Posts Tagged ‘flickr’
iPad social magazine Flipboard adds Google Reader, Flickr and more
Despite , the hot iPad social magazine shows no signs of slowing down. The company last night, bringing with it support for Google Reader, Flickr, live previews and more.
Flipboard with its unique ability to turn any web page into an elegant reading experience. But publishers weren’t so enthusiastic. Flipboard first started off scraping content directly from websites, which brought up major copyright concerns from publishers. Now the app is pulling content from RSS feeds — which is better than scraping content, but is still questionable legally.
With this latest update, Flipboard automatically loads a story’s original website underneath its optimized magazine view, instead of having users click a “read on Web” button manually. By doing so, Flipboard readers now count as normal website pageviews on analytics systems — which should make publishers happy.
The company says that Google Reader support was the feature users requested most. Flipboard has added a “deep implementation” of the service — meaning it supports pretty much every aspect of Google Reader. You can browse your Reader folders and your friends’ shared folders, and of course you can star, comment and share stories as well. With this update, Flipboard is now a legitimate feed reader competitor to , the current king of iPad feed reading.
Flipboard says it also added Flickr support due to high user demand. It makes sense — Flickr photos combined with Flipboard’s elegant layouts makes for a winning combination. Now you can view your Flickr photostream, your favorites, groups and more from within Flipboard.
There are also a number of social networking upgrades within the app. It gives you easy access to your Facebook groups, fan pages and photos. You can also get access to your Tweets, favorites, @mentions and lists. Not only can you read content from social networks, you can contribute too: Flipboard lets you post status updates, photos and share links across Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader.
The company says it has also added deeper integration for , its magazine-style layout that it’s currently testing with nine publishers.
Flipboard has released a short video showing off the new features, which you can view below:
Companies:
Data-Mine Other People’s Flickr Photos to Generate Your Travel Itinerary
Say you have three days to spend in New York City, the . The Yahoo software starts by separating tourist photos taken in New York from photos posted by city-dwellers, using geolocation data to ensure a user's string of NYC photos covered a short span of time before moving on elsewhere. It then uses the frequency of different landmarks to determine what attractions the crowd finds most popular.
It then begins looking at the timestamps across that universe of NYC tourist photos. How long did most people spend at each attraction? How long did it take people, on average, to get from the Statue of Liberty downtown to the Metropolitan Museum uptown? From Rockefeller Center over to the nearby MoMA?
By crunching all this visual and geolocation data, the program can turn out a detailed itinerary to help travelers make the most of their limited time at a destination. Moreover, the crowdsourced itineraries scored rather well against professionally prepared itineraries among human travelers that were asked to compare the two, with 70% of human testers finding the computer generated itineraries superior to the travel agents'.
The problem with these crowd-based itineraries is that they favor the absolute middle. They average people's interest, and therefore come up with itineraries that are geared toward very general preferences. The next step is greater personalization -- allowing different travelers to input their personal interests and figure a way to have the program bias that itinerary toward Flickr users with similar interests.
In tests the program was limited to London, Paris, Barcelona, New York, and San Francisco, but with some further work and refinement could be extended to smaller and less popular destinations as well.
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