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Microsoft just added news-reader functioniality to their technology-preview Microsoft Max. Max basically is a photo-browser & RSS-reader based on the Windows Presentation Foundation. while others are amazed by the admittedly cool user-interface and the newspaper-styled post-summary (see screenshot below), I was disappointed that the development-team didn’t spend more time on the core features of the news-reader itself: subscribed feeds can’t be organized/sorted in any way, clicking a teaser opens the original post in the external browser, posts aren’t marked as read, some feeds (f.e. Scripting News) aren’t processed at all etc.

so currently Max is more about showing of what’s possible in regards to user-interfaces using the Presentation Foundation - which is, no doubt, impressive.

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.

as read on Michael Martine’s blog, Microsoft Live Labs is developing an innovative approach on organizing photo-collections. their tech-preview Photosynth claims to automatically organize photos in 3D-space by recognizing particular features like a window-frame, or a doorhandle in images. using algorithmic simulation of depth-perception, Photosynth calculates the 3D-positions for each of the images, which can then be browsed in a 3D-environment. if this seemingly-complicated algorithms work as good as the promo-video (highly recommended!) suggests, upcoming products using the Photosynth-technology (remember, this is a tech-preview) could be quite hot… just imagine connecting your holiday-photos of Venice with those of thousand other users all over the world - the resulting 3D-collage would be impressing.

if you want to stay up-2-date with Photosynth, the development-team has setup a blog - good to see that Robert Scoble definitely left his mark on Microsoft!

Zooomr, a photosharing-site indicating it’s adjacence with flickr not only by it’s vowel-scanting name, got a minor overhaul earlier this week. the launch of Zooomr 2.0 was originally scheduled for friday 14th, but had to be postponed due DDOS-attacks and further technical problems. Zooomr 2.0 improves on many existing features which outplay flickr, like shiny geotagging (google maps mashed up), keyword tagging, backtrack-support, del.icio.us-integration and audio-annotations (coined ‘Zooomrtations’). on the downside, the Zooomr-servers seem to be even slower than flickr’s, at least here in europe. moreover, Zooomr will have a hard time to match with flickr’s greatest advantage - its numerous integrations with other services (my favorite one, shozu, allowing me to upload photos from my cellphone by a single click).

attention: Zooomr currently offers free pro-accounts to bloggers - the ‘Rats! In My Brain’-blog explains how to obtain one…

tabblo is a new photo-service focused on creating and sharing gorgeous-looking photo-pages, nicknamed ‘tabblos’. tabblos can be private, public or shared with a limited group of people and are usually organized around a topic.

photos can be uploaded via browser-based file-upload, java- or flash-based upload-clients or a picasa-plugin. good news for users of flickr: the flickr-API is integrated with tabblo, allowing to import your flickr-library with just one click. once the images are uploaded, a virtual lightbox-tool is used to pick the best ones for use in the photo-page. tabblo offers about 20 predefined photo-layouts which can be styled with more than 20 themes (see screenshot below).

if you are not happy with the layout of your photo-page, tabblo offers great tools to customize it: drag and drop your photos to re-position them on the page, enlarge them, add text-blocks and captions or even add sepia- or black/white-filters to your pics. the editor as a whole gives a good sense of how ajax can be used by non-designers to customize pre-defined content-elements.

tabblo is a flexible tool, especially useful for quickly creating nice-looking mini-photo-sites (it took me about 5 minutes to put together my demo-page), plus it’s fun to play around with it…

update: few hours ago, mike arrington pointed out that flickr is denying its competitor zooomr access to their commercial APIs… obviously interoperability between all the shiny web2.0-sites is getting more important. I just wonder why zoomr isn’t going a similar route as tabblo [the reason for this seems to be flickr, denying zooomr API-access], who really did a good job with their flickr-integration…

Munjal Shah, CEO of photo recognition-/search-service riya, recently started blogging about the first sixty days of his company since going into beta. episode 1 is an interesting case-study of an internet startup, from it’s launch-announcement on techcrunch to it’s first million of uploaded pictures after only two days. Munjal gives deep insights on managing the incremental upgrades and handling difficulties with software, hardware-scalability and - perhaps most important - customer support.

if you haven’t tried riya yet: after a short period of training, riya uses algorithmic face-recognition to automagically recognize faces in your pictures. the more photos you give to riya, the more likely it will recognize the persons on them.