Flickr Photos now in Street View …

Google have just updated their Street View to include Flickr Photos …

… you can see this in action here.

Flickr joins Panaramio and Picasa as a source of photos. Flickr has always had plenty of good quality geotagged photos, so this looks like a handy addition to the whole Street View thing. No word on how many Flickr photos they’ve used, or if it’s just for certain locations, but I’m sure there’ll be some official word at some point.

But wait, there’s more:

Flickr photos have also been crunched into google’s image brain …

… not only allowing for seamless picture-zooming between Flickr, Picasa & Panaramio photos, but it also means Google has a bit more understand of where a photo is and it’s context to the surrounding area than Flickr itself has. I guess this means they’ll make it onto the iPad version of GoogleMaps too.

Which is kinda neat.

Not quite sure how the copyright works out though. Traditionally image search results have shown thumbnails, which are fine as search results. Here fullsized images are being shown, and considering they must have been downloaded to be processed for the image-zoomy thing, they’re probably being served from Googles servers.

Haven’t sniffed the traffic while Flash loads them, so not sure yet.

Photos shown: seattle space needle #3 by lomokev & IMG_5811: Space Needle by ac4lt

(via Kellan)

Filed under: flickr, geoblogging, google, maps, photos by Reverend Dan Catt

Harder, Louder, Faster, from Flickr to The Guardian.

From Working at Flickr to the new job at The Guardian … a not unsurprising transition.

I count myself as very lucky, to have been able to work on Flickr, something that has effected so many peoples lives, bend its code in unexpected and unusual ways and mainly work with <3 amazing people … and this is basically how it went …

“In addition to building, scaling, evolving, and generally being as loud and fast as we could possibly be with the original Ludicorp team, I had the absolute privilege to hire and work in the trenches with some of the greatest people on the web.” – John Allspaw

“It is difficult and sad to leave Flickr but I have no regrets. If you asked me whether I’d do it again and what I’d do differently I’d tell you that I’d do it again in a heartbeat and the only thing I’d change would be to try to do it harder and louder and faster than we already did.” – Aaron Straup Cope

It’s that, right there, the people, harder, louder, faster, and to quote another ex-flickr, if I may, George Oates, “I’ve been thinking about the design for my spaceship” oh wait, that’s not it … “Just Fucking Do It”, yeah that’s more like it.

So that was Flickr, and now I’m at The Guardian.

I would have written this “Hey I’ve got a new job at The Guardian” sooner, but then it involves the question of what I’m doing at The Guardian and it took a few weeks to figure that out, and you know, having a spare moment :) …

Take a look at Frequent Releases Reduce Risk, you can get through 154 slides surprisingly quickly fwiw. For those without the time to read it, it’s all about deploy many times, often and keep moving forwards. With that in mind …

I work on the Internet == fast!
I work at The Guardian == wtf, old lumbering media, so slow!

But wait …

The Guardian prints (at around 33.4mph) newspapers every single day (well except Sunday, kinda). Not only that but it updates with various editions, or patches if you will. I’ve listened to conversations about last minute changes taking place because a new picture comes in, or a source of a quote needs to be checked. Layouts get swapped in at the last moment and so on.

To me that seems pretty fast, it certainly feels fast. It’s somewhat not unlike Continuous Deployment; you make it, update it, push it out there and fix bugs/corrections as you need to. If anything the paper version is in some ways just a snapshot of the current state of news. Also I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone roll back a newspaper. Sometimes The Graudian makes mistakes, bugs get in there but there are community feedback mechanisms in place for that too.

There are other similarities between Flickr and The G, but I’ll save those for another post. For the moment I now know what the answer is to the “what are you doing at The Guardian?” …

… It’s to do it again, in a heartbeat, and the only thing I’d change would be to try to do it harder and louder and faster than we already did.

Filed under: flickr, guardian by Reverend Dan Catt