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from my point of view, Zooomr vs. Flickr is the perfect web 2.0-rendition of the rather scriptical Dave vs. Goliath-meme, except that Flickr is a web 2.0 poster-boy everybody - including myself - seems to love - leaving aside recent censorship issues - which brings me to another point: I really think it’s pretty ingenious of Thomas Hawk, CEO of Zooomr, to use Flickr.com as their primary PR-platform.

but anyway. as of today, Zooomr now has Twitter-like notification features and - coming up - a marketplace which will enable photographers to monetize their work. if that’s not enough, maybe Zooomr’s unlimited & free diskspace might lure you away from Flickr - I’m certainly tempted…

read my earlier coverage of Zooomr…

sooner than expected, Linden Labs yesterday announced integration of voice-messaging into Second Life for Q2/2007, with a beta-run starting as early as next week. while residents have been using Skype and other popular teamspeak-applications since ages, the native SL-feature will go further by offering 3D-enabled, spatial audio. if done properly, this will increase the VR-experience massively.

on-/offline application development-platform Apollo gets presented to the web industry at Adobe Engage. lots of coverage… Read/WriteWeb has a good summary of what could be one if this years hottest products.

Search Engine Land congratulates Flickr on its upcoming 3rd birthday. the photo-sharing community which is now owned by Yahoo! pioneered the frontiers of Web 2.0 in many ways, mainly by bringing tagging and other Ajax-UI paradigms to the mainstream. happy birthday!

few days ago, flickr announced three major improvements on their official blog. while the Camera Finder (a very smart way of utilizing metadata generated by millions of users, paving flickr’s way becoming a vertical shopping-authority for cameras) got all the coverage a company could hope for, I’m more excited about the other two features:

• ‘Guest Pass’ allows users to share private photo-sets with persons not holding a flickr-account by generating ’secret’ (hashed) links - essential for photo-sharing with less tech-savvy folks (heck, even the nerds appreciate not having to register for another service).
• even better, m.flickr.com seems to be a serious attempt in bringing flickr to mobile devices. the stripped down site offers direct links to ‘recent activity since last login’, ‘comments you’ve made’, ‘photos from contacts’ and ‘your recent photos’ (screenshot below) - allowing quick access even on pre-UTMS devices. although Opera Mini seems to have minor problems with the CSS, it’s definitely a great addition to my regular visited mobile websites.

Janko Röttgers from netzwelt.de discovered snappradio.com, a cool mashup developed at Sun Labs. snappradio generates flickr-slideshows accompanying the music currently playing on last.fm by matching tags between both services. as Janko points out, this works quite well for better-known bands but might also bring out funny results (like getting aeroplane-shots from North Western Alliance [=airline] while listening to rap-pioneers NWA )

(screenshot courtesy of netzwelt.de)

TechCrunch reports tonights addition of geotagging-features to flickr. using a slick AJAX-interface, photos can be drag&dropped on Yahoo! Maps for adding geo-information. using flickr’s photo-organizer, batches of photos are easily processed in a single step. users can browse their own and public photos by geographic data and generate maps displaying all their photos. geo-features were long awaited and put flickr at par with upcoming photo-sharing sites like zooomr, offering similar features by mashing up Google Maps since quite a time.

update: wow, according to the official FlickrBlog, 1.234.384 pictures where geotagged in the first 24h since the feature has lauched! the post also includes interesting technical details on flickr-geotagging.