As people discover that social sites can be pretty decent news sources, especially when it comes to event coverage, I think we'll start seeing a lot more projects like Almost.at. Almost.at uses text, photos, videos and links from sites including Twitter and Flickr to show as-it-happens coverage of everything from concerts to conferences to breaking news stories. Right now, for example, a Phish concert, the E3 expo and a missing Air France flight are all being covered.

Almost.at's three column layout and automatic refresh are nice, but the site goes beyond what you see on its web display. You can add usernames to an event on Almost.at, so others can see and follow people who are at the event, and you can also download a standalone Almost.at browser for OS X. If you're interested in a particular event, it beats opening sites and search results across different tab and refreshing them manually.

Online photo sharing site Flickr offers a tool for uploading images and videos. But the Flickr Uploadr doesn't let you keep your photos synchronized with desktop folders the way that the third party FlickrSync does.

You can configure FlickrSync to watch specific folders on your Windows desktop and sync them up with your Flickr account. In other words, whenever you add files to the desktop folders and hit the sync button, they'll be sent to Flickr. If you delete the images from your local folders, they can be removed from Flickr when you hit the sync button again (although you can configure the application never to delete photos from Flickr).

FlickrSync offers only one-way synchronization. While changes made on your desktop will be reflected online, making the program an excellent tool for managing your Flickr photosets, FlickrSync will never delete photos stored on your desktop. While two-way synchronization might be a nice feature to have, my guess is the developer didn't want to have to deal with angry users complaining that the program deleted their only copies of prized photos.

[via MakeUseOf]

LiteFlick is a fast way to see the most interesting Flickr photos of the day, and display Flickr search results in a nice-looking layout that makes it easy to find what you're looking for. It uses a jQuery lightbox plugin so you don't have to load a Flickr page to see a larger version and a caption of each photo.

Flickr's search results are great, and very detailed, but all the information they give you makes it tough to browse through pages of results looking for something you'll know when you see it. That's what makes LiteFlick's 10 x 8 grid of photos so useful. You can scan through 80 photos in seconds, and easily get more details when you want them. The crucial feature LiteFlick is missing is a Creative-Commons-only search, which would make finding photos for blog posts a whole lot faster.

We've seen a lot of attempts to offer an integrated experience social web experience, where users can easily interact with multiple sites in the same interface. Skimmer is the latest of these, and it's definitely a mixed bag. On the plus side, it's a cross-platform Adobe AIR app, and its UI is absolutely gorgeous. Unfortunately, it's still a bit sluggish and buggy -- not such a big deal, as it's still in beta -- and falls into the trap of doing a lot of things, but not doing any of them exceptionally well.

The things it does, specifically, are Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Blogger. Activity from all 5 apps is combined in a really slick-looking stream that forms the heart of Skimmer. You can click on any item to expand it, and Skimmer has its own Flickr and YouTube viewer modes for checking out photos and videos at a larger size. This app looks so good that you're better off with a second monitor dedicated to it.

When it comes to interacting with the individual sites, though, I found myself annoyed at some silly choices: you can see all the comments on a Flickr photo in the stream, but you can't see its title unless you switch to Flickr mode; you can retweet something from Twitter, but you can't favorite it. Unless you have that second monitor, or unless you happen to use all five of the sites Skimmer supports, you might feel too restricted by the app and find yourself heading back to your browser.

Nearly a year ago, online image sharing site Flickr began allowing paid subscribers to upload videos up to 90 seconds in length. Today, Flickr expanded that program to the general public. In other words, both free and Pro members can now upload and share short videos using Flickr.

There are still some limitations. Free members can only upload 2 videos a month, and those videos can only be in standard definition. Starting today, Flickr Pro users, on the other hand, can upload high definition videos.

So if you've got a Flickr account and want to share short videos in addition to photos, Flickr's now an option for everyone. Or you could just use YouTube, Blip.tv, Vimeo, Viddler, or any of dozens of other online video sites that don't impost upload limits and time limits.

Cooliris is an awesome web browser plugin that lets you search and browse for images and videos from Flickr, YouTube, and a handful of other sites from a central hub. But what if youw ant a Cooliris-like wall of pictures without installing yet another add-on for your browser?

CoolFlick is a web page that provides some of the functionality of Cooliris. But there's nothing to install. Just visit CoolFlick, type in a search term, and browse through the photos of cats, computers, or landscapes, or celebrities to your hearts content. You can click anywhere on the screen and drag the wall of pictures, or you can click on an image to make it larger. If you want to visit the original page, just click the box and arrow icon that shows up when you select an image.

If you want to browse videos, Google Images, Amazon listings, or other sites, you'll still be better of with Cooliris. But if you just need a quick fix of some pretty pictures in a pretty interface, CoolFlick might do the trick.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

If you know someone on your gift list is getting a camera or is a new shutterbug, you might want to consider getting them a "pro" photo sharing account where they can upload all their new photos. This is a nice gift for several reasons: 1. A pro account is a must have since most free accounts have a storage limit that the average photographer will easily exceed. 2. Pro accounts are ad free. 3. Pro accounts have more features and allow the upload of larger file sizes. 4. As the giver of the account, it stands to reason you might be given access to your shutterbug's photostream, although, it's equally possible you might not.

Here are my top picks for investing in a pro account. (Many thanks to our readers for enthusiastically recommending Smugmug).

EventBox is an OS X desktop app that lets you watch activity on the various social networking apps you use, from one convenient window. Right now, it supports Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Pownce, Reddit and rss feeds. You can view everything in your stream, including photos, from within EventBox.

If you're completely addicted to your information stream, and you want to see it all in one place, EventBox might be worth the $20 pricetag. The UI looks fantastic, and the app features the all-important Growl support. Apparently a HUD mode is coming soon (think Twitterrific), which will make the app's footprint on your screen smaller. You might not be interested in what EventBox has to offer if you're not very active on social networks, but if you're looking for this kind of app, EventBox gets it right.

First the Obama campaign was sending out text messages to the masses and that whole thing came up about John McCain not using email. Obama was campaigning for those of us who are into the web. He appealed to our technology.

It appears he is going to keep it up. There are Presidential baby photos on the web. And, the President-elect is on flickr. He has released an entire set of election night photos of his family awaiting results in their hotel room. I wonder what will be next.

The Obamas certainly seem willing to let us have glimpses of their world. And they understand how to reach out on the web. No wonder someone took the time to make a flash game for Obama. Let's hope it continues. Maybe there will be a presidential blog.

[Via Lifehacker]

My wife takes a lot of photos of the jewelry she creates, and she uses Flickr to store and share them. Recently, however, she was shooting out of town and ran out of room on her SD card. Her solution: plug in to a friend's PC and upload them to her photostream.

When she got home, she wanted a quick way to download all 300+ images for editing. That would have been a pretty tedious chore, were it not for FlickrDown.

You can search by username, e-mail address, tags, or groups. Results display quickly, and downloading is as simple as checking a few boxes, browsing for your destination folder, and clicking download. Authorization is supported - and necessary if you're going to download private photos.

FlickrDown will automatically create a new folder inside your destination to make sure your selected photos are stored neatly. Folders are named based on your search text or the group name. You also don't have to worry about it overwriting existing files - it will automatically append -fd to the new ones.

My only minor gripe is that the download progress shows in a separate window (and adds another button to the taskbar). It's easy to overlook since FlickrDown so good at what it does.

FlickrDown is freeware for Windows only, and the .Net 2.0 runtimes are required.

When the iPhone launched almost all possible web services, whether officially or via a third-party, gained an iPhone-specific portal. However Yahoo!-owned Flickr only recently (October 1st) gained a well-designed web version. With the iPhone SDK on the block however, a number of iPhone-native Flickr clients are available for both Flickr browsing and uploading.

AirMe does a plethora of tricks when uploading to Flickr (as well as other services including Facebook) by using the iPhone's location-awareness to name, tag and geo-tag the image with your location. For browsing Flickr, however, Exposure from Connected Flow is perhaps the best. Available in both free (ad-supported) and paid-for ($9.99) versions, Exposure allows you to view photos from your own photostream, your contacts, today's Flickr 'Explore' pages, and the handy 'Near Me' feature which will find photos taken near your current location.

At least for now there's no Flickr uploading - but if, like me, you want to be able to show off Flickr photos using your iPhone, enjoy a slick way to view your contacts' photos on the go, or simply see what others are taking near you, Exposure is just the ticket.

This is a strange one. Jacob Seidelin has taken Wolfenstein 3D and Flickr, and created a mashup out of them. WolfenFlickr 3D runs in your browser, and allows you to walk around a floor of Wolfenstein 3D looking at images taken from Flickr as art on the walls. You can choose a Flickr search to use for the in-game images, or use a specific user account.

The graphics are understandably low-res, but the concept is very cool. There is no combat in the game - this one's just a proof of concept that allows you to look at a few photos on the walls. You'll notice quite a number of repeat images, or images that failed to load. Obviously this is still a work in progress, but for a few minutes of distraction give it a try.

Yahoo! hosted their third annual Hack Day this weekend, which basically consists of a ton of hacker/developers hanging out at Yahoo!'s Sunnyvale campus for 24 hours while consuming lots of pizza and trying to write interesting code. The results? A bunch of geeky mashups between one service and another. But there are a few projects that caught my eye.

Will Duff created a What You See is What You Get web page builder that you can open in a browser window. This is hardly the first web-based WYSIWYG editor, but it seriously makes it easy for anyone to build a simple web page in a matter of seconds. You can export the results as an HTML file which you can upload to your web server.

Jordan Sissel developed an app called SnackUpon that uses Yahoo! Pipes and delicious to create a StumbleUpon-type service that will show you a list of web pages you might be interested in based on your delicious bookmarks and tags.

Team Gokuso developed a new method of displaying CAPTCHAs by pulling imagery from Flickr. And the Game Changers team came up with an offbeta idea. Their iHeater web app basically pulls together 4 YouTube videos of fireplaces or space heaters on a single page. The goal? To burn CPU cycles which will overheat your computer and turn it into a space heater. Umm yeah.

Used to be desktop applications were essential to getting the job done, whatever the job may have been, large or small. Now, with all the nimble web apps to choose from, the idea of firing up a huge application for a small task seems almost, well, unproductive and wasteful.

Yeah, sure, no one is suggesting you do away with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop, Quickbooks and other heavy hitters. However, there are excellent tools on the web where less, in many ways, is actually more. Here are 10 of my favorites.

1. ScribeFire - essential Firefox add-on for bloggers. Allows you to to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into your blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.

2. Firefox - great web browser whose charm lies in all those irresistible add ons that make the whole interwebs experience that much sweeter. Once you pimp out your Firefox, it seriously is difficult to function on anything else. Yes, there are the crashes and other peccadillos, but they're easy enough to overlook especially if you are truly in love.

3. Skitch - this is the best, quick image editor and photo sharing web app that is dead simple to use. For quick screenshots and sharing photos, you cannot beat it. For Mac only though. Sorry.

4. Gmail - I've done away with Outlook and Mail and rely on Gmail for several reasons: free, 7090 MB capacity, integration with Google calendar, Gtalk, great search functionality, and the portability is sweet.

5. Google Reader - free, powerful feed reader which allows you to share items with your friends and slog through all your news feeds as fast as your bleary eyes will let you. Bonus - I'm playing with Feedly (Firefox extension) which provides a magazine like start page of your feeds with complete Google Reader integration and Twitter and FriendFeed and more. So far I like, but Google Reader is still number one for now.