Tag archives for web services

  1. 1TB free Flickr storage

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    Gigaom reports:

    “We want to make Flickr awesome again,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said.

    Flickr is getting three big updates. All users will get 1 terabyte of photo storage for free. The site’s s interface is also being redesigned to focus on full-resolution photos — both in photo browsing and in search — rather than words and links. Users will be able to share the full-resolution photos by email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr.

    This sounds amazing!  Also:

    Flickr Pro, which had allowed users to pay for more storage space, is going away. “There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore,” Mayer said (though she acknowledged that there are “different skill levels”). There are still a couple of paid options: Users can pay $49.99 a year for an ad-free interface, and can add a second terabyte of data for $499.99 per year. It’s unclear what will happen with existing Flickr Pro memberships that users have already paid for.

    I’ve been a paying customer of Flickr for years.  It was worth every penny.  But, at the same time, it was difficult to convince my friends to use it as there were some severe limitations for free accounts.  It’s nice to see them gone now.

    The only weird bit of the blog post is this:

    And, in addition to the iOS app Flickr launched last December, Yahoo is launching an Android app.

    Flickr already has an Android app.  So I’m assuming they will just revamp that as well.

  3. RFC 6585 – Additional HTTP Status Codes

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    If you’ve missed it like I did, RFC 6885 has been published recently.  It introduces four additional status codes for the HTTP protocol.  The codes are:

    • 428 Precondition Required
    • 429 Too Many Requests
    • 431 Request Header Fields Too Large
    • 511 Network Authentication Required

    Here is a blog post that gives a nice summary of purpose for each of the new status codes.

  4. myGengo – human translation service that scales

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    Via this GigaOm blog post I came across an interesting service – myGengo.  I’ve had plenty of projects that dealt with multi-lingual issues, and professional, punctual translations were always a pain in the process.  So it is nice to see a company that uses, in my opinion, a very correct approach to the problem.

    Right now, the translation market has two main segments: a high-end market dominated by full-time in-house translators, and a low-end market dominated by Google Translate. myGengo’s service aims to occupy the space in between the two markets by offering “human translation services at scale.”

    Essentially, myGengo is like an oDesk built specifically for translation services. myGengo has assembled a group of more than 3,000 translators worldwide who work on a freelance basis through myGengo’s own dedicated software program. myGengo serves clients directly, and also has an API to let other startups include myGengo’s translation services in their apps. myGengo says it is targeted at people and businesses who occasionally need high-quality, fast translation services, but aren’t in the market to hire an in-house translator for the job.

    0.5 USD cents per word, 1 to 16 hours per page (depending on the complexity of the document), human translation with pre-tested personnel, API integration – it sounds almost like a dream.  Of course, for now they only support a dozen or so languages, but given that they just received a $5.25 million Series A funding, I expect the service to expand quite a bit in the nearest future.

  5. More Picasa Web Albums space for Google+ users

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    Google Operating System blog tells:

    Picasa Web Albums offers more free storage if you are a Google+ user. According to Picasa Web’s help center, “photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won’t count towards your free storage”. If you upload photos from Google+, they’re automatically resized to 2048 pixels on their longest edge, so they don’t use the 1 GB of free storage that’s available in Picasa Web Albums.

    For those of you not on Google+ yet, only pictures up to 800×800 pixels won’t count up on your storage.  You really should let me know your email address and I’ll send you an invite.

  7. Trying out IntenseDebate

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    It’s been some time now since I wanted to play around with IntenseDebate.  Something triggered an action today and now this blog’s comments are powered by IntenseDebate.  All previous comments are imported and fully synchronized, and the new comments should be working now (tweaking ahead though).  I’d appreciate if you could leave a test comment to this post just so that I could see if it is really working.  You could also tell me what you think of IntenseDebate – and that would make your comment so much better…

  8. Backupify – your ultimate backup solution for the cloud

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    backupify

    I have just learned about a really awesome service – Backupify.  This a really simple yet extremely useful web application for those of us who use plenty of web services.  Backupify, as you have probably guessed from the name of it, does backups.  It can backup your data from a whole lot of services – Gmail, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, and so forth.  Backups are stored at Amazon’s S3 service.  And you have an option of using your own S3 subscription if you have one.  I don’t so I chose to use the one from Backupify.

    As I said, the service is extremely easy to use.  You just register for an account and then specify which of your online profiles should be backed up.  There are options for daily and weekly backups and email notifications.  Support for more services is in the works too.  And the best part of it is that if you register today (before December 31, 2009), you’ll have a free account forever!

    But if you were late for the free cheese, I’m sure the usefulness of such a service is beyond a few bucks that they will ask you for later on.  Strongly recommended!

  9. Google Public DNS announced

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    Google announced a Public DNS service, which is extremely easy to configure and which will improve your web browsing speed and security.  This service is not revolutionary however.  There were a few ones before, and the one that seems most popular these days is OpenDNS.  In case you wonder what’s the difference between OpenDNS and Google Public DNS, take a look at this Google Groups discussion.

    From the end-user point of view:

    Right now the difference is that Google Public DNS does not use any sort of redirection or display any ads. If a host (domain name, web address, etc…) doesn’t resolve, it will just fail. With OpenDNS, they hijack these failures and redirect you to a search page that displays ads and makes them money.

    From the administrator or customer point view there are things like stats, control panels, and more – all in OpenDNS.  Google Public DNS seems to be focused differently. At least for now.

    Update: Jason Kottke explains why Google did it.

  10. Rollip – Polaroid your pictures

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    Most of the people who have digital cameras these days don’t know what Adobe Photoshop is, let alone how to use it.  And I think, given the complexity of any semi-decent image editor, most of the people would rather quit taking pictures than go through all the trouble of learning how to use such an editor.

    But everyone I know wants their pictures to look cool.  So, what are they to do?  Well, there are plenty of sites on the web that can help you resize and colour correct your pictures, add borders to them and such.  But finding those that work for you is a bit of an issue.

    Today I got an email about one site that I tried and ended up playing with for a couple of hours – Rollip.   This one helps you to convert your picture into a Polaroid shot.  There are quite a few options that you can choose, but everything is quite easy and straight-forward.  Here is, for example, what I did with my own picture in less than a minute.

    Leonid Mamchenkov (Polaroid)

    You can try it yourself.  Play with different borders, fonts for the caption, special effects like coffee mug stains and soft focus.  All you do is choose, click, upload, and save the result or share it on the web.  Pretty cool!

    Pretty soon you’d want a batch processing option, which unfortunately I wasn’t able to find.  But imaging how cool it would be to upload not a single picture but rather a photo album.  And in the perfect world, I wouldn’t even need to upload, but instead point to a photo set at my Flickr stream.  That would have been totally awesome.  Hopefully, the guys at Rollip will develop such functionality later on.

    Oh, and by the way, if you want to see more examples, there is a Flickr group where people share their images processed with Rollip.  There are some pretty cool ones.