8degrees of vaughan rowsell

Picasa vs Flickr

Here is my first play with Picasa to see how easy it is to use vs Flickr. So far Picasa is impressing me…

My First Picasa Album

My First Flickr Set

What is Picasa? I first stumbled across Picasa yonks ago on my search for a nice tool to organise pics. I was on a PC at that stage (okay, so I am a reformed PC user) and it was a brilliant program to sort your pics, tweak them, tag them, mix and match them. I could yank my pics from my digital camera and find all sorts of hidden jpgs around my hard drive and consolidated them all. It was great, and it still is, well I assume Google haven’t made it worse. However I am on a mac now (hallelujah) and have iPhoto, which is much much better. However Google now has Picasa Web Albums, which to all extents is Google’s version of Flickr. They have just release some mac tools, I was intrigued so I took a look.

Picasa Web Albums

In true Google style, Picasa Web Albums is lightweight and simple. You can upload, tag and group your pics with ease. It is really very very simple. You can add video too which is the first step on the way towards the obvious merge of Picasa and YouTube. I was very pleased to easily find the mac Picasa tools, and to find they worked really well. Although there is no Picasa photo management software for the mac as such, there is a export plugin for iPhoto and a Picasa Web Uploader app which makes it easy for you to click and drag your pics up to your Picasa Web Albums account. Super simple and super easy.

Flickr

What is Flickr? Where have you been? Flickr is definitely the incumbent in the whole web photo sharing space, and if you were not aware it is now owned by Yahoo! Flickr is reported to be by far is the most popular, (however see graph below) but does it make it better or does that give it baggage? Due to one reason and another, but generally due to living under a rock for the last 12 months while I slogged my guts out working, I haven’t had the chance to play and explore the world of Flickr. So you could say I have an open mind to photo sharing. So I went and signed up and got terribly confused. Probably because I setup my Picasa Web Album first, which was pretty straight forward, but I just struggled with the Yahoo! style interface which at best baffles. There is no consistency with the navigation or links and Yahoo!’s interface design is something I have griped about in the past. I just can’t use it. I had Picasa set up in minutes, and had even found the downloads of the mac tools for Picasa, but yahoo had more options, more links and terminology that just conflicted with what seemed natural to me. As you move from one tool to another, the navigation can completely change leaving the user lost.

On the positive side, I found there was more features oriented to sharing pics through the online community. However after investing half an hour in Flickr, I found myself frustrated. I had to use a third party tool to get the pics out of iPhoto and up to Flickr. the tool was payware and limited you to 5 uploads. It also failed to authenticate with Flickr from time to time and refused to reconnect.
The Slideshows

Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/63814767@N00/sets/72157594431788518/show/

Picasa – http://picasaweb.google.com/vaughan.rowsell/MyFirstPicasaAlbumOn8degrees/photo#s5011039879104216066

The slideshows on both are good. Flickr uses flash and Picasa, following Googles strategy to use JavaScript tools wherever they can, uses some pretty nifty xhtml and JavaScript. Flickr’s player looked a little dated and Picasa had a much cleaner interface. Flickr’s Flash player had nice transitions between the pics, but the Picasa player did not, which was odd considering they used fade effects on the navigation (perhaps a mac Firefox thing). Flickr’s one didn’t resize with my browser and Picasa’s did. Picasa’s won me over in the end because it was simple, flexible and I like to know what its code is doing (geek!).
So where does that leave us? There were so many more things I wanted to cover but this post is already 12 paragraphs longer than I expected. So in quick summary, I have found that I am leaning more towards Picasa. Now is it because I have my web 2.0 tent pitched firmly in the Google camp? Is it because I don’t have the patience for Yahoo!s infuriating interfaces? Is it because Picasa plugged into my iPhoto nice and simple? Well, yes! It is because of all of this I am backing Picasa as the web photo album of choice, and not only because of these fickle reasons but also because I know that Google will make it something better. Simple.

Jingle Bells…

Merry xmas everyone. I hope you all have been good this year and Santa stuffs your socks full of lollies and buries your tree with toys.

Can Ferrit pull one out of its…

It’s shopping on the Internet. Now with an actual shopping cart so you can actually shop!

What is Ferrit? Urban Dictionary defines the word Ferrit as:

An overrated over advertised website which is only designed to make people buy expensive crap they don’t want.

Now there have been a lot of people quick to knock ferrit.co.nz, and I have been one of them, but has Telecom turned it around? Unfortunately I think they might have. Not because Ferrit is a good idea, in fact Ferrit has already changed its business model after one year of operation which would suggest they got it wrong first time (no, really). Now they actually have e-commerce, yes a shopping cart, 12 months late and only 2 weeks before xmas.

Telecom has let the world know they have spent 12 million already on Ferrit and was planning another 12 in the next year. I have seen money spent better and got more in return, but by all accounts it seems the majority of the cash has been hosed into the now infamous ad agency that tried to convince the world Ferrit was the uber review site for toasters.

So what are the compelling reasons that justify Ferrits existence? Why will Ferrit work, why will it succeed?

A unified shopping cart? I am not convinced shopping on the Internet is like mall shopping where in one visit you want to get as much as you can to save gas. It’s the Internet, its always there and always on, unless you are on ADSL broadband of course. I guess there is some convenience if you are on the hunt for 2 or more things, but still a lot of the Ferrit retailers funnel the actual purchase to their own websites with their own shopping carts. Not Ferrits. Until the unified cart is unified it is just not useful.

Free shipping? Until xmas! no.

Reviews? That toaster does look good mind you, but no.

Price comparisons? The majority of products are from one retailer only which makes comparison somewhat usless but I bet the pricing is competitive! Nup.

The search! A search for a new Nintendo Wii actually found the console on page 5 of the results. Surely they have thought to weight the relevance of search results.

The ads? Yes the ads. As long as Telecom have the cash tap twisted all the way to full squirt, the promotion of the site will be what wins it in the end. Hell they can’t spend the whole 24 million on product development. As long as the punter is hammered with banner ads, msn ads, tv ads, ads, ads, and ads, they will come and they will shop. Three months ago I asked everyone I knew if they knew what Ferrit was. It was no surprise to find that most had no idea (except its some kind of rodent). Today someone in the office suggested looking on Ferrit for something they couldn’t find in the stores. The message is getting out there and to be honest there is no competition. So whether I like it or not, Telecom will get there in the end.

And the winner is…

And the winner for new news website revamp is… www.stuff.co.nz

The herald revamp looks nice and shiny but stuff have obviously gone the extra distance and have clear navigation and use of colour to make it easy to find your favourite haunts easy. Everything is just colour coded and soooo damn friendly, I love my green and blue sections oh so much.

By why doesn’t the Herald really get my vote? We I got the feeling there was more adds than content as I found my self reading a short article (2 paragraphs) and found the copy was overwhelmed by all banner add, the skyscraper, the inset, the adds from Google, and the rest… and to think the web was once pure and clean, and to think also (if you can manage two thoughts) that it wasn’t too long ago that the media themselves used to whinge and moan about how no one will ever make any money out of the web. Today our web looks like a newspaper… hmmm. Anyway… one thing the Herald does do well is the use of space. On stuff you can go to a major section, like business, and have oodles of empty space as you scroll down the page, whereas the Herald seems to fill up the pages more (although usually with more ads). Okay so adds grind my gears! But in general I can find my way around stuff with more ease than the Herald, and that’s at the end of the day what I care about. Just the facts ma’am.
Anyway, good stuff… ah Stuff.

Hello, it has been a while…

Well here we are. I have refurbished 8d, thrown out all the crap, installed the hifi, re-wallpapered the rooms, the coffee machine is on and I am ready for a new year of blogging. This is going to be my wee vent, a small pipe to shove some ramblings through and to generally let the world know, as Peter Griffin (the cartoon character not the Herald journo) would say… “you know what really grinds my gears?”.

I have deleted my old rants, some live on over at somerock.com. I am going to try to keep 8d controlled and focussed on life in a dot com. Shit no that sounds wanky. Life as a modern entrepreneur… holy cow that’s worse. How to keep your bits from byting… Okay what this will not be is a channel for hype and buzz words. There is no information superhighway. There is the Internet (with a capital ‘I’). It has a name already. There is no web 2.0, 3.0 and there will never be a web 4.0. There are just good commercially sound ideas that use the Internet (again with a CAPITAL ‘I’). However for the sake of readability I may let a few slip, especially if they have comic value like “Broadband in New Zealand”.

So sit back, grab your popcorn and rent a vid, cause there ain’t nothing to see here.