other contacts you already have in your address book. With your Facebook friends now on Expono, you can add them to your contact groups, give them access to the photos you want them to see and tag them on your photos.

Face Tagging and Sharing to FriendFeed and Twitter:

Expono has extended its integration with Friendfeed and Twitter that allows interaction between users of those services:

"Earlier we had automatic photo uploads announcements to Friendfeed and Twitter every time you uploaded new photos to Expono. The functionality allowed our users to inform their followers and subscribers about newly uploaded photos in a innovative way. Now we have extended that to include direct sharing of public album and photos right from the Share menu, giving your subscribers and followers access to view your full quality photos with just 1 click."

Basically, you connect your Expono account with FriendFeed or Twitter, tag your friends' photos, add them to your contact groups and give them access to the photos you want them to see.

See what Expono's small but loyal group of followers are talking about on Twitter and also on FriendFeed.

Oh, did we mention Expono's context aware media RSS that allows users to enter a URL into your Wii Opera browser URL field, run it fullscreen and watch a slideshow on your TV? Don't forget authenticated RSS feeds, GPS support, photo editing, iPhoto photocasting, EXIF and IPTC support and much, much more. We also like that Expono takes your privacy very seriously.

This hungry startup (a core team of six, including Co-Founder and CEO Magnus Jonsson) means business when it says there are other exciting things in the works. Expono team member Daniel Bentes hinted at the company's interest in a developing a mobile site, similar to Flickr's new mobile site, that uses Apple's Core Location service right from Safari. Bentes says, "this kind of location awareness will be the future of not only search and discovery services, but even ad-based and paid content, giving even more value to viewers and readers alike. As of now, Apple's Core Location is the prime example of this ability". He adds that the company "...would like to implement the same kind of functionality on Expono.com for the coming iPhone version. But would REALLY love to implement it on the main web version as well, enabling this functionality to an even broader audience".

Like we said, there are other sites out there that do similar things. But when you combine all these things together and they are done well (in this case they did a great job), you get a very powerful and useful tool that just may be worth forking over your hard-earned money for. If you don't want to take our word for it, check out what our friend @CleverClogs had to say about Expono over on Friendfeed. She is quite knowledgeable and discriminating about such matters. You might want to also go to the Expono Customer Support Community on Get Satisfaction to see what others are saying and to throw in your own two cents.

Be sure to read the Expono blog for even more information and follow the company's Twitter updates @expono. The service is still in Beta, but you should have no problem getting an invite if you sign up at Expono.com.

CPAN Testers Summary - June - The Nylon Curtain (2009.07.04 8:45)

Cross posted from the CPAN Testers Blog.

June saw a lot of work behind the scenes for CPAN Testers. At the end of the month David and Ricardo finally got to release Metabase to CPAN, the project key to moving towards CPAN Testers 2.0. If you're interested in helping out or finding out more, join the mailing list, or take a look at the current Github repo. David has identified some of the areas still to be worked on, so if you have some tuits to help out, it would be very much appreciated.

The end of June also enjoyed the sun in Pittsburgh as part of YAPC::NA 2009, aka YAPC|10. While there were some testing related talks, there wasn't a specific CPAN Testers talk this year, or BOF. So much has been going into the work of getting the websites upgraded I never got the time to prepare a talk about it all. Next year hopefully we'll have a lot more to say about Metabase and the CPAN Testers 2.0 infrastructure. The talk I did do in Pittsburgh, The Statistics of CPAN, did however highlight some very positive numbers about the state of CPAN. If nothing else it highlights that CPAN Testers has a lot of work to continue with for a long time to come. I'm looking at putting a number of the tables and graphs into the CPAN Testers Statistics website, and if you have any suggestions for more, please let me know.

Following the changes in the CPAN Testers Reports website, the old domains now point to the static pages. Thanks to Ask, Robert and Jos for helping out with that. In doing so, a number of issues were pointed out that caused others problems. Specifically with the YAML files that are produced. Due to the vast number of reports now available, processing them is extremely time consuming. As a consequence to reduce the overhead, I ended up streamlining the data recorded in the YAML and JSON files, as several fields were either repeated or complete redundant. Unfortunately this has meant that some consumers of these files now are not able to process them correctly. As such there is now a new distribution on CPAN, CPAN-Testers-WWW-Reports-Parser, which can be used to correctly parse a CPAN Testers YAML or JSON file or data block, and return the fields you want. It supports all the fields previously used and knows how to construct them all from the current data set. If you plan on using the CPAN Testers data for a future project, please consider using this to ensure any future changes are instantly picked with a simple upgrade.

Last month we had a total of 165 testers submitting reports. The mappings this month included 34 total addresses mapped, of which 17 were for newly identified testers.

Congratulations to Dan Collins, who managed to post over 89,000 test reports in a single month, the highest we've ever had. Unsurprisingly Chris wasn't too far behind :) I was also delighted to meet up with George Greer at YAPC|10, as for those that weren't aware, George took the honour of the 4 millionth post to the CPAN Testers mailing list at the end of May. A few days later, on June 7th, Serguei Trouchelle posted the 4 millionth accepted test report. Hopefully I'll get to meet Serguei at some point too. On average we have previously being seeing just over 200,000 reports posted each month, however, June saw 358,107 reports posted, a staggering amount of effort from all the testers.

The next summary will hopefully be posted during YAPC::Europe 2009 in Lisbon. If you're a tester and will be there too, please come and say hello

Symantec Exec Warns Against Relying On Free Antivirus thefickler writes "Clearly, the rise of free antivirus is starting to worry Symantec, with one of their top executives warning consumers not to rely on free antivirus software (including Microsoft's Security Essentials). 'If you are only relying on free antivirus to offer you protection in this modern age, you are not getting the protection you need to be able to stay clean and have a reasonable chance of avoiding identity theft,' said David Hall, a Product Manager for Symantec. According to Hall, there is a widening gap between people's understanding of what protection they need and the threats they're actually facing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At 2,000 miles, Road Trip 2009 heads to America's largest bombing range In the days since 1,000 miles, Road Trip 2009 has visited some of the most incredible scenery America has to offer, as well as learned some of the most sobering military realities. [Source: CNET.com News]

The Chemistry of Firework Displays Ponca City, We love you writes "David Ropeik writes at MSNBC that there's a lot more to making a basic firework display than putting a fuel source and an oxidizer together. Pyrotechnic chemists, who are trying to create bedazzlement instead of bang, don't want their work to explode, but to burn for a bit, so it gives a good visual show. To achieve the desired effect, the sizes of the particles of each ingredient have to be just right, and the ingredients have to be blended together just right. To slow down the burning, chemists use big grains of chemicals, in the range of 250 to 300 microns, and they don't blend the ingredients together very well, making it harder for the fuel and oxidizer to combine and burn, thus producing a longer and brighter effect. Surprisingly few emitters are used in pyrotechnics, and there are no commercially useful emitters in blue-green to emerald green in the 490-520 nm region. Energy from the fire in the basic fuel is transferred to the atoms of the colorant chemicals, exciting the electrons in those chemicals into a higher energy state. As they cool down, they move back to a lower state of energy, emitting light. So, you actually see the colors in fireworks as they're cooling down. To get the really tricky shapes, like stars or hearts, the colorant pellets are pasted on a piece of paper in the desired pattern. That paper is put in the middle of the shell with explosive charges above it, and below. When those charges go off, they burn up the paper, and send the ignited colorant pellets out in the same pattern they were in on the sheet of paper, spreading wider apart as they fly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Weekly Wrapup: Facebook Privacy, FriendFeed Trolls, iPhone Push, And More...

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we analyze the latest changes to Facebook's privacy controls, investigate trolling on FriendFeed, explore the impact of push notifications on the iPhone, review Firefox 3.5, check out Google's update to Blog Search, and more. We also update you with the latest from our new channel ReadWriteStart, dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Sponsor

Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup

You can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapup by RSS or by email (form below).

RWW Weekly Wrap-up Email Subscription form:

Introducing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

Our First Premium Report for Businesses

Recently we released our first premium report: The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management. It's been in the works for more than four months and we believe it's unlike anything else you've seen. Businesses seeking to engage with online communities on their own websites or all around the social web will find the guide invaluable in getting up to speed on the state of the art and making sure their employees have the foundation they need to be effective.

The end product is in two parts. Part one is a 75 page collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community. Part two is a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day written by experts on community management from around the web. The Guide is available for purchase at a price of $299. (You won't be charged until you complete a few simple steps on that page.) You can download a free sample section of the report here.

Web Trends

Facebook Wants You to Be Less Private - But Why?

Facebook held a conference call this week about changes being made to the website's privacy features but we were left feeling a little confused. A long list of settings are being collapsed into a much more manageable privacy interface and users who want to keep sharing messages only with friends and family they have approved will be able to continue doing so. But it is pretty clear that Facebook would like you to share a lot more information publicly than you are right now, with the whole wide open internet.

Why? We asked the company if they really were trying to nudge users into being more public on Facebook and if outside developers would then get access to more user data. Two out of three of the Facebook staff members on the call have now confirmed that yes, they are aiming for users to be more public.

See also: A Closer Look at Facebook's New Privacy Options

Oh FriendFeed, What You Really Need is Accountability

Last month, we posed the question "are trolls ruining social media?" - a topic that seems to have reared its ugly head once again over the weekend, this time with a specific focus on FriendFeed and the supposed angry mobs that form there. But let's get real for a minute. Although it's shocking that some FriendFeed users post terrible, hurtful things while using their real names, posting angry and mean comments is nothing new to the internet. Other social communities, including Digg and YouTube, also deal with this issue - heck, they're even known for it! But instead of continually pointing out the problem, maybe it's time for the innovators in our community to start thinking up solutions. Here's one we just thought up...let us know what you think.

See also: How FriendFeed Could Become the Ultimate Social Media Tracking Service

So Far, Push Notifications on the iPhone are a Letdown

When Apple launched the iPhone 3.0 update, we were pretty excited about a number of the new features in the OS. But push notifications, which Apple billed as an alternative to battery-draining background processes, were on the top of our list. After a few weeks with the iPhone 3.0 OS, however, only a very small number of push apps have made it into the store, and even some of the best ones, like BeeJive IM (iTunes link) and the AP Mobile app (iTunes link) suffer from major drawbacks.

Rupert Murdoch: Facebook is Just a Directory

Rupert Murdoch, the 78-year-old CEO and chairman of News Corp., this week gave a revealing interview to The Street's Dan Freed. In the interview, Murdoch argued that the latest head-count reduction at MySpace was necessary because the number of employees at the company had grown out of control. In addition, he also told Freed that he wants the site to be very different from Facebook, which, in his eyes, is nothing more than a directory, while MySpace is a place "to find common interests, share music, that sort of thing."

U.S. Government Reaches Out to the Social Web for Collaboration, But Are Users Reaching Back?

In the quest to open government processes to citizens, collaboration and participation were identified as explicit goals in a presidential memo issued earlier this year. Upon the appearance of a tenuously connected web of blogs, sites, wikis, and forums, many were excited about the refreshing availability of public channels for dialogue between ordinary Americans and policy makers when it comes to deciding what the 21st century American government will look like. On the other hand, the participation in these initiatives has been dwarfed by what one might see on ICanHasCheezburger. In spite of what could be seen as lackluster citizen response, The Open Government initiative's final drafting phase, which was to have closed already, has been extended until July 3.

Becoming An Open Enterprise: Five Lessons from Booz Allen Hamilton

On Tuesday, consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton won the Open Enterprise Innovation Award at the 2009 Enterprise 2.0 Conference. The portal that garnered them the accolade, hello.bah.com, has shown impressive adoption within Booz Allen, especially for a firm that's 90 years old. Since being rolled out in August 2008, it's been taken up for daily use by 40% of the 21,000-strong workforce, according to Walton Smith, who's worked as an evangelist for it. But by now, the flurry of activity around the conference has subsided, and many are left wondering just what about Booz Allen's enterprise 2.0 initiative makes them innovative? What led their social software implementation to be successful, and what patterns and practices can we imitate? After taking a look, here are five characteristics that ReadWriteWeb feels were key to the success of hello.bah.com

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
• WeeBiz, a business community where you can find and share new business opportunities.
• Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
• SiSense, Analytics, Reports and Filters
• Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• hakia is a semantic search engine.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
• Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteStart

Our new channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Learn to Negotiate and Close

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

"It ain't over till the fat lady sings" means that nothing happens until you get the signature on the contract. That is when the money gets wired. Deals often get derailed. They drift, and then nothing happens. Or a competitor comes in and snatches the prize from you. That is why a "closer," someone who can seal the deal, is so prized.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Firefox 3.5 Arrives, But Are You Dazzled?

There used to be a time when a new Firefox release was an exciting day for early adopters. We'd delve into the new features, rejoice in the speed improvements, and moan about our lost extensions. Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 this week, but something was missing. Firefox just isn't dazzling us the way it used to. In fact, in some cases, it's as if the browser is playing a game of catch-up instead. With new features like Private Browsing and TraceMonkey, an engine that speeds up web applications, Firefox isn't exactly blowing us away - they're simply introducing features that put them on par with Google Chrome and even, gasp, IE.

Google Updates Blog Search - Where's the Innovation?

Google just announced a number of changes to its blog search engine, Google Blog Search, but none of them will knock your socks off. RSS feeds for search queries were added, something that no self-respecting search engine of dynamic content would be without. Hot search queries and recent posts from popular blogs round out the slight redesign of the Blog Search home page. While many different Google projects push the envelope with features and interface innovation - users are excited just to see Blog Search make catch-up moves, since it's a sign that the product is still breathing at all. No news about much needed spam control, no response to Twitter stealing many blogs' thunder, no personalization, no visualization, no semantics, no mobile play - nothing. It's really disappointing. Google Blog Search remains the best option if you're looking for fast results, but other options are better if you have any needs other than speed.

Video Interview with Pandora Founder Tim Westergren

Pandora is one of the Internet's slow and steady success stories. After years of work and more than $20 million dollars invested, the company is finally looking at the light of the end of the tunnel: turning a profit. In this exclusive interview with founder Tim Westergren after a town hall meetup in Richmond, Virginia, we discuss the company's close call with bankruptcy in 2007, their ad-based revenue model, their roadmap for adding new features and an open API, and their incorporation into a variety of hardware devices.

Pirate Bay Acquired for $7.8 million, Content Providers to Get Paid

According to their blog and a recent BusinessWire release, controversial Swedish bit torrent tracker the Pirate Bay, is being acquired by Global Gaming Factory X AB for roughly $7.8 million in cash and shares (or $60 million SEK). On the blog, the group hopes to alleviate concerns by saying:
"If the new owners screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want it to. And - you can now not only share files, but shares, with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That's awesome and will take the heat off us."

Google Apps Go Social With Improved Contacts & A New API

With some core changes to contacts, Google Apps has dipped a toe in to the enterprise social networking waters. As of this week, Apps contacts exhibits shades of Facebook and Twitter by allowing you to find and interact with all the user profiles in your Apps suite. According to Google, these adjustments where made at the behest of enterprise Apps users. It has also made a user profiles API available to Premier Edition customers, one that allows IT to retrieve and manipulate data about all the people using Apps in a company.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

In defense of Perl ithreads (2009.07.04 6:29)

People like to point out the problems with Perl's threading, say they're simply the Windows fork-emulation ported to other operating systems and conclude that they're of no use otherwise. They generally omit mentioning the cases in which Perl ithreads are the only viable solution for concurrency in Perl.

First, you have to understand the i in ithreads. Read: interpreter threads. Each ithread in your Perl program has its own copy of the whole interpreter. Nothing is shared between the interpreters by default*. Most other threading implementations work the other way around: By default they share everything and the user has to deal with locking of any shared resources. This has many advantages over ithreads. Most obviously, an ithread takes a lot more memory. Furthermore, passing data between ithreads is rather painful and very, very slow. But there is, unfortunately, a big downside to shared-by-default:

Real concurrency (i.e. multiple threads executing concurrently on multiple CPUs) doesn't seem to be feasible with the shared-by-default approach in a language such as Perl. This is because almost all operations -- including those who seem to be entirely read-only -- can potentially modify the data structures. Use a scalar that contains an integer in a string-context and the scalar will be modified to contain a char*. Marc Lehmann explained this in more detail in his talk "Why so-called Perl threads should die" at the German Perl Workshop 2009. (Couldn't find his slides online, sorry.) As far as I know, the typcial dynamic programming languages other than Perl only have (non-concurrent) cooperative multi-threading to start with.

Now, some will be quick to point out that ithreads are a mere fork() reimplementation with quite a few disadvantages. For a real fork, the kernel can do COW and non-thread-safe XS modules aren't a problem. But if your software has to run on Windows, the fork's a non-starter. As mentioned earlier, threads are used for the emulation of fork() on Windows. That means if you use fork(), you'll get multiple processes on systems which support it natively and multiple (i)threads on Windows with all the associated problems regarding memory use and thread-safety. If you're writing software predominantly on Linux, would you rather debug problems in your development environment or on your customer's (or generally user's) machine? I thought so. There is a case to be made for consistency.

The other big contender is the excellent Coro module (or an event loop). I suggest you have a look at its documentation to understand what it does exactly**. The downside? It's cooperative multi-threading. It doesn't really run concurrently. The code in each Coro has to cede control to the other coroutines regularly. If there is some code that's not directly under your control and takes a long time, your GUI or what not will be blocked. If you think about it a bit, you'll realize that heavy re-use of code from CPAN and cooperative multi-threading is a non-starter. In my case, I needed to parse Perl code using PPI. That can take seconds...

I'm all ears for suggestions on how to do concurrency right in a dynamic language. (here: Perl, but if another language does it better, that'd be interesting, too.)

The requirements are:

• Real concurrency, i.e. using multiple cores.
• Non-cooperative multi-threading due to code that is not under my control
• Portability
• A point I haven't touched in my rant: Ability to recover from crashes. You can recover from crashing ithreads.

* This statement may become painfully untrue if you use a non-thread-safe XS module, unfortunately.

** I'm not restating what it does in my own words because I'd expect them to be slightly inaccurate thus provoking eternal damnation.

Behind the First Secure Quantum Crypto Network schliz writes "Researchers behind the world's largest quantum encrypted network said the technology could secure business networks inside six years. The prototype Quantum Key Distribution network was built by the Secure Communication Based On Quantum Cryptography (SECOQC) group last year. It is described in a journal paper published by the Institute of Physics this week, which includes details on how it is based on the trusted-repeater paradigm."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Denture ice cubes

These ice dentures should be a hit in the punch bowl at granny's party! If you want to pick up a set, try Amazon.

Generating Power From Ocean Buoys and Kites cheezitmike writes "Researchers at Oregon State University are testing a new type of wave-energy converter to generate electricity from ocean waves: 'Even when the ocean seems calm, swells are moving water up and down sufficiently to generate electricity. ... For decades the challenge has been to build a device that can withstand monster waves and gale-force winds, not to mention corrosive saltwater, seaweed, floating debris and curious marine mammals. ... In the most recent prototypes, a thick coil of copper wire is inside the first component, which is anchored to the seafloor. The second component is a magnet attached to a float that moves up and down freely with the waves. As the magnet is heaved by the waves, its magnetic field moves along the stationary coil of copper wire. This motion induces a current in the wire — electricity.'" Meanwhile, researchers at Stanford are working to design "turbine kites" that operate at 30,000 feet, where air currents flow much faster than they do close to the ground. Ken Caldeira, a Standford associate professor, said, "If you tapped into 1% of the power in high-altitude winds, that would be enough to continuously power all civilization."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.